Looking back on this year, it is difficult to choose
one moment, one tragedy, or one political decision that stands out
among the rest. Palestinians witnessed a tumultuous year in 2018, as
they saw hundreds killed from the West Bank to Gaza, their rights slowly
stripped away inside Israel, and the heart of Palestinian identity, Jerusalem, pushed further out of reach.
We have seen the Israeli occupation expand its reach through its growing settlement enterprise, increasing home demolitions,
and extrajudicial killings of unarmed protesters, all with the full
backing of the United States and relatively no accountability from the
international community.
2018 marked 25 years since the Oslo Accords
were signed, but a fair and just peace agreement for the Palestinians
remains far out of reach — the dream of an independent Palestinian state
even further.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), which was supposed
to be a temporary government according to the accords, has developed
into a despotic regime, focused more on quashing dissent and policing
free speech than achieving liberation and statehood.
2018 also marked 70 years since the Nakba, the tragedy that has shaped the Palestinian issue for generations.
But as evidenced by the ongoing fight for the rights
of refugees in Gaza’s Great March of Return, the fight against
expulsion in places Silwan
and Khan al-Ahmar, and the fight for equal rights as citizens in
Israel, the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, of the Palestinian people did not
end in 1948........https://mondoweiss.net/2018/12/dispatch-palestine-review/
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