THE VETERAN Palestinian peace-maker Sari Nusseibeh says Israel’s onslaught on Gaza has not only killed any possibility of a settlement between his people and Israel but has also taken the region into a new zone politically.
“The repercussions of [the Gaza war] will be widespread and reverberate across the Arab world. The era of peacemaking is over . . . Now it is a question of how the order in the Arab world will start collapsing.”
Dr Nusseibeh, president of al-Quds (Jerusalem) University, warns that this crisis is “far more serious” than the “Naqba” or catastrophe of 1947-1948, when Israel drove Palestinians from their homes and defeated the Arab armies, precipitating the collapse of the old order.
“For 60 years” regional and world leaders “have been trying to contain the pain of . . . the expulsions, and people have been trying to make peace with the aggressor”.
He compares the image of the flagellation of Jesus as he staggered with his cross along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem to “the flagellation of the people of Gaza. The killing of Jesus’s body did not serve the Roman objective. The idea [Jesus launched] was much greater than the Roman soldiers understood. The idea that we should live in peace and dignity is much greater than the body enduring bombing and shooting,” he says.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is “irrelevant . . . and is partly to blame for what happened because, I personally believe, it should have taken the responsibility to protect the people of Gaza. The first thing the PA should have done was to make peace with Hamas and the second was that Abu Mazen [President Mahmoud Abbas] should have flown . . . or gone in a boat or by land to Gaza and made a statement to the world saying ‘over my dead body’ ”.
He says people around the world digest what is happening in Gaza much better than their governments do, including those in Europe, and “are disgusted”.
They understand that what Israel is doing is “beyond comprehension”.