Inaction over the Palestinian issue affects the entire world

As Morocco surged through World Cup rounds, e e beating team after team before falling to France in the semi-finals, it celebrated each victory not only by flying the distinctive red flag of the north African nation, but by raising the banner of Palestine a cause that many had considered forgotten, or at least fading, in the Arab world.

- BORZOU DARAGAHI

But as both the 2022 World Cup and recent events in Israel and across historic Palestine have shown, the Palestinian issue is very much alive, potent, and capturing the imaginations of people across the world. A pair of forthcoming books also show that both the historical and the present-day consequences of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remain highly relevant.

Since the signing of the Abraham Accords under US president Donald Trump, Israelis and their advocates have assumed that they could achieve their dream of regional integration with the wider Arab world without addressing the Palestinian question. This despite the fact of Israel’s brutal 55-year occupation of land recognised by the world as Palestinian; that history haunts Israel itself, where Palestinians and Arabs make up one-fifth of the population.

Palestinian aspirations, and the horrors and tragedies suffered by both sides in the conflict, have come to the fore again in a fresh and disturbing resurgence of violence. As usual, the bloodshed pits Israeli troops and settlers against Palestinians, some of whom are increasingly responding to the indignities and abuses of occupation by turning to aggression.

The cycle is familiar and depressing. Deadly Israeli raids on Palestinians prompt attacks on Israeli civilians, which in turn spark pogrom-like violence by settlers against Palestinian civilians, who become angrier and more prone to extreme actions themselves.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government the most extreme in Israel’s history threatens to further exacerbate the violence and plunge both sides into more despair. Both Palestinians and Israelis fear new rounds of displacement at the hands of settlers and soldiers in Jerusalem and the West Bank.