I have had enough of those Palestinians. I think the world in general is also fed up with the Palestinians. They have gone too far in demonising the Israelis and must be stopped. The international community must act now before it is too late and Israel is wiped off the map and a second tragedy of historic proportions falls on a significant part of the world's Jewish population. For starters, the Palestinians embarked by land, sea and air onto Israel and displaced more than half the Jewish population of Israel in 1948. Imagine, more than half of the population of Israel displaced, forced to live to this day, 66 years later, in squalid refugee camps only hours from their homes. Other than some faint attempts to fight their way back to their homes in Israel, the Israeli refugees have been “unreasonably reasonable” in accepting their fate, and they continue to wait patiently for word when they can return home to Israel. This man-made tragedy was perpetrated by the Palestinians, who continue to this day to strangle Jewish citizens of Israel by the use of brute force and economic suffocation in an attempt to have them emigrate elsewhere. The Palestinians are a violent people. Every Palestinian high-school graduate is forced into mandatory conscription, three years for males and two years for females. During this military stint, every Palestinian citizen is trained in the use of weapons and combat methods. Many Palestinians brag about how they brutalise Jewish Israelis during their military service; some have even posted photos on their Facebook walls of their posing with Israeli corpses or a blindfolded Israeli who was taken prisoner. The Palestinians are making Israeli livelihoods miserable. They have set up military checkpoints in and around major Israeli cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa and Eilat. Palestinian soldiers stop only Israeli cars, sometimes for hours on end, while letting Palestinian registered cars ride through their checkpoints unhindered. When an Israeli wants to leave Israel, s/he must get Palestinian permission beforehand. If any Israeli gets onto the Palestinian blacklist, his/her ability to leave Israel is impossible. Imagine not being able to leave your own country or being allowed to leave but not to return. Even when Israelis want to travel from one Israeli city to another, the Palestinians have set up checkpoints, which resemble the border terminals between the US and Canada, with one difference: the process to pass is one of pure humiliation, more like cattle being pushed through caged pathways than passengers crossing a terminal. Israel has a huge potential to be a regional economic hub of tourism and trade, but the Palestinians are blocking Israel's ability to economically develop by every means possible. Israelis love technology, but every smartphone in Israel is a dumb phone because the Palestinians are refusing to allocate the electromagnetic spectrum, which they control as part of their occupation of Israel, required for 3G services to Israeli telecommunications companies. Can you imagine, those Palestinians are actually refusing to free the airspace above Tel Aviv to Israelis! It gets worse. Israelis have found a huge natural gas field in Israeli territorial waters off Tel Aviv, and the Palestinians are refusing to give Israeli firms access to tap the gas. Even Israeli fishermen are routinely shot at when fishing in the Mediterranean Sea. As if all of this was not bad enough, for the past 47 years the Palestinians have slowly moved their citizens to the hilltops around Israeli cities. The hilltops were first confiscated by the use of force, then Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas sent in Palestinian security forces to protect the confiscated lands. Once the lands were ready, the Palestinians tapped the huge amounts of funds that donors had passed to them, using them not to build schools and a healthcare system, but instead to build permanent housing in these military enclaves around Israeli cities in order to entice Palestinians from Ramallah and Hebron to move to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. This is not only against international law, but defies common sense. How can the Palestinians keep paying lip service to wanting to live in peace with the Israelis when they keep on gobbling up more Israeli land and moving their population to take up residence inside Israel? You think it cannot get worse? Well, you're wrong. The Palestinians have kidnapped 5,000 Israelis from their homes, about 200 of them Israeli children under 18 years old, and have locked them up in Palestinian jails. These jails that the Palestinians maintain are all built inside Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza. When Israeli mothers want to go to visit their loved ones, they must get permission from the Palestinian security forces. Hundreds of these 5,000 prisoners are being held without charge; the Palestinians deceitfully call it “administrative detention.” You would think that the world would hold these Palestinian jailers accountable, but they haven't for decades. This is why the time has come to stop those Palestinians once and for all. The Israelis cannot be expected to live like this forever. Something must be done to stop these Palestinians and hold them accountable for the daily atrocities that they are committing against humanity as a whole. The Israelis are a peace-loving people. They come from a religion that rests on the pillars of social justice. What is being done to them is beyond belief. Israeli civil society has made a call for the world to divest from Palestine. Israelis across the political spectrum are referring to how Jews around the world supported the boycott and divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa, which successfully ended that racist regime. The Jews are pointing to their always being on the correct side of history, from the US civil rights movement to the people's struggles in Latin America. They now beg the world to act to stop the Palestinians before it is too late. The time is now to boycott Palestine, divest from Palestine, and apply serious sanctions on Palestine until it removes the boot of military occupation from the necks of the Israelis. The writer is a Palestinian-American business consultant in Ramallah on the West Bank.
