Returning the gift of generosity

Soon, a close friend of mine will be leaving for the Gaza Strip of the Palestine Occupied Territories, to work with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Elated at the opportunity to serve the poor and the needy Palestinians, she asked me - during our farewell drink in London last week - to join her there one day.

"I can't." I said to her bewilderment, "We Malaysians are not allowed to enter Israel."

"Not even to help the refugees there?" She was clearly puzzled.

"This I will have to find out, but I certainly won't be able to set foot in Tel Aviv without having first consulted the Malaysian authorities."

And we both sighed.

Israel shielded from German criticism

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, met with his German counterpart Chancellor Angela Merkel (left) in Berlin on August 27.

Any country is free to criticize Tel Aviv's settlement policy in Gaza and the West Bank but not Germany, for obvious reasons.

Klaus Vater, the spokesperson of the German government, had cautioned against further settlements in the occupied territories, causing some hawkish Israeli commentators to remind the German of the Nazi past.

With painful historical memories of the Holocaust as the backdrop, it was brave of Merkel to press on with the issue of Jewish settlements.

In return, Netanyahu expressed hope that the newly planned peace talks in September between the Israeli leader and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, could produce a positive outcome, while making no promise to freeze the construction of settlements in the West Bank.

In May 2007, Defence Ministry adviser Haggai Alon told Ha'aretz, a highly influential daily among the Israeli intelligentsia, that the building of the West Bank Barrier was meant to halt the creation of a Palestinian state, and the Israeli Defence Force would ensure Hebron, the second holiest city of the Jewish nation, would be free of Palestinians.

When Israel captured the West Bank following its stunning victory over Arab forces in 1967, the territory had no significant Jewish population.

Tel Aviv's spreading tentacles

Four decades on, nearly 40% of the West Bank comprises built-up Israeli settlements, outposts or military bases.

For years, infrastructure has been used by Tel Aviv to extend its reach around and well beyond Palestinian lands.

As for Gaza, it had long been perceived to be a strong bastion for Hamas, "the infrastructure of terror".

The result? The unrelenting war by Tel Aviv on the territory in January this year, seeking to hammer home carefully crafted messages that Israel had been forced into a corner after months of terror attacks by Hamas.

Israel's targets included police stations, homes and mosques, with more than a third of the war dead being civilians or police officers. International outcry did ensue, but was not strong enough to change the hard-line position of the Israeli authorities.

Shocked and anguished at the consequences, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RTP) was launched two months after the Israeli offensives against Hamas started.

The initiators of the RTP could not have been more prominent in the international arena: Ken Coates, Chairman of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Leila Shahid, General Delegate of Palestine to the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg, and Nurit Peled of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

The RTP symbolizes a citizens' initiative to reaffirm the primacy of international law as the basis for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as to raise the awareness of the world community to the continuing denial of the right of the Palestinian people to a homeland.

Israeli smoke screen

Modelling on the Russell Tribunal on the War Crimes in Vietnam of the mid 1960s, the RTP aims to establish facts and build up legal arguments through experts' opinions and witnesses' testimonies in support of the establishment of a Palestinian state.

For instance, despite that the Oslo Peace Accords signed between the late Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and the late Yasser Arafat (left) of Palestine in 1993 state that the final status of Jerusalem would be determined between the two sides, the successive Israeli governments have continued to refer to the holy city as "the undivided capital".

Meanwhile, Netanyahu insists two states can only be viable if the Palestinian Authority is willing to demilitarize territories under its control.

Without dismissing the threat perception of the Israelis in regard to Hamas and other militant groups, one must ask as to how the Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank are expected to live under the tight security and encirclement by Israeli forces, who have been proven to be excessively hostile.

Netanyahu's trip to Germany also included a visit to the Wannsee House, the site where the extermination of the Jews was first mooted by the Nazis.

This aside, Das Bild, Germany's best-selling tabloid, handed the recently discovered blueprints for Auschwitz to the Israeli Prime Minister as a token of the country's atonement for the Holocaust.

All this goes to show that the German nation as a whole has been most sincere in acknowledging its past atrocities, giving Merkel the moral authority to "preach" against further settlements in the West Bank.

How shall Netanyahu return the generosity shown by his country's erstwhile enemy? Perhaps to seek in earnest a fair and reasonable solution to the Palestinian issue, not to aggravate the hardship and pain faced by ordinary Palestinians.

For now, my primary concern is how, if at all possible, can I visit my dear friend in Gaza without finding myself on the "wrong" side of the Malaysian law.