Reflections on the Gaza Conflict

I first visited Palestine in 1996. In fact, it was much more than a visit as I had received a predissertation fellowship to go figure out how to add an international dimension to my economics dissertation. I arrived in Ramallah on January 28th, just two days after the first free Palestinian elections in history. Everyone was jubilant at this expression of political autonomy. Little did Palestinians know exactly how little they had gained that day. While Ramallah became my home for 8 months that year, Palestine remains in my heart. I cannot see the images from the conflict in Gaza and the mass protests and arrests in the West Bank without getting heartsick. Although I will always be a foreigner there, in the half a dozen times I have been back to Palestine since 1996, I always feel like I'm coming home. The current conflict is just the latest in a long history of disproportionate response by the Israelis to Palestinian actions. In the earliest years of the refugee crisis in Gaza in the 1950s and 1960s, Palestinians trying to sneak over the border in order to retrieve belongings in villages that had been razed by the Israeli army were killed. Over a thousand Palestinian civilians lost their lives this way. Very little has changed since then, despite going from Egyptian control to Israeli control to purportedly self rule. The fact is that in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the occupation continues. Until a Palestinian state is recognized by Israel and Palestinians are given freedom of migration, controlling their own borders and their own defense, they will be an occupied people.