"If borders open today, people in Gaza will invade Israel by spoon"
Adham Noman, a friend who strongly feels what does occupation mean.
Palestine is a place one can only enter after minimum several hours interrogation at the airport. If one is lucky to enter then the story starts. A beautiful and relatively strong society and people are waiting for you. Every building and street has a story to tell you. Either someone got killed in that building in the struggle or it has a historical importance. Not only buildings but also people who runs shops has a story to tell if one could spare a little time fro them too. They will probably mention their stories with the occupation, hoe Israeli soldiers treat/ed them or how their shops or goods are taken away without showing any reason. Amid this deeply, sometimes highly emotionally areas, life is still lively. Music is still loud. People are still talking about happiness, love, future plans and dreams. Palestinian society is one of the highly educated societies in the world. They are strong in knowledge, emotion and understanding, but not in weaponry. That is the point they losing or winning depending on which way one looks ate the issue.
Palestinian society is very much preoccupied with political issues. It is not only national one, as naturally expected, but also international one. Interestingly enough, recent Turkish elections and the re-election of Erdogan as Turkish premier is one of the hottest topic. Even it draws more attention than the recent peace initiatives driven by Arab League and Tony Blair. . Turkish case is so important that it can even be a topic for Hutba in the biggest mosques. Imams seems overjoyed with Erdogan`s winning as if Palestine won. As far as it seems from within Palestinians are not optimistic for a possible peace. They lost, if not totally, their hopes for peace. Some expects a tsunami, some waits for an earthquake to end ongoing violation of human dignity in Palestine.
While writing this piece, there have been developments to bring peace to holy land. The Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair was in the area for laying the ground for possible peace talks, while the foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt paid a visit to Israel to present Arab League peace plan to Israel. Just to show people how become so pessimistic about piece, there is not even a serious attention or even mention of these developments. It is highly possible that Israelis also do not take these developments seriously. Simply, there is not ground fro piece now. While traveling within Palestine, it is impossible to miss one element. There are lost of NGOs, government agencies and organizations work to help or alleviate the problem. Turkish TIKA, German GTZ, Switzerland representative to PNA and even Orthodox Church are on the ground to help people. There is not need to mention USAID, UN and EU offices. After seeing all this organizations working here, one asks this question naturally: why are they really doing? Or do they know what they are doing? Of course they seem doing very necessary job on the ground, but I think it is time to question this development and even international aid itself. In the post-cold war era, there have been booms in NGOs and aid organizations, at the same the crisis increased all over the world rather than decreasing as expected at that time. In this environment, NGOs and aid organizations seem to play 'good police' role, most of them having government support behind them. It may be contradictory but one can find more NGOs and aid organizations working on the ground from the country that is apparently involved most in creating conflict itself. Time has come to re-think the real role of NGOs and aid organizations. The best cure can never replace prevention. Time has come for NGOs to focus on prevention rather than cure. Cure is needed but prevention is a must. If each NGO pressure its own government not to involve in creating conflict of any type, maybe NGOs will be jobless at the end but world will see more peace! Palestine is clear example of this existing contradiction and Palestinian question should broaden our perspective on bringing peace to global world.
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