'Israel wants all of Palestine, or as much as it can grab'

Diana Buttu and Gerry Adams

there shouldn't be these states based on religion or ethnicity but one state based on citizenship, whether the citizens were Jewish who had recently emigrated there or whether they were the indigenous Palestinian population.

After both World War One and World War Two, the Palestinians were demanding independence after many centuries of imperial rule. Unfortunately, like in many similar situations, the imperial powers didn't pay attention to what the local indigenous population wanted and they proceeded to attempt to divide Palestine into both a Jewish state and what they euphemistically called an Arab state. It has been against that backdrop that the Palestinians have been trying to pursue their quest for freedom.

The resurgent Palestinian resistance movement of the 1960s and 1970s was very much a secular, democratic movement and it directed its attention towards one unified state for all its citizens. However, as Palestinians saw there was no internat occupation.

I was like a lot of people, who didn't really realise that the façade of the peace process was exactly that. Israel was doing everything it could to suggest that it was serious but on the ground it was a different story.

The news media was very culpable in all of this. They showed high level negotiations in an upbeat light but they didn't show the ongoing day to day life of Palestinians.

House demolitions, particularly in East Jerusalem, and the removal of Jerusalem ID.cards, continued to force Palestinians out. Although Israel (illegally) claims Jerusalem as part of Israel, Palestinians living there are not treated as full citizens of Israel and can have their residency rights withdrawn at any time if they cannot prove that Jerusalem is the centre of their life.

There was no emphasis on this ongoing activity, the settlement construction, the building of Jews-only bypass roads, the killing of Palestinians. Little ofto what is going on in Palestine. It deals with all the major issues, whether it is refugees, borders, settlements, water, Jerusalem - there are international legal solutions.

However, after being involved in the negotiations, I realised that our problem is not that we don't have international law on our side - we do. Our problem is that we just don't have public opinion on our side. International law counts for nothing. It is whether there is enough public opinion to enforce international law that is important. We live in a system in which unless you have the backing of public opinion to enforce international law, then nothing is going to happen on the ground.

The negotiations were everything I expected them to be. The Israelis were very arrogant, stating that they were doing the Palestinians a favour. The negotiations never proceeded on the basis of international law or justice. It was always on the basis of Israel being generous to the Palestinians.dn't matter if anything else was being resolved.

We went into the negotiations with the arrogance of the Israelis and beyond that their failure to view the Palestinians as equals or to respect them in any way. On top of that, we had the Americans viewing this not as a conflict based on inequality and injustice but based on religious intolerance.

You have stated that Israel used the guise of negotiations to grab more Palestinian land. Can you say something about this?

It is important to remember that Israel does not view the Palestinians as equals, or as having equal rights to be in Palestine.

Basically, Israel's position has been that its wants all of Palestine, or as much as it can grab.

Thus, Israel's strategy has historically been aimed at getting rid of the indigenous population and taking their land. They did it initially through force, physically displacing people in 1948 and in 1967. They did it through ed from 1994 to 2000, there was actually a doubling of the number of settlers from 200,000 to 400,000. So instead of Israel using the negotiations process to try to curtail the settlements and move them back, to give incentives to settlers to move back into Israel, instead Israel actually gave more and more incentives for settlers to move into the Occupied Territories. All of this was ignored because there were negotiations going on. There was a peace process.

During that same period, the number of settlement houses in the West Bank increased by about 62%. This, combined with the doubling of the settlers, was actually the highest rate of growth for the settlements. It surpassed by far the growth of settlements in the 27 years preceding the signing of Oslo.

The highest rate was during the negotiations rather than before the negotiations. Israel used the cover of the negotiations process to demolish more houses, deport more Palestinians, confiscate more lans overnight even though it wants to - it does it gradually. It doesn't invade Palestine all at once, it does it gradually. They'll invade Ramallah, wait for the criticism and three days later they'll pull out. A couple of weeks later, they'll invade again. Less criticism comes and they'll stay a few more days until we've the situation where they have now physically been present in Palestinian cities for more than two years now and nobody says anything and nobody cares.

Similarly, with respect to the Palestinian leadership, what Israel did was that it slowly started to attack Palestinian leaders, whether they were from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Fatah. Every organisation is a target because the Palestinian people are a target. In the past three years, it has assassinated 130 people.

However, Israel targets not just military and political leaders but the whole social and economic fabric of Palestinian life. How does the Palestinian Ministry of get people to understand what is happening in Palestine.

I also do a lot of work monitoring Israeli abuses and trying to work with smaller grassroots organisations.

I have also been working for the last couple of years on creating a legal case against the Apartheid Wall before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. However, in spite of the ICJ ruling in July, and in spite of the recent UN Resolution (supported by all the EU states including Britain and Ireland) the Israelis know that the international community is not going to do anything.

What have been your impressions of Belfast?

Belfast has been great. Before I came here I was told I'd see Palestinian flags in republican areas and Israeli flags in loyalist areas and I thought they were exaggerating when they said flags. I didn't think I'd see so many.

But to me it wasn't just the flags. The solidarity that I felt was unbelievable. Tday, nearly 400,000 Israeli settlers live in more than 150 colonies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, controlling 42% of the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian refugees, who now number 4 to 5 million, are denied the right of return to their land in what is now Israel in contravention of UN resolutions. A further 3.2 million live as virtual prisoners in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, while a further million live as second-class citizens within Israel.

Since September 2000, up until 30 May 2004:

• More than 3,000 Palestinians have been killed, among them more than 500 children, and over 30,000 have been seriously injured. More than 900 Israelis have also been killed. (Figures from Palestinian Red Crescent and B'Tselem)

• Thousands of Palestinian houses have been completely destroyed, causing thousands of families to be homeless.

• Israel's military checkpoints and security roadblocks in the West Bank and Gaza divide these territories into separate, isolated Bantustans and prevent people from working or getting access to urgent medical care.

• As a direct result of Israel's policy of closures, 75% of Palestinians are living on less than $2 a day, well below the poverty line.