ONE afternoon back in 2002, I stood on the outskirts of a refugee camp that sat near the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank. It was the end of a military campaign that Israel had dubbed Operation Defensive Shield and Jenin was just the latest in several cities to have borne the brunt of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) considerable firepower.

Palestinian fighters had put up fierce resistance in the camp and that day I watched as the last of them emerged from the rubble to be rounded up by Israeli troops.

Most were filthy, many were gaunt and haunted looking. Same Shit, Different Day, read the slogan on the T-shirt of one young Palestinian man as he yanked it up to his shoulders on the orders of Israeli soldiers to prove he wasn’t carrying a bomb underneath.

It’s over two decades now since the start of the second Palestinian intifada or uprising of which the battle for Jenin was just a part.

Since then, many deadly days have passed for Palestinians, for as events this week have again confirmed it’s still the same story of occupation, oppression, displacement, and violence.

In this interminable battle of wills between Palestinians and Israelis the blame game is as much part of the struggle as what takes place on the streets of east Jerusalem or the refugee camps of Gaza.

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Yes, there are victims on both sides. Yes, Hamas and others fire rockets into Israel that kill or wound Israelis. Yes, Palestinians have launched suicide bomb attacks. These things I know and have witnessed. But so too have I witnessed the years of oppression Palestinians have undergone on a par with that of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The Israeli government and many of the country’s citizens of course vehemently deny or even resent the comparison with apartheid. Many years ago, when I first drew such parallels in an article, it did not go down well in some quarters.

It was the same, when I made the same observation that the Hebrew term “hafrada” which means “separation” or “apartheid,” had entered the mainstream lexicon in Israel as well as having come to determined much of government policy towards Palestinians.

Subsequent actions by the Israeli authorities led human right groups to draw the same conclusions, the most recent of which was a report published last month by Human Rights Watch (HRW) entitled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.

As international conventions and statues spell out, apartheid is defined as a crime against humanity consisting of three primary elements.

The first is “an intent to maintain domination by one racial group over another.” The second, “a context of systematic oppression by the dominant group over the marginalised group.” And finally, “inhumane acts”.

Any visitor to the West Bank and Gaza Strip today couldn’t fail to see such elements in action, witnessing as they would the punitive restrictions on movement and the penning in of the Palestinian population behind a network of walls, fences, checkpoints, and barriers.

All this too before the expansion of Israel’s land grab in the shape of Jewish settlements which much of the global community has condemned and is in breach of international law.

Many elements have dropped into the simmering cauldron that has boiled over in the latest violence. From the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by former US President Donald Trump, to a political crisis whereby Israel’s prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has failed to form a government in the wake of the country’s recent election.

Then there is the rise of Israeli ultranationalism and the timing of this year’s Jerusalem Day, when Israelis commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem and the establishment of Israeli control over the Old City in the aftermath of the Six Day War.

That this coincided with the Muslim holiest month of Ramadan when Palestinians gather to pray in East Jerusalem’s Old City certainly made for a combustible mix. On the Palestinian side too of course there have been manifest failings, with a leadership that has delivered nothing for a younger generation fed up with being ignored by the “old guard”.

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But these are just symptoms if you like, as opposed to the underlying causes that need to be addressed if the endless killing is to be stopped. Ultimately the real elephant in the room here is, as it always has been, the continued Israeli military occupation.

This occupation too has only been further underlined by a much more assertive Jewish settlement programme in Palestinian east Jerusalem neighbourhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. In these and other places, Palestinians who might have lived there for generations are being forced out as part of what is undoubtedly a wider extension of Israel’s control over Palestinian east Jerusalem.

Jewish settlement expansion has long been a tinderbox issue, and one that the international community should years ago have been more forthright in condemning Israel over. It is after all, a breach of international law.

Which brings us to the nub of the issue. Where then is this condemnation and outrage? Where is the diplomatic pressure that could and should be brought to bear on Israel making it stop and think again?

Washington of course has a crucial role to play here, and the latest crisis will be the first test of President Joe Biden’s mettle and reveal whether this like other US administrations is one always willing to acquiesce to Israel’s demands.

THE EU, UK and other countries including Arab nations must also for once stand their ground and say enough is enough over Israel’s flagrant abuses of international law and what in some instances amounts to war crimes. And yes, they must all equally condemn, when necessary, those acts of violence when perpetrated by Palestinians. I know we have been here before, but we will be time and again, until Israel gets the message that it is not above reproach.

If indeed what we are witnessing now is another Palestinian intifada, then it will not be defeated by Israeli military might, vast and powerful as it is. Popular uprisings are not defeated in this way, only exacerbated, and those behind the Palestinian resistance will only find other ways to take the fight to their Israeli occupiers.

As the Israeli writer and historian Amos Elon once put it: “in the intifada the Palestinians discovered the power of their weakness and the Israelis the weakness of their power”.

Quite simply, as should be obvious by now, the Palestinian cause cannot be bombed into submission.