Crisis Prevention

There is and there cannot be any democracy or the development of a democratic system under occupation. It follows, therefore, that in our discussion today we can only pose the question about the amount of freedom needed to end occupation and build a free society and, perhaps eventually, achieve the “dream” of a democratic state in Palestine.

Japan has been the only country in the world that suffered from a nuclear attack. Today, security and stability in Asia are at risk because of a potential nuclear arms race from the Persian Gulf to North Korea.

State-building as an indigenous process in entities emerging from violent conflicts is a growing issue not only in conflict studies, but in Development policy and in Development Economics. There are a growing number of studies related to post-conflict scenarios. The situation in Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) is hardly a “post-conflict” situation with a conflict sensitive economy and economic development.

What is and where is Palestine? One of the questions of the complex and compacted issues that are sometimes pushed to the margins in any discussion of Palestinian democracy.

The first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 has been the seminal event in the modern history of the Palestinians. The impacts of the 1948 defeat – the Nakba (Arabic: Disaster) – for Palestinians have been profound, for they have shaped the contours of Palestine and Palestinian history in myriad ways.

Nicolas Pelham concludes, that an end to western, Palestinian and Israeli isolation of Gaza and an improvement in Gaza’s lot generally, is likely to empower groups with external connections, and impede rather than accelerate Gaza’s Islamisation. By contrast, the alternative - of maintaining the closure - is likely to hasten the application of Sharia norms.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict was born at the end of last century as a result of "incompatible national aspirations" between the indigenous population of Palestine (the Palestinians) and the Zionist movement over the land of Palestine.

The struggle for Palestine first emerged as a significant issue in the neighboring Arab countries and the wider Arab world in the second half of the 1930s, largely as a consequence of the 1936-1939 Palestinian Arab revolt against the Zionist project and British colonial rule which protected and fostered it.

The Palestinian schism is often referred to as a deep one that pits a secular nationalist movement (centered around Fatah) against a religious movement (centered around Hamas). In his paper, Nathan J. Brown suggests by contrast that the division is not as deep as is often assumed but it is exceedingly wide.

Refugees under occupation - nowhere else in the world are these three words combined to describe the living reality of nearly two million people. But for Palestine refugees in the occupied Palestinian territory, these words have for more than 40 years captured the essence of a doubly deprived existence caught in a political im-passe, denied basic human rights, and largely removed from the international agenda.