12 September 2024
Israel Allowed Polio Vaccine to Enter Gaza.
I am 56 years old, and I have always struggled and found it so difficult to explain to non-Palestinians what it means to be under an occupation. The title above, “Israel allowed Polio vaccine to enter Gaza” explains it all. The USA and Europe cherish and are grateful to Israel for allowing the vaccine to get to the children of Gaza.
This statement shows the reality – that Israel ‘allows’. Yes, they do ALLOW. Because they have the power to allow, as well as the power to not allow.
Since 1967, Israel has occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and since then they have controlled our lives, the life of another people, another nation; the Palestinians. And since then, Israel allows or doesn’t allow. They control not only our lives, but our resources and our borders. They decide what enters our territories and what goes out. They decide what quantity of water we can use from our water resources. They decide who can travel and who can’t. They decide what type of food and goods we can import or export, and they decide from whom we can export or to whom to export. They decide what type of factories we can build and what we can’t. They decide how much electricity we can generate and can’t. They decide that we are obliged to import and purchase their goods, their products, their electricity with the prices they decide. They decide if a student can travel overseas for education or not. They allow or don’t allow one to go to Jerusalem, or to pass through the more than 400 military checkpoints in the West Bank. They decide who can have access to work and who cannot, they decide who can be employed by the civil administration they force on us and who can’t. They decide who can build a home and who can’t. They decide that whoever raises a Palestinians flag in Palestine will go to prison for 6 months. They allow us to have a nationality or not have; my travel document is issued by the Israeli authority and has my name, my ID number, my mother’s name, my religion, and my personal photo, but in front of the title ‘nationality’, it is written ‘unidentified’. They decide, they allow or don’t allow whatever they want for us, for our present life and for our children’s future, and any act of objection is called terrorism. This is how it is even after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and the arrival of a so called ‘peace’. Still, the Israelis have the same power over our land, over our natural resources, over our export and import, over the funds which reach us from the world, who can donate to us and who can’t, and how much is allowed and how much is not.