Why don the Palestinians have a solidarity movement like Black South Africans did?
A number of reasons. They have never prioritised it. They don’t understand its importance. A quarter of a century ago, their leadership alienated Western public opinion and made it easy for Western governments to manipulate the media when they chose terrorism as a route to liberation. Western nations created the Palestine problem and led the Palestinian leadership in exile – the PLO – to settle in desperation for a flawed peace deal in 1993 that was never going to satisfy the different interest groups of the Palestinian people and which has made life more difficult for your average Palestinian on the street. The fruit of this is the random violence of a small number of Palestinian extremists against Israeli civilians that we have seen on TV in recent years. What do you believe about violence and terrorism? I hate violence. In the four years I lived in the West Bank, I witnessed a lot of it at first hand. Yet, the more I see violence and see our reactions to it, it is clear that there n
