room is the editor of the english language quarterly magazine of the big deal resource center for palestinian residency and refugee rights in bethlehem palestine alternate focus sat down with has him in his office in the he explained the history of the israeli palestinian conflict so what the oslo agreements is does is it transforms what remains of the leadership of the p l o into something called the palestinian authority essentially and i mean some people accuse the p l o leadership of treason and this and that for this looking at the time that this agreement was signed there were very few options open to the p l o it was either essentially cease to exist altogether and i mean some people say well you should have just done that or try to find some kind of solution some kind of settlement the idea being like live to fight another day but what they knowingly or unknowingly and i think like they knew what they were signing onto but didn't know how far it would go and just how tightly israel intended to squeeze them they agreed to a solution not solution they agreed to this arrangement whereby they would the passing authority would take control and they would essentially become a municipality they would take municipal control over certain palestinian areas particularly the high density areas so the cities and the big towns and israel would take control over the rest and then the agreement say that in the future we'll start transferring some of the rest of this of the west bank and gaza over if you're good if you're obedient and obedient and good means officially what's called clamping down on terrorism on the ground it means that any palestinian activism it becomes the responsibility of this palestinian liberation movement leadership to clamp down on liberation movement activities armed unarmed doesn't matter as long as there are activists in the society and this is site is trying to protect itself against the ongoing israeli military assaults and to try to reclaim any of the land that was taken has been taken by the occupation and the apartheid regime then it becomes the passing authorities responsibility and so the motto of israel during the ninety's and everyone who is watching news during this period resemble remembers yes or arafat and the p a are not doing enough to clamp down on terrorism we hear this almost every day in the news and it would be the excuse the cover for israel just continuing with the implementation of the maximum land under jewish control minimum palestinians on the land the way that that looked in the west bank was an explosion of settlement activity the number of settlers in the ninety's doubled after the signing of the oslo agreements in the oslo agreement talk about you know the process of removing settlements etc in addition to the explosion of the settlement activity again hundreds if not thousands of acres of palestinian land were confiscated during this period outside of these areas a  palestinian high density population centers the cities in the towns and then mobility begins to be restricted basically israel establishes hundreds of checkpoints throughout the west bank and  gaza to control movement in and out of palestinian cities the area in areas and it's all dependent on palestinian id cards the passing off thirty also becomes responsible to issue palestinian id cards the particular the mobility restriction regime and the area of security so the what the us the agreements also sort of include is an agreement that israel can build these things called bypass roads which aren't what they sound like you know dirt roads that are tiny there they're these massive multilane roads with what they called sanitary areas on both sides and then barbed wire fence in many cases sort of with an electric charge on both sides and so these roads connect the settlements to one another and connect the settlements to the rest of the country and if you look at them on a map you see that the combination of the settlements the settler roads are bypass roads which passings of course have no access to and because of the fences you can't even cross the street so it's essentially a border in addition to the military bases and the military roads again which palestinians can't access carve up the entirety of the west bank into little islands some of them big island some of them little islands all of it relative of course and all of this is taking place on less than twenty percent of historic palestine so the negotiation process becomes which part of this twenty percent is israel willing to hand over to the palestinians and this is still continues to be what the negotiation the peace process sort of so called is essentially negotiating over this you know one nine hundred twenty percent of  historic palestine so you know on two thousand at the camp david accords where barak made his so called most generous offer ever of ninety seven percent this was ninety seven percent of the twenty percent and this and as israeli professor jeff helper puts it in a prison the prisoners control ninety seven percent of the prison it's the three percent of the walls and the barbed wire in the watchtowers that makes it a prison and this was exactly what the west bank had turned into of course it's much more than three percent that the israelis control and it continues to grow and actually around half of the land of the west bank is essentially controlled by the settlements and the different infrastructure and then two thousand and two two thousand and three is the kind of everything is made concrete literally with the construction of israel's separation wall also called the apartheid wall and the confiscation wall and the protective or preventative wall the main excuse is that it will keep suicide bombers out of israeli cities and protect jewish civilians and reality what it does is it just creates a wall around palestinian areas with watchtowers so the past if there is a physical transformation transformation of what remains of palestine both in gaza and the west bank into prisons into open air prisons and the wall is still being constructed and phase three of the wall is even aims to completely confiscate what remains of the jordan valley and what they call the eastern border it's most severe or you can see it most severely in jerusalem and sort of northern west bank and in jerusalem but it affects all of the eastern side of sort of the west the western side of the west bank as well but but the wall is not all just concrete while much of it is i mean it's a wall and it's regime so it's the wall and the settlements and the checkpoints and  fences and the roads and the military bases this is what really what the wall is the wall and it's regime that has transformed palestinian areas into open air prison and the process of confiscating the land of and forcibly displacing the palestinians outside of the wall those who remain in these other areas is ongoing and accelerating so every day there is home demolitions land confiscation settlement expansion settlers harassing palestinians which is part of what makes people think that it will be safer to leave where they are and go somewhere else and the idea is to like with the negative than the club to concentrate all of the palestinians of the west bank into just the cities and to take control of the rest and it's very evident it's hard to miss if you know what you're looking at but israel tries to make it look beautiful for people who don't know so if you don't know and you come to the country and you hear about how the heroic jewish people after centuries of anti semitism and the holocaust came and created a thriving economy and look how beautiful it is because they don't show you the west bank even on the israeli side of the wall it's often made to look pretty or it's hidden behind a sand a sand dune or a hill so you don't mess it you can come here and not see this but if you come to the west bank or if you then it's hard to miss so for anyone who opens their eyes just enough they'll see what's really happening here and i started by talking about zionism the main issue continues to be zionism the idea the racist discriminatory idea applied anywhere this would be racist and discriminatory idea but it's particularly irritating here in the sense that this piece of land has been continuously inhabited maybe longer than most others in the world and like i said jericho is the oldest city in the world continues the inhabited and over these you know eleven twelve thousand years of people living here in cities and  i mean so many people have come through as conquerors as guests as refugees as pilgrims and so even if you look at our faces as palestinians you'll see the wide spectrum from whiten blond to black and dark haired right and sometimes two brothers or sisters one will be much later will be white and blonde and the other will be black and dark hair d and this is because their palestinian identity it's as a result palestinian identity itself is not a racial identity or an ethnic identity and the idea that one group can come and say that this is just going to be exclusively ours to the exclusion of everybody else is riddick it's a big crime it's like i said it would be a crime anywhere for one group to come and say and especially if they don't even live there for them to come from outside and say you the indigenous people of the land have no right to this land it's a crime in north america and a crime in south america it's a crime in south africa and in australia and it's an ongoing brutal crime here  d maybe what makes it a little bit different here than in some of these other cases is that the actual physical brutal violent daily violence continues so we have the same problems as native communities in north america and australia and latin america of poverty of ongoing land confiscation of misery but add to this f sixteen s and tanks daily arrests eleven thousand palestinians held in israeli jails and just the sheer violence and brutality of daily life under occupation in the west bank and gaza and in gaza of course it's perhaps one of the worst places to be right now in the world given that there's no access to medicine food water petrol you can't move nobody can come from outside you can't go outside with very tiny exceptions where it's all governed by the israeli military and what it allows to happen so this is why we consider you know we called what happened in one thousand eight hundred eight the neck of the catastrophe but it wasn't a singular event that came and the refugees are still refugees today there's around seven million palestinian refugees many of whom languishing in refugee camps still with high population density high disease rates and rampant poverty and vulnerability in the case of iraq palestinian refugees who were considered a little bit better off than the refugees elsewhere after the u s occupation of iraq were essentially made vulnerable to i mean thousands have been kidnapped disappeared tortured killed and those who weren't essentially the tried to run tried to go and find safety elsewhere and jordan in syria wouldn't let them in and so the thousands of palestinian refugees ended up on these border camps between on the borders of jordan and iraq and on the borders of syria and iraq and now we're just waiting for a country to say ok we'll take in five families will take in twenty families will take in thirty families and the case of lebanon palestinians still are not refugees still not allowed to work in over seventy jobs and if you can't find work then why go to school the situation in the camps is really horrible and particular because of the vulnerability and this was highlighted last year in two thousand and seven when you know a small band of non palestinian largely non palestinian armed militants came and used the camp the northern camp of and had batted as their base of operations and the lebanese army partly also to show that you know it still had some muscle after it was hezbollah that repelled the israeli attack went in and just destroyed the entire camp it flattened it i saw a picture of not about it and i thought i honestly thought it was an ashtray and it took me a while to figure out that these are actually just the rubble of the houses right and i mean refugee camps for the past sixty years have been subject to this in one nine hundred seventy the jordanian military case of lebanon for throughout the civil war last particularly after the p l o left and were and the fighters weren't able to defend the camps anymore right after there was the massacres of subbranches but even before that  syrians and the fascist parties within lebanon had besieged and destroyed the camps of tel design of just a little and then after this allies of various regimes through the war of the  of course in gaza where the camps are continually under military assault but also in the west bank you know we remember jenin refugee camp and what happened there under operation quote unquote defensive shield when the army  in with the bombs and the bullets but also the bulldozers and basically took out a central neighborhood in the refugee camp and killed tens of people massacred them the bullet holes in the school let out the camp are still there for you to see you know and some places they've things have been renovated and taken off but and every night and this is no exaggeration every night one of the refugee camps in the west bank if not more experience is a military  invasion for the purpose of extracting a prisoner as to basically arrest someone or more just in bethlehem four or five nights a week the army comes in to arrest someone and if they're not coming into the issue they're coming into either  camp and the same as with the refugee camps in nablus and around the normal so the you know in addition to all of the other things that we've talked about you know displacement and refugees and economic conditions and squeezing us into areas that are open air prisons there is just the sheer fact of brutal military occupation you know it's soldiers who run the west bank and the law here is not the law passed by parliament a international law has you know they can criticize they can say that we condemn the u n issues these kinds of reports regularly because it's u n workers who actually come under attack sometimes in the west bank and  the u n doesn't look at what happens in forty eight palestine and israel right so there's very little coming out from the international community on what's happening in the negative or in the palestinian cities or in the galilee but in the west bank and gaza you know there's reports that come out the u n special committee to investigate israeli crimes in the occupied palestinian territories just came out this committee isn't allowed to come into palestine the un special rapporteur on palestine on the ark bypassing territory is not allowed in to look at what's happening right after the dean refugee camp the u n wasn't able to send committee a fact finding mission because israel wouldn't let them in but what does come out is just ignored right there's an international court of justice opinion this is like the highest court in the world supposedly that says yes the wall and its associated regime are illegal they're a war crime and a crime against humanity israel says our right so right and this is israel's response to these things ok so or no it's not you know come do something about it and the reason that israel is able to do all of this continually is because the international community all right these reports and these condemnations come out but they're not willing to do anything about it on the contrary you know the european union just upgraded its trade relationship with israel the united states continually upgrades its support for israel barack obama just hired one of the most ar in the united states as the white house chief of staff so the relations with israel and the support for israel only increases on the material level money weapons diplomatic support  visit celebrations you know every leader in europe in north america came and celebrated the sixtieth birthday of israel you know george bush spoke in the knesset to sing happy birthday for israel meanwhile that's you know that same week people were being arrested and killed in gaza and in the west bank and houses were being destroyed in the negev and in the west bank and in gaza so this is what allows israel to continue to need to do this right i mean most of these missiles and bombs and bullets are made in the u s and shipped here right so the bullets in the people who are killed here are made in the usa right as are the f sixteen s and the bombs dropped by its center all right as far as i understand it the official israeli line after nine hundred forty eight was one we were attacked by arab armies and there was a war and we won and in the course of a war people get frightened and flee to arab leaders issued radio broadcasts to palestinians telling them to leave now on both of these counts there's some huge historical flaw first of all let's start with the radio broadcasts basically all the radio broadcasts were are archived by the british and the archives are still there for anyone to go and look at and there's not one arab radio broadcast telling people to leave in fact later on in the war there's tens of radio broadcast telling people to stay because these arab regimes didn't want any more palestinian refugees flooding in to the idea of you know arab armies you know at first the arab armies invaded and then we israel defended ourselves and in the course of the war people left it's just historically completely inaccurate arab armies did not invade until may fifteenth and everything before that is israeli military forces implementing plan dalet and this is all in the millet israeli military archive and for the most part it's israeli historians who have brought out these documents some of them zionists right benny morris who has written one of the main textbooks on this his position is our big mistake was we didn't kick out all of the palestinians in one thousand forty eight so he's no pro palestinian but in his research he says the military talks about it's a village that we destroyed and we kicked the people out right so and this is before the establishment of the state and then even more so after the establishment of the state right like it didn't require massive military prowess to defeat the arab armies of the time when you've already sort of neutralized the jordanian and iraqi army's which are the only ones that are an army to speak of at the time through an agreement so most of the military efforts were still were continued to be i mean after plan that had been implemented and the communities were connected and the borders were were cleared out of the passing community the military was that why should we stop here and they just kept going and cleared out as much of the land as they could which meant everything except the west bank and g so now today it's much more muddled right people still rehash the old myths like their radio broadcasts people still talk about radio broadcasts even though three separate sets of historians have gone into the archive and said no  not here there's no radio broadcast but still if you go on to some zionist websites you'll find nothing but their radio broadcasts and people left because the arabs told them to these two even though also the i mean the research the well researched record is very clear on the fact that israeli military operations aimed to kick palestinians out of this also on the intentionality premeditated nature of the of the ethnic cleansing of palestine the fact that people like david ben gurion and and like the big leaders of the zionist movement had written and made it very clear that we're going to have to force palestinians to leave the main response to the issue of the refugees is and i mean this is where it all comes down right this is the central issue of palestine is if we allow the refugees return it will challenge the jewish character of the state right plain and simple and this argument is successful for some reason in europe and north america that some people buy it of the jewish character of the state and i mean maybe there's something understandable that the world still feels guilty about the holocaust that they committed particularly in  europe and this is some kind of like reparations for that but it wasn't palestinians who committed the holocaust and secondly it mean you don't provide reparations for one crime by allowing another crime to be committed  painted a very depressing picture and it's a very tough situation here but of course the people continue to be strong and steadfast but one thing that if we want to find the hope and if we want to look for how people can help and what's happening here and try to reverse it so that people can live with dignity jewish people and indigenous the indigenous passing community can live with some form of dignity both of them not just one at the expense of the other  then we need to stop international support for israel and we need the international community needs to say ok israel we're not going to support you anymore until you implement just international law palestinians aren't asking for more than this there's something called international law supposedly this is the will of the international community israel is a signatory to many of these things like the geneva conventions just implement them or stop the violation of them you know it's very basic refugees people who've been forced to leave their homes and forced into a situation where they can't go back to their homes have the right to come back to their homes i mean it's a pretty basic right so ok israel wants talk about the demographic threat and this and that it's only a demographic threat if the ideology underpinning your regime is a racist ideology that says jews only well sorry not in palestine you know if if palestine was an empty island before jewish colonization then you can have you know a jewish only state a muslim only state do whatever you want nobody's going to object but if the majority of the people who are here before are not jewish and you come here to create an exclusively jewish state then you're going to face opposition and the international community should not condone this kind of racism especially when it causes so much destruction and death every day so if we want to look for a sign of hope we find it in this new emerging global movement for boycott  sanctions on israel and essentially what this movement is saying is there's three demands implement the rights of the passing refugees to go to back to their homes and reclaim their land implement the right of palestinian citizens of israel to full before the law which means stop destroying their houses and stop evicting them from their homes and give them their land back and dismantle this apartheid and occupation infrastructure in the west bank and gaza no more walls and checkpoints and military coming in and killing our children every day these are the three demands they're very basic ok politically they're extremely complicated or whatever but this is what the demands are and isolate israel until it implements just international law just what the international community already says is what it's it will