(MENAFN - Arab News) Do you notice how news about Palestine is being ignored to the extent that we barely even remember this issue? This is really an irony as the Arabs had for a long time been calling it - "The great issue of the Arabs"!
This thought came to mind when I was listening to a report by the "BBC-London" radio station, which is still my favorite radio station despite the mushrooming of stations on FM radio. Though there are plenty of news outlets on the radio, none are to my liking as most of them bombard us with pointless noise day and night.
The report from the BBC was about the sufferings the people of Gaza are enduring due to lack of fuel and no electricity. Apart from the lack of these to necessities that sustain the wheels of life, the report also highlighted how the Palestinians suffer difficulties in obtaining the most basic requirements of daily life.
Just a few days back, the Israelis had attacked the Gaza Strip and as usual the attack resulted in a large number of dead and wounded. But that did not bother anyone because the whole world is busy with other news. America itself is busy with the race among Republican candidates, who are competing with each other to get the Republican nomination to run against President Barack Obama.
There is no doubt that this atmosphere is perfect for the Israeli Likud government to do what it wants. If Israel always got what it wanted from America in the past, at this time it's much more able to do what they want. At the same time, US President Obama looked really humble in front of "AIPAC," which is the main Israeli lobby in the United States. Obama did not actually give a presidential speech in the true sense, but rather he was begging for Jewish votes to support him for the renewal of his mandate.
Since the early events of the "Arab Spring" a year ago, there is no time to shed light on what is happening in the Palestinian territories.
All satellite TV channels only carry news about the Arab Spring states, the Iranian nuclear crisis, and the problem of the euro and the European sovereign debt. In the midst of these events the Republican candidate "Gingrich" came out with a statement denying the existence of the "Palestinian people", claiming that these people were just an "invention"!
And what makes matters worse, is the internal Palestinian conflict, which causes more harm than anything else, a conflict that is absurd and that has resulted in the loss of lots of enthusiastic supporters for the Palestinian cause.
In the past it was said that both Arabs and Jews had been betting that time would resolve the dispute in their favor.
The Arabs were more enthusiastic in their bets based on the demographic factor in the higher birthrate of the Palestinians compared to the Israelis. However, by one clever move, Israel has been able to turn the equation by attracting more Jewish immigrants after the fall of the former Soviet Union. The number of new immigrants during the past two decades reached nearly two million up to the year 2010.
In a speech delivered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said that he would work harder to attract a further one million new immigrants from Russia, the countries of Eastern Europe, the United States, Western Europe, Latin America and Ethiopia. Thus, with all that has been mentioned above, it begs the question: Shall we say goodbye to the Palestinian cause and declare our mourning for it?
