Transforming human history is a campaign to encourage engagement and inspire confidence that change is possible in three areas that will determine the future of life on our planet: nuclear weapons abolition, education for all and climate action
( Growing Up in An Abusive Environment )
Because of Britain’s failure to act, the conflict between Israel and Palestine has intensified, and damages the trust in the British Government and it undermines the very foundations of trusting the British, placing the future of the Palestinians in jeopardy.
The crisis can seem overwhelming. But when we take the time to learn the facts and deepen our awareness, we discover the promised pathways of action deliberately not delivered by the British.
When we consider the events and the promise that marked the historical periods, it is clear that we cannot allow this story to be one only of devastating loss undergone and endured. I say this because I firmly believe that the key factor determining the direction of the conflict proves to be that the British are the ones who have allowed this to happen, for the two countries to fight one another.
Most crucial is that when people grow up in such an abusive environment they lose bonds of trust from the realizaation of how they have been abused deeply and intensely during this unprecedented conflict, and make shared efforts to find a way out of the conflict.
The question of Palestine was brought before the United Nations shortly after the end of the Second World War.
The origins of the Palestine problem as an international issue, however, lie in events occurring towards the end of the First World War. These events led to a League of Nations decision to place Palestine under the administration of Great Britain as the Mandatory Power under the Mandates System adopted by the League. In principle, the Mandate was meant to be in the nature of a transitory phase until Palestine attained the status of a fully independent nation, a status provisionally recognized in the League’s Covenant, but in fact the Mandate’s historical evolution did not result in the emergence of Palestine as an independent nation.
The decision on the Mandate did not take into account the wishes of the people of Palestine, despite the Covenant’s requirements that “the wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory”. This assumed special significance because, almost five years before receiving the mandate from the League of Nations, the British Government had given commitments to the Zionist Organization regarding the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, for which Zionist leaders had pressed a claim of “historical connection” since their ancestors had lived in Palestine two thousand years earlier before dispersing in the “Diaspora”.
During the period of the Mandate, the Zionist Organization worked to secure the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The indigenous people of Palestine, whose forefathers had inhabited the land for virtually the two preceding millennia felt this design to be a violation of their natural and inalienable rights. They also viewed it as an infringement of assurances of independence given by the Allied Powers to Arab leaders in return for their support during the war. The result was mounting resistance to the Mandate by Palestinian Arabs, followed by resort to violence by the Jewish community as the Second World War drew to a close.
After a quarter of a century of the Mandate, Great Britain submitted what had become “the Palestine problem” to the United Nations on the ground that the Mandatory Power was faced with conflicting obligations that had proved irreconcilable. At this point, when the United Nations itself was hardly two years old, violence ravaged Palestine.
After investigating various alternatives the United Nations proposed the partitioning of Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalised. The partition plan did not bring peace to Palestine, and the prevailing violence spread into a Middle East war halted only by United Nations action. One of the two States envisaged in the partition plan proclaimed its independence as Israel and, in a series of successive wars, its territorial control expanded to occupy all of Palestine. The Palestinian Arab State envisaged in the partition plan never appeared on the world’s map and, over the following 30 years, the Palestinian people have struggled for their lost rights.
The Palestine problem quickly widened into the Middle East dispute between the Arab States and Israel. From 1948 there have been wars and destruction, forcing millions of Palestinians into exile, and engaging the United Nations in a continuing search for a solution to a problem which came to possess the potential of a major source of danger for world peace.
In the course of this search, a large majority of States Members of the United Nations have recognized that the Palestine issue continues to lie at the heart of the Middle East problem, the most serious threat to peace with which the United Nations must contend. Recognition is spreading in world opinion that the Palestinian people must be assured of its inherent inalienable right of national self-determination for peace to be restored.
In 1947 the United Nations accepted the responsibility of finding a just solution for the Palestine issue, and still grapples with this task today. Decades of strife and politico-legal arguments have clouded the basic issues and have obscured the origins and evolution of the Palestine problem, which this study attempts to clarify.
The focus of the United Nations response measures needs to be on how they will return the land back to the Palestines and stop focusing on a two-state solution, then the UN should lead efforts to negotiate a treaty that will establish international obligations between the two countries.
Since the conflict, the global focus has been on economic recovery making money and profit. However, in addition to these issues is the impact on Palestinian children and youth in the form of disrupted educational services and the loss of learning opportunities due to missile attacks on Palestine.
There are still enormous numbers of young Palestinians stranded on the wrong side of the conflict, unable to access the necessary means for living. I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of strengthening international cooperation to ensure that Palestinians overcome poverty.
What is poverty?
Poverty in the simplest sense of the word, is a state where one lacks access to basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter. It is also used to describe a person whose living conditions prevent them from being able to acquire education, seek medical help, secure a stable job, and participate in recreational activities due to a lack of money.
Poverty is not just about money, though. It is a bigger conversation about marginalisation, exclusion.
Is poverty only about money?
AssumptaGH:
No. Common perceptions of poverty consider income and consumption alone. However, there are significant approaches that say other factors must be included. This is because money doesn’t tell the whole story.
(Typically, when the poor describe their poverty they do so in ways that go beyond simply not having enough money.)
Examples of such approaches include the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and the Human Development Index
GLOBAL MULTIDIMENSIONAL POVERTY INDEX 2018
LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development pledges that “no one will be left behind”.
Putting this idea into practice, the global MPI considers the depth or intensity of an individual’s poverty, going beyond the overall number of poor people (headcount ratio) and providing measurement incentives to reduce the deprivations of the poorest even if they don’t yet exist poverty.
This promotes policies that “leave no one behind”. Disaggregation of the MPI by region, age, and urban/rural area identifies specific pockets of poverty.
This enables more targeted policies and actions, and helps ensure that particular areas and groups are not left behind.
INTERLINKAGES ACROSS SDGs. The global MPI reflects deprivations each person faces in multiple SDG areas such as education, water and sanitation, health, housing, etc. Connecting to at least seven SDGs, the MPI brings many concerns together into one headline measure. And, since people are MPI poor if they are deprived in one-third of the weighted indicators, the MPI focuses on people who are being left behind in multiple SDGs at the same time.
It is human beings themselves, not governments or markets, that will determine the course of history. People must be the main actors, as we have repeatedly pointed out in our discussion. “Open” dialogue and exchange among people at the citizen level will have to form the undercurrent of all international efforts for constructive change.
The “option” I am talking about here is a forthright, categorical decision, not a preference for or a relative choice of A or B. It must be an act of choosing a particular course of action on which the whole existence is at stake, just as some the Jewish Rabbis have chosen to be activists and find it important to celebrate the Al-Quds march, they could have also chosen violence.
it was an act of choosing the cause of peace on which the Jewish Rabbis find important to organize the Al-Quds march every year, because they believe it is human beings who usher in a better future.
It is also clear that by choosing peace, they did not allowed themselves to be trapped in the deliberate institutional arrangements made by the British to bring them into such an organised conflict.
Thank you Assumpta
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