Last night, Israeli occupation troops swooped on the northern West Bank town of Nablus, rounding up as many as 30 Palestinian activists and community leaders, including intellectuals, university professors, college students and business people. As always, the sweeping detentions were carried out in coordination with PA security personnel who looked on passively as crack Israeli soldiers raided homes, vandalized property and beat innocent people.

Israel didn't give convincing reasons for the latest campaign of arrests; apart from saying the measure was preventive and mainly intended to prevent Hamas from undermining the PA regime.

Israel, ruled by supremacist and megalomaniac Jews who think that no country or entity under the sun has a right to criticize Israel's appalling maltreatment of the Palestinians, believes it has an unending free season on its victims.

According to this morbid, racist thinking, this state of affair allows the apartheid state to kill, torture and detain Palestinians for as many years as Israel deems fit, all without charge or trial and without having to answer to anyone. In short, Israel is judge and enemy.

For several months now, the Israeli occupation army has been resorting to the draconian collective punishment of demolishing Palestinian homes in various parts of the West Bank. The extremely callous and unjust practice is intended to prevent Palestinian demographic expansion, especially in the so-called Area-C, which constitutes more than 65% of the occupied territories. As we all know, Israel covets this part of the West Bank as part of its unrelenting efforts to liquidate the Palestinian question and eliminate any remaining possibility for creating a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state.

Again, the PA contents itself with merely watching the act of rape unfold, while listening to the cries of pain from the helpless victims.

In the meanwhile, Israel continues its inhumane policy of preventing Palestinians from traveling between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, causing untold misery to ordinary families and spouses, cut off from each other.

Israel is maintaining a harsh blockade of the coastal enclave, triggering a true human catastrophe of phenomenal proportions.

In summer, Israel destroyed tens of thousands of homes in Gaza, causing hundreds of thousands to go homeless. Israel, which murdered more than 3000 Palestinians, including some 500 children, in last summer's aggression on Gaza, continued to murder and maim Palestinians, including fishermen almost on a daily basis.

There are a thousand daily tragedies afflicting ordinary Palestinians as a result of sustained Israeli policies, aimed at tormenting ordinary people and narrowing their horizons to the point of making them contemplate emigrating for good.

This is coupled with rampant unemployment and abject poverty, unprecedented since the start of the Israeli occupation 47 years ago.

It is widely believed that more than 50,000 college graduates in the West Bank alone are totally jobless, with many of them considering emigration to Europe, North America or Australia. Others may well be prompted to join resistance groups, including the violent ones, not necessarily out of ideological convictions but rather as an escape from their dire living conditions.

Indeed, as a result of growing poverty, coupled with a clarion PA failure to create jobs, many young Palestinians are seeking work in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Again, the PA plays blind, deaf and dumb, totally ignoring this scandal, at a time when PA officials fill the ether with complaints about Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank, a fact that has effectively killed any remaining chances for establishing a viable Palestinian state worthy of the name.

The rampant poverty coincides with a phenomenal growth of despondency and hopelessness on the part of many Palestinians, especially the younger generations.

A few weeks ago, a young university graduate from Hebron, who holds a B.Sc in Chemistry told this writer that "Our ambitions and aspirations are not what they were a few years ago."

"A few years ago, we were thinking about liberating our land and freeing our people from Israeli occupation. Now the utmost we dream of is to obtain a work permit in Israel in order to be able to live a decent life."

Gigantic failure

When the PA was created more than 20 years ago, as a result of the hapless Oslo Accords, Palestinians were told that that the PA would be the first step toward the establishment of an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Now, with the two-state solution thoroughly and probably irreversibly eliminated thanks to the ubiquitous proliferation of Jewish settlements, it is amply clear that the PA, a corruption-ridden entity, has effectively lost its raison d'ętre.

Indeed, not only has the two-state solution become more remote and more unlikely than ever, the PA itself has also proven so impotent and incompetent in enabling ordinary people to withstand Israel's ethnic cleansing efforts, widely expected to increase in pace and brutality, especially after the formation of the new Israeli government, which most observers believe will be the most fascist in Israel's entire history. In fact, initial expressions of this fascist extremism are already manifesting themselves in virtually daily occurrences of land- grabs in area C and also in brazen gang-style assaults by paramilitary settlers on unprotected Palestinian peasants and farmers.

All in all, the PA itself, far from helping the Palestinians withstand Israeli oppression and ethnic cleansing, is actually doing the opposite, more or less becoming a vanquished supplicant begging Israeli good will and imploring the callous Israeli leadership to pay Palestinian tax and customs revenues, collected by the Zionist state on behalf of the PA, pursuant the infamous Paris economic protocol of 1943.

Ignominious behavior 

Notwithstanding its political and economic failures, the PA often seeks to justify itself from the "security: view point, by arresting and cracking down on dissent among Palestinians.

A young wife from the village of Ithna, west of Hebron, last week intimated to this writer that PA security personnel "beat and humiliated us without any reason."

"They came to arrest my husband. They terrorized us by pounding on the door with their military boots. And when we opened the door for them, they ganged up on my husband like vicious beasts as if he were a serial killer. And when I asked them to stop it, they started cursing the Almighty."

This is by no means an isolated incident reflecting a single rotten apple spoiling the entire bunch. Unfortunately, this unlawful and unethical behavior seems to represent the norm, not the exception.

It is unlikely that such behavior occurs without the knowledge of security chiefs and the political leaderships.

But it is highly likely that the PA leadership is more concerned for satisfying Israeli security whims than maintaining the human rights and personal dignity of its own people. Otherwise, what would make the PA reach this extent in tormenting Palestinians and violating their rights and liberties… other than wanting to receive a certificate of good conduct from Israel?

Khalid Amayreh is a veteran Palestinian journalist and current affairs commentator living in occupied Palestine 

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