Saturday, September 3, 2011

15th Day: Facts the PA likes to deny (or) Palestinians control an area only 10% smaller than TLV


Orange is my country. Thanks Abbas! You done good. [map from here]
These are some of the actual De Facto percentages: 

Palestine's 1948 Areas (aka Israel): 77%-78% of Palestine (not including Jerusalem, 20,770 km2 of 26,920 km2) out of which Tel Aviv (TLV) metropolitan area alone is nearly 18% the size of the area; yet nearly 50% of Israel's 7.7 Million live! (close to 3.5 million residents!)

The size of the West Bank and Gaza is 22% (around 6,000 km2: WB= 5640 km2 + GS= 360 km2) the size of Historic Palestine. Palestinian Authority has control of only less than 2.7% of that (area A according to Oslo Accords), and a joint-control with Israel of nearly 25.1% (area B according to Oslo). The proposed state will not have access to nearly 97.3% of the remaining areas or most towns and villages plus all of the roads connecting any two Palestinian town and village plus all of the Jewish settlements.

The proposed state will be declared on 2,370 km2 of Historic Palestine's 26,920 km2. Slightly more than  in Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area, 3.9 million Palestinian Arabs reside in these small dis-fragmented localities! Israel will control all of the (2,370 km2)'s entrances and exists, will grant or deny passes to residents, and will be the entity to receive Palestinian taxes and distribute back the tax refunds to the PA, like it would treat any other municipality. 

The PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY "MUNICIPALITY" is the largest disfragmented Metropolitan Area in Israel! Compare: Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area: 1,516 km2, the PA "Metropolitan Territories": 2370 km2. The areas the PA may have control over in the West Bank and Gaza (1,668 km2, or areas A & B) are only about 10 percent larger than Tel Aviv Metropolitan area with the around the exact same number of residents!

YET!, the PA will officially be like a chain of territories, or small countries that literary control only 162 km2 of all of the West Bank, or around 0.59% of Historic Palestine. The area is less than 10% smaller than TLV urban areaShame on us. Shame on the PA. Shame on Yasser Arafat who delivered good on his promise to declare a state "even if only on one (1) inch of Historic Palestine".

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, is merely the counterpart of any Israeli Mayor.

Historic Palestine is still vast and nearly empty! The Palestinian Arab refugees do have a lot of space left to move back to, their villages and towns which were ethnically cleansed can easily be repopulated or amalgamated into other already established Israeli municipalities in order to preserve historic sites and farmlands used for agriculture. 

Palestinians are very peaceful, even today after having been subject to Israel's violence which they faced for nearly 63 years, they are still willing to live in peace with Israelis in one bi-national country and not 2 racist countries. Just check out how many Palestinians apply for/ and acquire passes to go to "Israel" on vacations and how many workers jump the wall for work and come back in peace. 

Factually, we live in a single state but we are simply denied equal rights. What the PA and PLO have been doing since the peace initiative was started in the early 1990s was white-washing occupation and denying us the right to demand our equal rights! The PA has endorsed the idea of Bantustans when they signed Oslo, I will go as far as accusing them of fully knowing the consequences and knowing exactly what they were getting into unless they were complete invalids in which case (both cases actually) we should revolt against them. Hopefully sooner than the proposed state's date.