The New York Times has one of the best articles I've seen on the situation of Palestinians. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/world/middleeast/12intifada.html?ei=5089&en=7b52df347348d2fe&ex=1331352000&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
There are no surprises, and one wonders how others will read it. Isolation, poverty, lack of hope, anger at Israel and at the lack of Palestinian leadership, the despair of parents who worry about children recruited to resist, including suicide.
A high incidence of young people want to leave, but males under the age of 30 may not be allowed through the checkpoints that circle their home towns. They live without contact with others, except for armed Israelis. Some have bought forged travel documents, and have made it to the Cairo airport in a ghastly journey, but were sent back home when the last check before the airplane revealed the problems in their documents.
One of the German bishops who toured Palestine compared what he saw to the Warsaw ghetto. It did not take long for a Cardinal to express a severe reservation about his colleague's comments. And that was before he could have read an article in the Washington Post describing the problems of the diminishing Christian minority in Palestine. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/11/AR2007031101644.html
Corrupt Palestinian officials steal properties that Christians say are their own, and transfer them to Muslims. It helps that process that Christians leave, and Muslims manage to register their property in their names before Christian relatives can arrange their own ownership.
It is safest for Palestinians to blame Israel for their problems, but both articles provide insights into the importance of factional fighting among political movements and extended families. People remember a golden age when all were fighting and willing to die for Palestine. Now few of them expect that a Palestinian state will emerge. Many doubt the value in fighting for a Palestine torn by disputes financed and managed by outsiders who care more about their own agendas than the future of Palestine.
It has been clear for some time that much of the world is tired of the Palestinian rhetoric. Expressions of support for a two-state solution are lip service to the weight of Muslim votes in international forums. Competition among outsiders keeps any peace process from moving forward. A declaration out of Mecca written with the participation of Palestinians fudged the issue of refugees and seemed to offer a way forward. Then politicians far from Palestine added an explicit reference to the right of refugees to return home. This does no more than pave the way to the already full cemetery of empty gestures.
Israeli officials meet with Palestinian "moderates," but cannot move beyond the problem of a Hamas-led government, funded and prompted by Iran, that refuses to recognize the right of Israel to exist.
It is more than sad to read about the hopelessness of a Palestinian generation, and seeing the signs of continued despair as young parents hear their infants talk about their own resistance and their wish to be suicide martyrs. Yet it is not the Warsaw ghetto. The fighters there wanted to survive. The young fighters in Palestine have chosen our destruction as their goal. So we must defend ourselves by confining them, and worse. We have to pity them, but we cannot solve their problems and pave their way to a better future.