Human Rights activist Bassam Eid: They have turned Gaza into Hell. The Arabs of Judea and Samaria see how their situation has deteriorated since Oslo and are willing to accept a status of residency under Israeli sovereignty.
In Jerusalem the Sovereignty Movement held a panel discussion on the topic of sovereignty and one of the speakers was human rights activist Bassam Eid, a resident of east Jerusalem and former resident of Jericho, who has become an international symbol, exposing the corruption and incitement to terror carried out by the PA leadership.
Eid began his talk with an anecdote from one of his meetings with senior officials of the Civil Administration in the Gaza Strip that are held to support the residents of the Strip with their humanitarian problems. "One day I met the head of the Civil Administration of Khan Yunis. He asked if I believe in G-d. I told him 'yes' and he said that I must surely believe that in the world to come there is a Heaven and Hell. Hell will be here in Gaza and Gaza has really become a hell".
I have always been in contact with a lot of people there. There are shocking stories there. No one speaks of the thousands of people who are murdered there, like in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states where people are murdered and no one knows about them. We know about the severe Islamic regime that rules the Hamas movement in Gaza", says Eid, adding: "If, tomorrow, the State of Israel took a secret survey among the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, asking them which regime they would prefer to live under, I believe that 99.9 percent would prefer Israeli rule".
According to Eid, the Arab public in Judea and Samaria and Gaza remembers longingly the days before the Oslo era. "We remember the good days before Oslo. People in Gaza are nostalgic for the beaches of Jaffa and Haifa. Palestinians say that since Oslo their situation has been deteriorating day by day".
"Two days ago in Jericho, a Palestinian died as a result of beatings carried out by people from the Palestinian government. They have no respect for human rights in the PA. I have dealt with human rights under Arafat as well as under Abbas; each one is worse than the other. There are no investigative committees there and the most important thing for them is their corruption".
"In all of the public relations activities in the Palestinian Authority there is nothing but incitement. When you pay a salary to a murderer, it only encourages more murders and more murderers. This is exactly what they do", says Eid, stating that "The only support that Mahmoud Abbas gets is from the West, especially from Europe. Not from the Palestinians and not from the Americans. Only Europeans give it power and money".
Bassam Eid told another story about a speech by former U.S. ambassador Nikki Haley in the AIPAC conference, which he attended specifically to hear her speech. In this speech, she said that "When there is a draft resolution in the UN, it is voted upon, if it is in favor of Israel the Arab ambassadors are against it and vice versa, but after the vote, when I return to my office in the UN, the ambassadors come to me and tell me that they are sorry, that they had no choice but to vote as they did, but they are with me".
From this story about Haley, Eid reaches the surprising conclusion that "no country in the Middle East wants a Palestinian state". And to this, he adds that he believes the king of Jordan is in agreement with the Israeli consensus that the Jordan Valley must remain in Israeli hands, since he does not want Palestinian soldiers on the border of his country.
In Eid's opinion, 21 Arab states support Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, even if they do not say it aloud. "The time has come to move from theory to practice. There has been enough talk about theories. The time has come to do this and with Trump, anything is possible. He is for everything. You have the support of 21 Arab states. Why are you waiting? This could happen even before the elections. The way is paved and you should do it as quickly as possible", said Eid, to the audience's loud applause.
In the question and answer period Eid was asked if the Arab population in Judea and Samaria would be satisfied, in his opinion, with the status of residency, which is not citizenship. Eid answered in the positive, stating that when the Arab public hears and speaks of sovereignty and Israeli annexation "what interests them is 'what does it give me', and if it would give them rights. This is what they want. They hear that I, as a resident of east Jerusalem, am covered by National Insurance, can travel to anyplace and fly to anywhere and they tell me residency is enough for them. They know that with this residency they would receive much more than what PA or Jordanian citizenship gives them".