And because they are stateless they have no rights. In Lebanon, for instance, Lebanon is known among all the Arab countries that hold large numbers of Palestinian refugees, Lebanon has always had by far the most stringent restrictions on what Palestinian refugees can do. They are not only not allowed the rights of citizenship, as they are in Jordan and to a large degree historically in Syria until the war began, but they are also explicitly restricted from, I think it's about 50 or so job categories. That they are simply not allowed to take those jobs. So refugees, Palestinian refugees, second, third generation refugees in Lebanon, are already living incredibly difficult, constrained, impoverished and dispossessed lives, along with the denial of their right to return to their homeland. So it's made all of that worse.
DB: So then we're going to sort of leap over Palestine-Israel and talk about Egypt but obviously in the context of talking about Egypt, obviously what happens there has a major impact if anything is going to change in terms of Palestine and the Israeli occupation. Do you want to talk about the horrific unfolding we've seen around the dismissing of charges against Mubarak because of technical whatever in the court system. Do you want to talk about what's been going on there? Some people died in protests over the last several days.
PB: There was never any technical problem with the court system. The court system works fine, technically. The problem is political. The problem is the courts are an instrument of the military government that took power in a coup d'etat a year ago, overthrowing the first and, so far, last, freely elected president of Egypt, the Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi. And when Morsi was overthrown in the protests that resulted in the military government that came to power killed huge numbers of people. Over 1,000 people were killed in one set of demonstrations. Thousands have been imprisoned; famously the three Al Jazeera journalists remain in prison without any evidence, charged with being supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Without, again, without any evidence at all. These are completely secular [journalists]. Two of them are not even Egyptians.
So the human rights situation has been disastrous in Egypt. And in the last couple of days the courts, the government controlled courts, have given up any efforts on accountability of Mubarak and his two sons and their top officials. And all the charges were dropped. He's expected to get out any time now. And, in some of the protests that greeted that decision, several more people have been killed. But at the same time there has been a rise in Islamist opposition fighters, extremists militias of various sorts, that are operating kind of unaccountable to anybody in the Egyptian Sinai.
One of the results of that decision by the government that has been so far unable to stop them from their occasional attacks on military targets. They've killed some soldiers. In one large-scale attack they killed 31 soldiers, but the response of the government has been to, among other things, create a so-called buffer zone along the border between the Egyptian Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Which has meant, not only shutting down the tunnels that were used for smuggling crucially needed building supplies, food, other supplies into Gaza, but they also permanently shut down the Rafah crossing which was the last remaining way for Gazans to get in or out.
As of right now, Gaza is completely surrounded with no open border, without any way to get in or out. Students who have scholarships to study around the world can't get out to get to embassies to pick up their visas, can't leave to begin their studies. And they are simply losing their scholarships. They are losing their right to go to school. Patients that desperately need cancer treatment in Cairo, can't get out. Four hundred to five hundred houses have been destroyed. These are Egyptian houses, on the Egyptian side of Rafah who have been summarily dismissed and told to go live somewhere else.
So the situation in Sinai is at an absolute boil. And the human rights situation in Egypt is getting worse and worse. So the situation there is becoming worse and in response to that at least one of the extremist organizations operating in the Sinai has declared its new allegiance to ISIS. So it's now linking the instability in Egypt directly to the ISIS crisis in the Iraq-Syria region. So it's very quickly becoming a widespread regional reality that we're dealing with.
DB: And does this reverberate in the militant Palestinian community which is, you know, at the edge of ... you can't even say desperation in terms of what's been going on there; the last slaughter with Israel. I mean it would seem to me that the militancy, the next intifada is around the corner, if not here now.
PB: Well, I think we have to be careful. There is no question desperation is rising, and it's not only rising for militants. It's rising for ordinary people, for children, for families, for pregnant women, for every possible constituent of society that you can imagine. People are desperate. There's no work, there's no money, increasingly there's no food. Ninety percent of the water in Gaza, and there's very little available, 90 percent of it is not fit for human consumption. Everything that you need for a normal, decent human life is denied. So desperation absolutely is on the rise.
When we speak of another intifada, I think that one way to see it is that the third intifada has already been underway for quite some time, and this one is an international intifada. And it's largely non-violent. It's largely led by the global BDS movement, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement that is growing in power here in the U.S. and is enormously powerful in Europe and in places like South Africa and elsewhere.
But it's also a situation in which that the call for BDS came from Palestinian civil society which is increasingly the most recognized leadership of the Palestinian people, at a time when both Hamas and Fatah, the two leading Palestinian parties are losing ground, are losing support, are losing the ability to speak for and even speak to their constituents.
So, I don't think that we're going to see something like the second intifada which was quite a violent uprising against extraordinary Israeli violence of the occupation. That violence, occupation violence has been absolutely skyrocketing in recent years, as you mentioned this last summers' 50-day assault on Gaza was only the most recent. But the expansion of settlements, the destruction of homes, the arrests, the killings are driving people to absolute desperation.
I don't think that necessarily means it will translate into a violent uprising. I think that there is already a set of uprisings underway, some of which is non-violent, much of it is non-violent, but certainly some have seen what we've seen some of these individual people who simply lose control and there's an explosion. When people are just pushed to the limits. And we've seen these kinds of individual acts which do not constitute an intifada. They're not organized, they are not led by anyone, they're not part of organizations. They are simply desperate individuals who have been driven to the end of their tolerance. There's a danger of that for sure.
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