Middle East Eye, 24 November 2017

A Palestinian demonstrator tries to destroy the wall separating the West Bank city of Abu Dis from East Jerusalem in November 2015 (AFP)

It was what I would call incremental ethnic cleansing. In some cases they expelled droves of people from certain areas such as Jericho, the Old City of Jerusalem, and around Qalqilya. But in most cases they decided that military rule and a siege to enclose Palestinians in their own areas would be as beneficial as expelling them.

From 1967 until today, there is a very slow ethnic cleansing that probably stretches over a period of 50 years and it's so slow that sometimes it can only affect one person in one day. But if you look at the whole picture from 1967 till today, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that are not allowed to return to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

[...] In Gaza the Israelis are the wardens that lock the Palestinians from the outside world but they don't interfere with what they do on the inside.

The West Bank is like an open-air prison where you send petty criminals who are allowed more time to go outside and work outside. And there's no harsh regime inside but it's still a prison. Even the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, if he moves from Area B to C, he needs the Israelis to open the gate for him. And that's for me very symbolic, the fact that the president cannot move without the Israeli jailer opening the cage.