While protests erupt across the Middle East and North Africa (see the latest Tahrir Mothership and Liveblog for full details as well as weasel’s country by country roundup) protesters are meeting with various levels of success. Crucial to the success of the protests is the appetite for regimes and military and security authorities to inflict violence on their own people. In Tunisia and Egypt, where those authorities did not have the appetite for violence, concessions were made and it appears the momentum for change is unstoppable. In Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, and Algeria, the authorities are more willing to use violence against their people in a marked display of autocratic deafness.
Palestinians face many of the same problems as other in the region. They are subject to a regime that is deaf to their demands and is willing to use violence. Within the Green Line, Palestinians are discriminated against in a range of ways from lower funding by government for education and a range of services including housing, marriage and immigration. In the occupied territories (OPT), they are occupied militarily or under siege, subject to arbitrary arrest and detention due to the criminalisation of political action and speech, constrained by checkpoints and Jewish-only roads and settlements, subject to land expropriation and home demolition and all the problems associated with being Palestinian and living under a regime prepared to use violence against them to quell their aspirations.