The Palestinians need new leaders

are more humiliating for Palestinians than plodding through the Israeli checkpoint at Qalandiya, where the West Bank’s administrative headquarters at Ramallah are separated from the Palestinians’ would-be capital in east Jerusalem. Young Israeli conscripts bark orders at middle-aged labourers queuing to cross. Meanwhile the Palestinian workers can hear the roar of Israeli commuters who live in settlements on nearby Palestinian land zooming along a four-lane motorway barred to Palestinians, en route to jobs in Tel Aviv. “The humiliation is a tax I have to pay to feed my six children,” says a day labourer trudging to work in Israel.Seventy-five years after the voted to divide Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, Palestinians are still waiting for one. While Israelis celebrate May 14th 1948 as their day of independence, Palestinians mourn their , or catastrophe, when some 700,000 of them were forced from their homes or just fled.