Fifty years ago, Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani put forward a clear position about the boycott of Israel. Kanafani was, at the time, not only an esteemed novelist and short story writer. He was also one of the leading spokespeople of the Palestinian armed revolution, representing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

There are a number of issues that the occupation government is escalating: settlement expansion and demolition orders against Palestinian buildings; daily arrests of Palestinians, some of which are accompanied by heinous murders, as in the case of the martyr Dalia Al-Samoudi in Jenin; and attacking Jerusalem institutions and the attempt to reduce the Palestinian presence in the city.

It is a common platitude amongst some of the weaker parts of the Palestine solidarity movement that “Israelis want peace” and do not support their government’s policies of oppression against the Palestinians and other Arabs peoples.

Recognition of a Palestinian state is one of the potential responses European Union states are mulling in response to an Israeli annexation of territory in the West Bank

Everything starts with the Palestinian people and all options are now open in this decade of clarity and renewal.

The proposed annexation of the West Bank is not the exception but the rule when it comes to Israel's decades-long dispossession of the Palestinians – the only difference is this time, they're not pretending.