Israel reported a record $7.2 billion weapons exports solidifying its position in the top four countries profiting from war and destruction. The other two main official sources of income for Israel (foreign aid and its pillaging of the Palestinian economy) are also at a record high. A fourth source of income that is less publicized but certainly is in the billions is money laundering and other criminal activities. Many make billions by illicit schemes in their own countries and then move to Israel or at least move their money there (there are many example among Russian and American Zionists). Israel is indeed in a very strong position financially and militarily. Israel is also aided by a massive media campaign that vilifies Palestinians (and now Muslims and Arabs in general). On the ground, Jerusalem has largely been transformed and its multi-ethnic, multi-religious character meticulously eroded just like what happened to Jaffa and Haifa before and just like what is happening in Hebron and elsewhere today. But we are not entirely helpless in facing the last remaining bastion of fascism and racism that is protected by state power and a global network of hate peddlers.
Yes, it is true that our struggle is more difficult than what transpired against apartheid in South Africa. Yes, it is true that our “leadership” has been reduced making weak declarations in fancy hotels and conference centers and to the media. This “leadership” is paid handsomely for doing nothing useful to change the political discourse or even increase the cost of this colonial Zionist venture. Worse yet, a good segment of this “leadership” actually aids and abets the occupiers. Salam Fayyad who worked at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), declares that he is fully in favor of the appointment of the head of the Central Bank in Israel as head of the IMF! He also worked hard to get funding to pave alternative roads that made it easier on the apartheid system isolating Palestinians in cantons than need not interfere with the plans to control the natural resources and best lands of the West Bank. And then there is Mahmoud Abbas who declared on more than one occasion and also even signed a provisional agreement with Israelis that also declared that refugees need not return to their homes and lands but only to the demilitarized denuded bantustan called a Palestinian state. Abbas also declared repeatedly that his options are negotiations, negotiations, negotiations. He and his associates (Saeb Erekat, Abu Ala’ etc) have been negotiating for 20 years with the only tangible accomplishment being giving Israel economic and diplomatic space to consolidate Zionist colonialism. But this era of Israeli colonial superiority must and is coming to an end.
While we in the civil society still hope for these “leaders” to change their ways, we have not been waiting. We have been acting and must act more. The upcoming escalation in confrontation will not be between states nor will it be with “insurgency” in its classic sense. What we see instead is a growth in boycotts, divestment, and sanctions and what transpired by freedom flotilla I, events of May 15, June 5th, the upcoming freedom flotilla II, and July 8-16 are so critical. We have individual and collective responsibility to change things by moral and determined ways. The other options have been proven catastrophically negative: relying on politicians (elected or self-appointed) or on the vagaries of shifting military capabilities (a dangerous development in the era of advanced science that makes development of weapons of mass destruction relatively easy even for small state and non-state actors). Let no one have any illusion: we are coming to a major confrontation. It can either be
1) a civil confrontation where civil society wins the struggle because it got engaged in these tactics of strong and determined popular resistance, or
2) it can happen via armed insurgency that uses modern technology to challenge conventional military forces. Hezbollah in Lebanon provides a model of mixing the two but with more reliance on the second. In challenging local dictatorship, we saw the power of civil resistance in Egypt and Tunisia. Challenging colonialism successfully happened with a mix of the two in Algeria (liberated in the 1960s) and South Africa (more recently). But the mix in South Africa was improved thanks to International civil participation. Each situation is unique and our local history here and the upcoming confrontation will also be unique to Palestine and different than in these other places. But it is clear that we have a responsibility as individuals in our society to try to shape the coming confrontation so that it is not catastrophically violent (i.e less “military might makes right” and more “people power”). Our future as humans depends on us working together to change our circumstances. Those who think they can afford to sit and wait (and watch TV news) will miss the moving train of justice and will regret their apathy. We Palestinians must carry the bulk of the weight (I remember the image of the old man carrying Jerusalem and Palestine on his back). But we humans are all responsible. We cannot be lulled by “humanitarian aid” or by “state” and non-state structures that give the illusions of safety and security whether in the US, Europe, Australia, the apartheid state of Israel, or in the bantustans called a Palestinian state. Everyone knows that that old system merely makes the rich richer, the poor poorer, destroys our environment, and lets us have fake elections between waves of certain economic downturns and the occasional war or terror attack that aims to distract us.
For those of you in Palestine, you may want to join us for a workshop this Saturday, 18 June, at 11 Am in the Bethlehem area that will bring dozens of activists from throughout Palestine and some internationals to help organize us better for the week of activities in July and beyond. We also just updated our website with new answers to frequently asked questions on this (see http://palestinejn.org/section-blog ). For those of you abroad, you could intensify your efforts to challenge the status quo. We are one world and our struggles are one.
Palestine Writing Workshop in Bethlehem, July 2011: additional information and registration at www.palestineworkshop.org
Action: 51,000 people signed asking TIAA-CREF to divest from apartheid. We must insist that they respond to investor demand for a vote on the issue. Their meeting is in Charlotte NC, USA July 19. There is a campaign where you can help from anywhere: http://wedivest.org/ [there are also other actions – email me for details]
I continue to be sad, shocked but also inspired by what I see and hear in my working tour in Germany. I remain cautiously optimistic because lessons of history, as sad as they are, provide an unmistakable map for the future.Hitler (and Zionists) who aimed to leave Europe with no Jews have failed.Here in Germany is the fastest growing Jewish population on earth and more than half of them come from Israel (the supposed haven of Jews).Many of the activists for human rights here are ex-Israeli or ex-Zionist Jews. Gideon Levy explains in Haaretz this week how and why Israelis are getting foreign passports at unprecedented rates.
As you examine the sites of former Nazi interrogation camps and as you look at pictures and read stories of the past, you are struck by the idiocy of humans who thought they could get away with treating fellow human beings with such indignities. There are enough resources for everyone on earth but greed and racism seem to dog our species and rear its ugly head here and there.The folly and arrogance of power confronting indifference and subjecting fellow humans to such cruelty is beyond description in certain periods of our history.In other periods, denial (of the Nakba or of the Jewish holocaust) can hurt the feelings of survivors.No human can claim they are not impacted by these things.But I as a Palestinian found the microcosm of this all too human history truly disturbing and resonating with our reality.
Today, it was reported that the government of Israel is considering a new plan to move 30,000 Bedouins to concentration areas from their unrecognized villages in the Negev because of “environmental reasons”.Seventy years ago, thousands of Roma (Gypsies) were also relocated to improve the environment.Gypsies (Roma) are still treated bad in Germany and they are still around despite those early attempts to clear them out.
Seven years ago, uprisings in the Jenin Refugee Camp and in Nablus old city (ghettos) were put down brutally, sixty years before, an uprising in Warsaw ghetto was put down. Stories about Jewish collaborators with the Nazis bear uncanny resemblance to descriptions of Palestinian collaborators with Zionist plans (including stories of extortions, use of family members, use of medical or economic levers etc).
Walls three meters high in Berlin are mostly gone but walls 8 meters high in Palestine still stand.I bought a piece of the wall in Berlin.I imagined that very soon, some Palestinians will be making a lot of money selling pieces of the Israeli apartheid wall. Dreams and memories and lessons and tears and hopes know no state boundaries and no national or religious boundaries.
I recalled the remarkable book by Jewish theologian Marc Ellis “Out of the Ashes” and his message that the lessons of horrors should be “never again to all humans” not “never again to my group.”That is the lesson I hope will finally sink in to all of us.
We held a press conference about planned actions of bringing Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza in late June and bringing hundreds of peace activists to the rest of Palestine July 8-16 (sponsored by 30 Palestinian groups so far and supported by hundreds of organizations around the world, see PalestineJN.org).The press conference was on the same day as the day that one year ago, Israeli navi commandos attacked humanitarian ships of the Gaza freedom Flotilla murdering 9 activists and injuring many.All of us are inspired by the determination of the International civil society (people of all walks of life who act on their conscience) to keep working for peace with justice.This determination stands in contrast with the collaboration of Western governments in supporting the last remaining apartheid colonial state.As we see in the Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, we can safely bet on the power of the people.
Press Conference in Berlin May 31, 2011 (Gestrige Pressekonferenz mit Mazin):
Action in Palestine: A new colony has been put off on the land of Kufr Malek east of Ramallah. The villagers are planning the first in a series of protest this FridayJune,3 2011 at 12:30
Please come and lend your support. For more information contact: Majed Fahim 0599201411
Action especially for those in the USA: Call TIAA-CREF
Actions around the world: June 5th in front of Israeli embassies and consulates and at major apartheid barriers (borders, checkpoints etc).For example Sunday there will be an event in Al-Walajah starting at 10 AM.
Remember we still seek volunteers and activists for Palestine.Wilkommen
(SALEM, Ore.) – Yesterday we reported the arrest of Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Salem-News.com writer and high profile educator and peace activist in Occupied Palestine, who in the past has been a professor at both Yale and Harvard.
It seems clear that Israel fears no boundaries, and that occupational forces are acting with a blatant disregard for even their own public image.
More than the fact that arresting peaceful men for speaking out is unconscionable; there seems to be a particular level of vengeance connected with this case.
According to what we are hearing, he will be released soon, though two other activists arrested with him who were American, were released while Dr. Qumsiyeh remained in custody.
Lawyers in Palestine say Mazin and two other Palestinians will be released on bail within the coming hours. Their cases will be reviewed later, and if there is no evidence to bring charges then the case will close and bail money returned.
Mazin’s family advised:
“We can all breathe a sigh of relief now. Your support and prayers meant so much to our family and made us strong. We thank each and every one of you. Next message hopefully will be coming from Mazin himself. In the meantime, our work continues until the rest of them are free.” Salem-News.com published contact information for the Israeli embassy in yesterday’s report, urging readers to contact embassy staff in their respective countries and demand that the professor be released. At one point it was relayed via the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem, that: “They are aware of the many calls people made calling for Mazin’s release. They said at this moment, any additional calls would not change Mazin’s status.” However, it appears that may not have been the case.
Targeting Intellectuals
We continue to be horrified and amazed that Israel targets intellectuals in this way, but then the first thing the Nazi’s did to Jewish resistance was to eliminate the ranks of academics and journalists. This is the way of oppressive occupational armies that believe they are part of a supreme race. There is no reason to mince words over it. Zionist Jews consider themselves superior to non-Jews, or ‘goyam’, and a lower species, here to serve the needs of Zionist Jews. We’re talking about a wide breadth of humanity who doesn’t qualify. Problems in Israel don’t stop there either. Dark complected Jews receive a lower level of regard and in some cases they are not allowed to attend schools with white Jewish students. There are many reported assaults and worse on Jews of color in Israel. This is not the first time Mazin has been arrested for participating in peace protests in occupied Palestine. We have in fact reported three prior arrests:
Does anyone see a pattern here? He had never been arrested in his life, and then all of a sudden, while touring the U.S., he learned that: “The Israeli army invaded our neighborhood at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, waking up my mother, wife and sister. Heavily-armed soldiers blocked roads during ‘the operation’. When my family opened the door, they demanded to see me. They were told I have already left to the U.S. After many more questions, they left a paper that states I am to appear at the military liaison office next Monday.” It only got worse from there, and the fact that they did this when he was on tour is even more of an insult.
During the early morning IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) raid on his otherwise peaceful neighborhood, his sister and wife told the soldiers that the professor will not be back by the court date they had set. All because he participated in peace activity- that was their only beef with him. He said at the time, back in March 2010, that was really disturbed him was the effect on his family and thousands of friends around the world who care. “My 76-year old mother asks on the phone that I not go back and that I work in the U.S. for a while, a very painful suggestion for a mother to make about her only remaining son near her! I try to assure her that I have done nothing wrong and will not leave her… but she brings up many examples of people who also did not do any violence and were arrested, imprisoned, and their families had to go through a lot.” That is everyday life for Palestinians, but Americans need to comprehend that the most accomplished professors here, people who would normally be granted a great deal of respect, are treated brutally and illegally.
Hope from Israel
It is important to note that the Israeli population is not all Zionist, and a growing contingent of Jews are standing up and speaking out over the terrible inhumane treatment of Palestinians. Equally important is the fact that hundreds and hundreds of young Israelis are imprisoned for refusing to be a part of their oppressive military system. Israel is such a militant government that every single individual is forced to enter the Israeli Apartheid Forces at the age of 18.
Nakba – Palestine’s Continuing Catastrophe
The Palestinian catastrophe, known as the ‘Nakba’ began sixty three years and one day ago, when Israel became independent and began an ethnic cleansing program of indigenous Palestinian people. It was at a demonstration where people object verbally and peacefully to these policies, on this historic day, where Dr. Qumsiyeh was arrested.
Apartheid
Alison Weir
In Israel, speech can be a crime.
In Israel, laws are specifically designed to discriminate against Palestinians, people exactly like Professor Qumsiyeh, whom in my opinion, is one of the world’s greatest champions for peace and fairness.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with Israel’s practices, a simple answer is to watch this highly informative documentary called Occupation 101 which features another highly valued Salem-News.com writer, Allison Weir of IfAmericansOnlyKnew.com. The very best thing you can possibly do, is stop what you are doing and watch this riveting, compelling documentary about Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The problems are far from new, and in fact they are as old as Israel itself, which is a diaper laden infant of a country that badly needs to be changed. In the January/February 1998 edition of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Dr. Israel Shahak wrote in the article Israeli Discrimination Against Non-Jews Is Carefully Codified in State of Israel’s Laws:
The legal system of the State of Israel can be described as a weird mixture of advanced democracy and retrogressive discrimination, combined with clumsy attempts to hide the discriminatory reality. For example, in all Israeli laws except one, the Law of Return, the word “Jew” does not appear. The term employed when the law gives discriminatory privileges to Jews is that those privileges are granted to “persons who would have benefited from the Law of Return had they been outside the borders of Israel.” The Law of Return specifies that its benefits can be given only to Jews. However, Israeli propagandists calculate, correctly in my view, that a great majority of the opponents of discrimination would not dare to criticize this law. The second trick, especially beloved by the Meretz Party and other “leftist” hypocrites, is to campaign for and then pass a high-sounding law in favor of equality or human rights. Such laws, however, always contain one little paragraph stating that their provisions will not affect any laws or regulations enacted in the past. The high-sounding preambles of the new laws then can be solemnly quoted without mentioning that since discriminatory laws and rules were passed in the 1950s and early 1960s (by Labor, of course), the new laws cannot change the existing discrimination. When one understands those two tricks, one comprehends that Israeli laws, and even more so government regulations on all possible subjects, are full of discriminatory measures which, if employed against Jews anywhere else in the world, would be regarded as anti-Semitic.
The problems Mazin and so many others are wrestling with today, date all the way back to Israel’s conception, as Dr. Shahak described above. They were wrong and unacceptable in a human sense then, and today this unwarranted apartheid legal system of Israel’s runs totally afoul of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
The bottom line is that people all over the world are watching this treatment of Dr. Qumsiyeh like hawks. All will remain vigilant and I suspect I am far from the only one who will continue to write about this frequently. It all serves as a distraction from the point Professor Qumsiyeh has been trying to make about the very place where he was arrested: Al- Wahala. The reports about this place are numerous and tragic and it seems proper that we list not all, but just some of the stories we have carried about this historic Palestinian town whose people deserve to live in peace, but have no such luck.
Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He previously served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee, Duke and Yale Universities. He served on the board/steering/executive committees of a number of groups including Peace Action Education Fund, the US Campaign to End the Occupation, the Palestinian American Congress, Association for One Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, and BoycottIsraeliGoods.org. He is now president of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and coordinator of the Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements in Beit Sahour. He advised many other groups including Sommerville Divestment Project, Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project, Palestine Freedom Project, Sabeel North America, and National Council of Churches of Christ USA. He is an active member of a number of human rights groups (Amnesty, Peace action, Human Rights Watch, ACLU etc.).
He published several books the most acclaimed of which is “Sharing the Land of Canaan: human rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle” which was also translated to spanish.
He also has an activism book published electronically on his web site (http://qumsiyeh.org). His main interest is media activism and public education. He published over 200 letters to the editor and 100 op-ed pieces and interviewed in TV and radio extensively (local, national and international). Appearances in national media included the Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, CNBC, C-Span, and ABC, among others. He also regularly lectures on issues of human rights and international law. He has a new book out shortly titled “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment” which reviews resistance going back to the beginning of the Zionist project in the 19th century until today.
Tim King is Salem-News.com Editor and WriterHe is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com’s Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines.
Tim holds awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Silver Spoke Award by the National Coalition of Motorcyclists (2011), Excellence in Journalism Award by the Oregon Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs (2010), Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), First-place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Tim has several years of experience in network affiliate news TV stations, having worked as a reporter and photographer at NBC, ABC and FOX stations in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. Tim was a member of the National Press Photographer’s Association for several years and is a current member of the Orange County Press Club.
I teased a friend the other day: Do you feel safer in the new world order? We discussed the fact that there is a “new world order” whereby two states (regimes) in the world feel immune from International law, disregard existing mechanisms including the UN and Interpol, and send agents or machines regularly to other sovereign countries to engage in extrajudicial assassination of those they deem enemies. On most occasions, nearby civilians are killed or the victim turns out to be someone else. There is the argument that these people assassinated are bad guys and should be killed. My friend and I certainly do not have sympathy for Bin Laden and people like him. But violating laws is not the way to go (two wrongs do not make a right).
My friend points out that some two million Iraqis, half of them children, perished by the unjust US/UK led blockade, sanctions, and war. Millions suffered and over 60,000 were murdered by the Israeli policies of land theft, ethnic cleansing, regular massacres of civilians, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are all acts of state terrorism in whole sale as opposed to the retail terror acts of Al-Qaeda. Yet imagine if Afghani commandoes (or Chinese or Irish for that matter) landed in a clandestine way in the US, Britain, or Israel and “took-out” one of the masterminds of such mass terrorism. Come to think of it, the stage is set now for this to happen since the message sent around the world is that “might makes right”. As humans, we have clear choices to make: we either support the notion of “dog-eat-dog world” and put our faith in military might OR we insist that another world is coming and that we can shape it with our hands using popular and nonviolent resistance.
My friend laments a history of our species of oppression, exploitation, destruction, and even mass murder (e.g. the genocide during slavery, during colonization in the Americas, the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). She asks half jokingly why should we expect a dramatic change in our life-span? History does show that, slowly but surely, democracy and peace are spreading around the world. In Latin America an amazing progress transpired from the era of colonialism (including genocide and slavery) to the era of “banana republics” (ruled by ruthless, western-supported dictators) to the hard won democratic revolutions. A similar transformation is occurring in the Arab world. This Arab spring came later and is more painful because such a transformation threatens the implanted Western wedge that is the racist apartheid state of Israel. My friend and I debate whether acting is contingent on being 100% sure of winning! While a more rational reading of history would lead one to be more optimistic, acting on our beliefs and our ideals is not contingent on existing power structures or short-term outcomes but only on how we believe we should live and act. Self-transformation itself is a win!
I ask my friend to imagine activists 10 years before each of these events and what motivated them to act (even as they did not foresee the end): the collapse of the Berlin wall, the freedoms in the countries of Eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of segregation in the South of the US, the woman suffrage, and the end of the US supported Pinochet, Suharto, and Mubarak regimes. In each of those instances and hundreds more, many activists died even before seeing the end of the struggle. In each of these cases, some thought it was a hopeless struggle against incredible odds. But even some activists did not understand how close they were to winning. Some even gave up the struggle a year or two before it triumphed.
Even when it seems most entrenched the status quo will not stay the same. The mighty Persian and Roman empires ended. Who now remembers that in the 19th century, Portugal, Spain, and England had armies and colonies around the world and seemed invincible. Even Hitler’s relatively short-lived third Reich seemed invincible. Human constructs are invariably changeable by new human constructs ESPECIALLY if they are repressive and antagonize too many people. The Israeli and US regimes are thus more susceptible on this front than any other in existence today. Martin Luther King Jr once said of the US: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government..” Israeli historian Benny Morris stated “The Jewish generations of 1948, however, knew the truth and deliberately misrepresented it. They knew there were plenty of mass deportations, massacres and rapes . . . . The soldiers and the officials knew, but they suppressed what they knew and were deliberately disseminating lies.” Ilan Pappe summarized years of his historical research thus: “Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab. We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time..” These ‘original sins’ (as another Israeli historian titled his book) will catch up with this generation.
I tell my friend that the sins of the past come to haunt people whether at the individual level or the national level. Similarly, the good deeds do get repaid sooner or later. I remind her that her good deeds were already rewarded many times over as she herself acknowledged to me. I am sure the many Israelis and US citizens who worked very hard for peace with justice will be vindicated. She states that our biggest troubles are not sustained by those who work against us but the masses who are apathetic. Apathy indeed is the scourge of humanity. Each of us should look themselves in the mirror everyday and honestly think if they have done enough! Here in Palestine, like in other parts of the world there are also those who act and those who are apathetic. The latter may watch TV, may feel pangs of frustration or anger but are not willing to sum up the inner courage (present in all of us) to finally act on their convictions. On our deathbed, will we lament a life wasted or smile at a life of achievement for fellow human beings.
My friend and I are pleased to be alive in this day and age and continue to be very optimistic. We are grateful for the tentative initial steps of reconciliation of the Palestinian house (but must keep pushing) and we are grateful for the failure of Netanyahu to get Europeans to pressure the Palestinian people to keep their divisions. We know Netanyahu will next go to the US but there he will have to pass through demonstrators to get to the Israeli occupied halls of Congress. And the US is already 14 trillion in debt, one third of it caused directly by the Israel-first lobby. But AIPAC is being challenged.(1)
Meanwhile, the struggle here in the last land of apartheid continues. Saturday, our friends Yusuf and Musa AbuMaria were attacked and injured by Israeli forces in a peaceful demonstration in Beit Ummar near Hebron (Yusuf had two breaks in one arm) and we attended two conferences in Hebron the same day. One was the Palestinian Forum for Medical Research first biomedical research symposium (2) where one of my master’s students presented her research results. The second was attended by 300 activists nearly half Israeli and was titled “Joint Struggle for an End to the Occupation and Racism”. The final declaration from this conference is meaningful in showing the change happening on the ground in joint struggle (as opposed to normalization)(3).
Join us 15 May 2011 on the streets as we launch a global intifada (uprising) using popular resistance methods. It will not be the end but the beginning of the end as hundreds of demonstrations and marches are held around the world (including marches to checkpoints) and from nearby countries to the borders of occupied Palestine.
We will say that 63 years of destructions and war is enough and our Nakba must end. Some are calling this the third intifada (4) but it is actually the 14th or 15th and it is likely going to be the last (5). In follow-up you can join us in Palestine this July (see PalestineJN.org) to take a bigger step forward.
In the meantime, as our friend and martyr Vittorio reminded us to always “STAY HUMAN”.
Bin Laden’s assassination and the continued state terrorism practiced by the US government and its allies, especially Israel, attempt to entrench the idea of violence as an answer.
There is a western media frenzy about the reported “taking-out” of Osama Bin Laden (the previous ally turned enemy). Israeli papers reported a high level US security official as saying his instruction was not to capture Bin Laden alive but to liquidate him. But everyone already knew this would be the case, since it would be a messy business if the US soldiers captured such a person alive (he may even spill the beans on his US and Pakistani intelligence links). Most people went about their daily lives of apathy. Even the stock market did not go up as pundits predicted. Soon the dollar will resume its downward spiral.
The US military may feel vindicated and Pakistanis will feel their country’s sovereignty challenged. Some may choose to retaliate with violence giving the Neocons and Neoliberals their excuse to pursue their policies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military-industrial complex needed a new enemy to sustain its massive structure and conveniently the “Islamic terrorism” materialized. Of course there are fanatical Muslims (and Jews and Christians and Hindus) who are willing to kill. Yet, the US did not have to invade Iraq and Afghanistan and create more such fanatics. But a more sober analysis shows that things will change. Bin Laden was killed a while ago not physically perhaps but as an idea! The idea suffered significant blows by the Arab Spring revolutions which showed that it does not take violence to change our societies and remove US/Israeli backed dictators.
Bin Laden’s assassination and the continued state terrorism practiced by the US government and its allies, especially Israel, attempt to entrench the idea of violence as an answer.
The brutal assault on Syrian, Yemeni, Saudi and Bahraini demonstrators and the US continued military attacks in countries around the world are part of this human foolishness. They represent that wing of our global society that believes violence is the answer: the win-lose scenario. The hopeful ideas of popular resistance, freedom, democracy and end to exploitation successfully challenged the notions of “clash of civilization” and “might makes right”.
We thus remain hopeful despite all the false news planted around us and all the false-flag operations, and despite the 1 million Iraqis and 50,000 Afghans killed by these wars.
Here in Palestine, most people went about their lives focusing on how to find the next loaf of bread under Israeli colonial occupation. Hardly a mention was made of Bin Laden. If we take just one village called Izbet Al-Tabib, a tiny village of 247 residents (60% of them children), we see one example of what was on people’s minds. The Israeli decision to take their land was met with building a protest tent on the threatened land and trying to make their story known.
Sandra Quintano, A 60 year-old American Activist
The Israeli military came and attacked the villagers and the international volunteers severely, injuring an elderly American woman and arresting three other internationals (see here).
At night more than 200 soldiers invaded the village terrorizing its population to try and stem the growing popular resistance. Please join the villagers this Thursday for solidarity starting at 1 PM.
Last night, the Israeli army arrested several Palestinians in major cities including Bethlehem (this happens regularly in defiance of the Oslo accords and with knowledge of “Palestinian security” forces). In a few days, there will be events and commemorations surrounding the Nakba day. The Nakba is the Palestinian catastrophe etched into every living Palestinian mind. It is the fact that from January 1948 to the end of 1949, more than 2/3rd of our people who lived in the land that became the (Jewish) state of Israel were ethnically cleansed. 63 years later, nearly 7 million Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced people. This is the largest and most tragic and persistent post world war II atrocity.
Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He previously served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee, Duke and Yale Universities. He served on the board/steering/executive committees of a number of groups including Peace Action Education Fund, the US Campaign to End the Occupation, the Palestinian American Congress, Association for One Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, and BoycottIsraeliGoods.org. He is now president of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People. He advised many other groups including Sommerville Divestment Project, Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project, Palestine Freedom Project, Sabeel North America, and National Council of Churches of Christ USA. He is an active member of a number of human rights groups (Amnesty, Peace action, Human Rights Watch, ACLU etc.). He published several books of which the most acclaimed “Sharing the Land of Canaan: human rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle” which was also translated to spanish. For more about his work go to: http://qumsiyeh.org
The olive and citrus trees were blooming all over Palestine on Prisoners’ day.Pink irises, red puppies, and yellow flowers weave interesting patterns among the endless green carpet underneath the fruiting almonds, fig, and loquet trees.Green almonds are eaten with a pinch of salt and are addictive.There are already some ripening loquots. We harvest new green grape leaves (waraq dawali) to make a most amazing dish. Amid this beauty and abundance of nature, there is also beauty and abundance among those of us humans who are still connected to nature and partially free.But we remember the nearly 7000 political prisoners (see below).
They cannot be forgotten especially since 750,000 of the Palestinians on the outside have been on the inside! We visited with a poor family in Hebron area whose father spend some time in jail. Their immediate concern was that the family donkey has a problem with his leg; the white and fairly large donkey is after all the only source of transport for the children who walk to school 7 km (nnearly 5 miles) each way.A nice veterinarian in Beit Sahour gave us the medicines free and hopefully we can help the family of 8 (6 children ages 5-16) buy a goat which can provide them with milk and cheese.
On Palm Sunday,we visited Jerusalem (even though I do not have a “permit” from the occupiers). This even commemorates the entering of Jesus, the Palestinian who spoke Aramaic (the precurser of Arabic), into Jerusalem; then under foreign occupation knowing that his liberty and his life were at stake.The acts of civil resistance by Jesus continue to inspire Palestinian Muslims and Christians.My colleague and dear friend Lubna Masarwa, an amazing activist, introduced me to an old women who has been selling used cloths on the side of the street and having to run away each time the occupying authorities show up. She is a strong women with big hands, piercing determined eyes, a wrinkled face that tells a thousand stories of suffering but also of persistence and resilience. She has no family here, all her children and grandchildren and other relatives are in the besieged Gaza strip.
We met with the staff and employees of the Al-Quds community action center (see www.cac-alquds.org) and learned of the amazing work they do to help people on the ground.Also on Sunday in Ramallah we met with members of Al-Hiraq Al-Shababi (the youth movement), amazing and inspiring activists who had just done a demonstration in front of the Ofer prison on Prisoners day.We remembered and held vigils for prisoners and for murdered activists (including our heroes Juliano and Vittori). The people I chose to associate with are those flowers of Palestine, full of positive energy, willing to sacrifice, willing to believe that the future can only be better than this reality of colonialism, racism, oppression, incarceration, and murder. One of those is Faris Badr, a 19 year old who was captured when there was a peaceful demonstrations by families and friends of prisoners on prisoner day on Sunday. It was sad to see mothers and brothers and sisters tear-gassed and pushed back and attacked for wanting their loved ones freed. It is sadder yet to see one more youth added to the growing list of political prisoners.
Two years ago, Israeli occupation forces attacked the people of the Gaza strip putting as one of their goals to retrieve the one and only Israeli prisoner held by the Palestinian resistance (tank crewman Gilad Shalit is by definition a war criminal engaged in acts of an occupying army). Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian political prisoners are in Israeli jails, prisons, and concentration camps. Some are guerrilla fighters. Some are elected parliamentarians. Some are women. Some are children. Many have been held without charges and without trial in “administrative detention.” All are prisoners of an unjust colonial power that has no right to hold even one of those comrades in struggle. There is no freedom struggle without a struggle to free those who pay the heavy price of being held by the colonizers.Liberation movements worth their metal understand the significance of emphasis on political prisoners.
We do have some notorious political leaders in Israeli jails. Here are just three of the most recognized names:
-Marwan Barghouti: led the Tanzim activist group under the umbrella of Fatah and member of the Palestinian Legistaltive Council (PLC) (http://www.freebarghouti.org/)-Ameer Makhoul: director of Ittijah network of NGOs inside the Green Line (1948 areas) (http://freeameermakhoul.blogspot.com/))
-Ahmad Saadat: General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine also member of the PLC (http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/))
In Israeli jails is the longest serving political prisoner (Nael Barghouthi, nearly 34 years in jail) who is already in the Guinness book of world records. Recently, a video surfaced on Israeli TV showing prisoners being beaten and shot in a most inhumane way by the criminal military unit named “Masada” (after the mythological story that was weaved by Josephus but that has no historical evidence).Many prisoners died for lack of access to medical care. Relatives of prisoners from Gaza were denied visitation rights for years.For those from the West Bank, visitation is rare, sporadic and associated with many restrictions.
Israeli forces also continue to target political dissidents who happen to be Israeli. Mordechai Vanunu servbed his time for exposing Israel’s nuclear secrets but even though released from jail, he was and continues to be targeted . And Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak is in Israeli prison as punishment for his political activity.
Thus it si fitting for all of us who work for freedom of Palestine whether outside of Palestine or in the large open-air prisons (the concentration areas we live in like Bethlehem and Gaza) to remember all those who are held by the apartheid system in the smaller prisons scattered throughout Palestine. We must demand loudly for their release so that they get to enjoy tehir family and the smell of the lemon blossoms and the feel of the growing olive and grape leaves.
During the siege, time becomes a space
That has hardened in its eternity During the siege, space becomes a time That is late for its yesterday and tomorrow (Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege)
Like Mazin I don’t like the term, Palestinian reconciliation, Mazin is “not big on “reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah” as that implies that they have drifted apart and need to be brought back together.” He thinks it is just fine that they always had differing political ideologies (like in Europe there are parties with differing political ideologies). “
No sir, the drift with Fath, and your likes is about Palestine,
The problem don’t lie only in the confusion and damage done by the Oslo process which created the illussion of a “Two state solution”, after the PLO realized the illusion of the reconciliation, with mass murderers, supremacist, racist zionism in a One-State Solution.
Our problems as Palestinian people stem from wisgfull thinking, denying the truth and drifting away from the original charter and goal of return of refugees, full liberation, to both Oslo, and before and later to sharing the land and the illussion of south Africa solution. Our problem is not with Jews. its with the Jewish racist supremasitic criminal culture, where shalom equals security for the jews.
Israel apartheid week/month in progress The Israel apartheid events* are already being attacked ahead of the events.
We are now writing from Colorado where we had our first US stop and where the local groups arranged a number of appearances for us to launch the apartheid Month. In three days we have public lectures at a church, two universities, a bookstore, interview with two radio stations, informal meetings with community leaders, and a meeting with a congressman. Some anti-Semitic Ashkenazi Zionists have been writing to organizers telling them that we are “anti-Semitic” and sending them the link to the ferociously right-wing and settler supporting and misnamed “Anti-Defamation League” (ADL should be called Arab Defamation League).
The link they send is this that includes a serious of quotes from me http://www.adl.org/israel/qumsiyeh/in_his_own_word.asp (I have no problem with the quotes, only that some of them are truncated and out of context).
March 15 is Palestine’s moment to join the other struggles in Arab countries gfor freedom and people power. All Palestinians and their supporters are encouraged to get down to the streets in all cities and towns wherever they occur. We also demand an end to the West Bank Gaza Split but I personally do not use terms like reconciliation. There are many Palestinian factions on the ground similar to the number of factions that existed in South Africa when it was struggling to end apartheid.
The problem lies in the confusion and damage done by the Oslo process which created a “Palestinian authority” (now 2) without any real authority. It relieved the pressure on the occupiers by administering people and controlling their anger while really making the occupation cost-free to the occupiers. I am not big on “reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah” as that implies that they have drifted apart and need to be brought back together. I think it is just fine that they always had differing political ideologies (like in Europe there are parties with differing political ideologies). Our problems as Palestinian people stem from drifting away from the original charter and goal of our movement (return of refugees, liberation, self-determination) to notions like a state on (part of) the West Bank and Gaza (less tahn 22% of Palestine) or discussing the form of government without reference to letting people decide AFTER liberation and return. In this, there are trends now to reconstitute the Palestinian National Council to represent all 11 million.
Palestinians around the world. There is also a growth in popular resistance towards a new uprising (which I discuss in detail in my new book) which like in 1928 has to contend with both Palestinian security forces and
colonizer/occupier forces. But it has succeeded in the past and will succeed again. Our movement is alive, vibrant, and diversified. It is also being helped now internationally with hundreds of thousands of activists
engaged in media work and in boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS).
Action: Diamonds are Israel’s single most important export commodity, accounting for over 30% of Israel’s exports in 2008. In evidence to the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, Israeli economist Shir Hever stated – “Overall the Israeli diamond industry contributes about $1 billion annually to the Israeli military and security industries … every time somebody buys a diamond that was exported from Israel some of that money ends up in the Israeli military so the financial connection is quite clear”
The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign have been promoting the idea of a boycott of Israeli diamonds for some time.
A new, closed Facebook working group, GPS (Global Palestine Solidarity), has just launched a petition calling for a review of the Kimberley Process definition of a conflict or blood diamond so all diamonds that fund human rights violations are included. Cut & polished diamonds, the sector of the industry which Israel dominates, are excluded from the existing definition of a conflict diamond.
Posted on February 27, 2011 by uprootedpalestinians
No true Palestinian would argue with Electronic Ali saying that “Palestinian Authority has proved not to be a step toward the“legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” but rather a significant obstacle in the way of achieving them.”and saying“This would not be a surrender.”.It is not a surrender, its a victory
But, I am wondering if Electronic Ali’s call for dissoving the PA, includes dissoving Hamas Authority, and wondering if would dare to say, after Mubarak’s moment, “it is time for the” Hamas who, according to electronic Ali “offered no coherent political vision to get Palestinians out of their impasse and its rule in Gaza has increasingly begun to resemble that of its Fatah counterparts in the West Bank.” to have its Mubarak moment and “dissolve itself and ….. announcing that the responsibilities delegated to it by Israel are being handed back to the occupying power, which must fulfill its duties under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.”
Electronic Ali is right PA in Ramallah “is acting in the Israel’s interest”
I would add, as late Mahmod Darwish noticed the PLO signed OSLO to solve the Problem of PLO leader ship. Therefore, Elecrocnic Ali’s call for PA in Ramallah to dissolve itself is an illusion.
Ali’s likes such as Mazin Qumsiyeh and others leading the popular resistance, instead of following the steps of revolutions in Tunis, Egypt, Libya and in other Arab regimes, and demand FULL LIBERATIONthey are calling for reconciliation with the thieves, mass murderers, and genocidal supremacists.
Both Ali, Mazin and their likes are doing their best to hide their “Hamasophobia”, to put popular resistance, as an alternative for armed resistance, to promote the illusion of equal rights in nazi-like Israel, and the illusion of peace with zionism. They forget that the road to Oslo started with PLO calling for a secular state and ended with “Palestinian Papers”
Both listened to the truth Gilad Atzmon (my Hebrew speaking brother) in Stuttgart who dared to cross the Jewish, Marxists activist’s red lines, and both seen their friends demanding removal of Gilad from the protocol.
“I was obviously sad about it — I believed that those who advocated the ‘One State solution’ should be able to support intellectual pluralism — But it turns out that a few of those who promote democracy in Palestine would be better advised to first confront their own Stalinist tendencies.”Gilad wrote.
Thanks to Evelyn Hecht-Galinski who firmly announced that if Gilad “was to be removed from the protocol,”for telling the truth about both Jewish and Israeli culture, then she also wanted to be removed”.
Later “Arbeiterfotografie, (the group who documented the conference) transcribed Gilad’s talk and considered it“most convincing and humane”.They thought that it should be ‘disseminated widely’
“I guess that truth cannot be suppressed anymore — not even in Germany. If Israel defines itself as a Jewish State, then surely, it is our duty to question what Jewishness is all about. I believe that solidarity with Palestine becomes a more meaningful event once we are brave enough to stand for the truth. Rather than fit ourselves into any given consensus or discourse, our duty is to present an alternative reality, whilst aiming at ethics and beauty. For Justice to prevail, truth must be told.”
Yes, truth bits, but must be told. The Truth on the “disagreement between Fatah and Hamas” and between PLO and Hamas has been the illusion of peace with Zionism.
New elections will not give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas the credibility he needs, writer says [Reuters]
The slow collapse of Palestinian collective leadership institutions in recent years has reached a crisis amid the ongoing Arab revolutions, the revelations in the Palestine Papers, and the absence of any credible peace process.
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) controlled by Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction has attempted to respond to this crisis by calling elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and the PA presidency.
Abbas hopes that elections could restore legitimacy to his leadership. Hamas has rejected such elections in the absence of a reconciliation agreement ending the division that resulted from Fatah’s refusal (along with Israel and the PA’s western sponsors, especially the United States) to accept the result of the last election in 2006, which Hamas decisively won.
But even if such an election were held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it does not resolve the crisis of collective leadership faced by the entire Palestinian people, some ten million distributed between those living in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, inside Israel, and the worldwide diaspora.
A house divided
There are numerous reasons to oppose new PA elections, even if Hamas and Fatah were to sort out their differences. The experience since 2006 demonstrates that democracy, governance and normal politics are impossible under Israel’s brutal military occupation.
The Palestinian body politic was divided not into two broad political streams offering competing visions, as in other electoral democracies, but one stream that is aligned with, supported by and dependent on the occupation and its foreign sponsors, and another that remains committed, at least nominally, to resistance. These are contradictions that cannot be resolved through elections.
The Ramallah PA under Abbas today functions as an arm of the Israeli occupation, while Hamas, its cadres jailed, tortured and repressed in the West Bank by Israel and Abbas’ forces, is besieged in Gaza where it tries to govern. Meanwhile, Hamas has offered no coherent political vision to get Palestinians out of their impasse and its rule in Gaza has increasingly begun to resemble that of its Fatah counterparts in the West Bank.
The PA was created by agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel under the Oslo Accords. The September 13, 1993 “Declaration of Principles” signed by the parties states that:
“The aim of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations within the current Middle East peace process is, among other things, to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority, the elected Council (the “Council”), for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.”
Under the agreement, PA elections would “constitute a significant interim preparatory step toward the realization of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements”.
Small mandate
Thus, the PA was only ever intended to be temporary, transitional, and its mandate limited to a mere fraction of the Palestinian people, those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accords specifically limited the PA’s powers to functions delegated to it by Israel under the agreement.
Therefore, elections for the PLC will not resolve the issue of representation, for the Palestinian people as a whole. Most would not have a vote. As in previous elections, Israel would likely intervene, particularly in East Jerusalem to attempt to prevent even some Palestinians under occupation from voting.
Given all these conditions, a newly elected PLC would only serve to further entrench divisions among Palestinians while also creating the illusion that Palestinian self-governance exists — and can thrive — under Israeli occupation.
A decade and a half after its creation, the Palestinian Authority has proved not to be a step toward the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” but rather a significant obstacle in the way of achieving them.
The PA offers no genuine self-government or protection for Palestinians under occupation, who continue to be victimized, killed, maimed and besieged by Israel with impunity while Israel confiscates and colonizes their land.
The PA never was and cannot be a stand-in for real collective leadership for the Palestinian people as a whole, and PA elections are not a substitute for self-determination.
Dissolving the PA
With the complete collapse of the “peace process” — the final push given by the Palestine Papers — it is time for the PA to have its Mubarak moment. When the Egyptian tyrant finally left office on February 11, he handed power over to the armed forces.
This would not be a surrender. Rather, it would be a recognition of reality and an act of resistance on the part of Palestinians who would collectively refuse to continue to assist the occupier in occupying them. By removing the fig leaf of “self-governance” masking and protecting from scrutiny Israel’s colonial and military tyranny, the end of the PA would expose Israeli apartheid for all the world to see.
The same message would also go to the European Union and the United States who have been directly subsidizing Israel’s occupation and colonization through the ruse of “aid” to the Palestinians and training for security forces that act as Israeli proxies. If the European Union wishes to continue funding Israel’s occupation, it ought to have the integrity to do it openly and not use Palestinians or the peace process as a front.
Dissolving the PA may cause some hardship and uncertainty for the tens of thousands of Palestinians and their dependents, who rely on salaries paid by the European Union via the PA. But the Palestinian people as a whole — the millions who have been victimised and marginalised by Oslo — would stand to benefit much more.
Handing the PA’s delegated powers back to the occupier would free Palestinians to focus on reconstituting their collective body politic and implementing strategies to really liberate themselves from Israeli colonial rule.
New leadership
What can a real collective Palestinian leadership look like? Undoubtedly this is a tough challenge. Many older Palestinians recall fondly the heyday of the PLO. The PLO still exists, of course, but its organs have long since lost any legitimacy or representative function. They are now mere rubber stamps in the hands of Abbas and his narrow circle.
Could the PLO be reconstituted as a truly representative body by, say, electing a new Palestine National Council (PNC) — the PLO’s “parliament in exile”? Although the PNC was supposed to be elected by the Palestinian people, in reality that has never happened — in part due to the practical difficulty of actually holding elections across the Palestinian diaspora. Members were always appointed through negotiations among the various political factions and the PNC included seats for independents and representatives from student, women’s and other organizations affiliated with the PLO.
One of the key points of disagreement between Fatah and Hamas has been reform of the PLO in which Hamas would become a member and receive a proportional number of seats on the organization’s various governing bodies. But even if this happened, it would not be the same as having Palestinians choose their representatives directly.
Yet if Arab countries which host large Palestinian refugee populations undergo democratic transformations, new possibilities for Palestinian politics will open up.
In recent years, “out of country voting” facilities were provided for large Iraqi and Afghan refugee and exile populations for elections sponsored by the powers occupying those countries. In theory, it would be possible to hold elections for all Palestinians, perhaps under UN auspices — including the huge Palestinian diaspora in the Americas and Europe.
The trouble is that any such elections would probably need to rely on the goodwill and cooperation of an “international community” (the US and its allies), which has been implacably opposed to allowing Palestinians to choose their own leaders.
Would the energy and expense of running a transnational Palestinian bureaucracy be worth it? Would these new bodies be vulnerable to the sorts of subversion, cooptation, and corruption that turned the original PLO from a national liberation movement into its current sad status where it has been hijacked by a collaborationist clique?
I do not have definitive answers to these questions, but they strike me as the ones Palestinians ought now to be debating.
Inspirational boycott
In light of the Arab revolutions that were leaderless, another intriguing possibility is that at this stage Palestinians should not worry about creating representative bodies.
Instead, they should focus on powerful, decentralized resistance, particularly boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) internationally, and the popular struggle within historic Palestine.
The BDS movement does have a collective leadership in the form of the Boycott National Committee (BNC). However, this is not a leadership that issues orders and instructions Palestinians or solidarity organisations around the world. Rather, it sets an agenda reflecting a broad Palestinian consensus, and campaigns for others to work according to this agenda, largely through moral suasion.
The agenda encompasses the needs and rights of all Palestinians: ending the occupation and colonisation of all Arab territories occupied in 1967; ending all forms of discrimination against Palestinian citizens in Israel; and respecting, promoting and implementing the rights of Palestinian refugees.
The BDS campaign is powerful and growing because it is decentralized and those around the world working for the boycott of Israel — following the precedent of apartheid South Africa — are doing so independently. There is no central body for Israel and its allies to sabotage and attack.
This might be the model to follow: let us continue to build up our strength through campaigning, civil resistance and activism. Two months ago, few could have imagined that the decades old regimes of Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak would fall — but fall they did under the weight of massive, broad-based popular protests. Indeed, such movements hold much greater promise to end Israel’s apartheid regime and produce a genuine, representative and democratic Palestinian leadership than the kinds of cumbersome institutions created by the Oslo Accords. The end of the peace process is only the beginning.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, a policy advisor with the Palestinian Policy Network, and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s
Posted on January 28, 2011 by uprootedpalestinians
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Ignoring the hype about the Palestine papers is hard. I spent a lot of time reading through page after page of the documents showing minutes of meetings and other exchanges regarding the Palestinian-Israeli “negotiations” (the quotes are warranted). The Guardian newspaper summed up the back and forth arguments about these papers as follows:
” PA and PLO leaders such as Saeb Erekat can be expected to point out that one of the core principles of the negotiations is that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’. As such they are not necessarily committed to provisional positions that in the event failed to secure a settlement – though Erekat made clear to US officials in January 2010 that the same offers remained on the table. Critics are likely to argue that concessions – such as accepting the annexation of Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem – are simply pocketed by the Israeli side, and risk being treated as a starting point in any future talks.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/story-behind-leaked-palestine-papers
For me two things come out clearly from these painful documents (some of them have parallel data in the US embassy cables on Wikileaks). First it is not that the Palestinian officials are traitors but merely (and this is bad enough) mistakenly and passionately going through motions hoping against all odds that by talking and compromising more they could achieve a tiny fraction of what we are entitled to. The second observation is that Israel will not sign a peace deal regardless of how low and ridiculous the concessions on the Palestinian side: hunt down resisters (abandoning the internationally recognized rights of resistance to occupation even unarmed one), give up on most settlements built illegally on Palestinian lands, allow Israel sovereignty over nearly 1/3rd of the occupied old city of Jerusalem, give up on the refugee rights, allow Israel to keep looting natural resources in the West Bank, give Israel the right to control our airspace, and even assure a statelet devoid of sovereignty. Not even tourism income would be allowed in this emasculated state. Some critics asked: if, as the documents show, the Palestinian negotiators were willing to accept all of this then WHY did Israeli politicians hold out?
The answer is obvious to anyone who ever faced Zionism. They believe (rightly or wrongly) they can get 100% so why should they settle for 91% or even 99% especially when the ceiling of the Palestinian requests kept dropping in the past 22 years (since they accepted in 1988 to let Israel keep most of the looted parts of Palestine 1948). Today, Israel’s three main sources of income are dependent on a continued conflict and occupation: the 6.5 billion military and security exports, the 6 billion US and other western direct aid, and 3 billion from the captive markets in the West Bank and Gaza. All three would be threatened with end of conflict even if Israel gets to keep most of its stolen loot. Israeli officials are keen to keep negotiations going to avoid an anti-Apartheid scenario and for PR and normalization to keep pumping more money and more settlers into the remaining small shriveling Palestine because it is economically profitable.
The recorded meetings show no real interest or even emotion or any sense of urgency on the part of the Israelis or their American benefactors. Saeb Erekat comes out basically pleading and begging sometimes and other times using the presence of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to try and convince these officials. Jim Jones, David, Hale, and (Israeli lobbyist Dennis Ross), Tzipi Livni, Mofaz etc. all just repeat utter few selective words and simply drag their feet to keep the “process going”. What would be the nature of the conversations if there was no Hamas to wave as the boogeyman to US officials and claim success in containing Hamas and other “extremist movements” (In Egypt Hosni Mubarak uses the same notion of containing Islamic Jihad but for the sinister goal of justifying his dictatorship)? US officials are very confident of their strength and the Israeli strengths and the fact that they only need the Palestinians to prevent any attempts at international isolation of Israel. This they get just by innuendo or hintsof threats on the Palestinians authority. They studied the situation carefully and think that Abbas and company have no other options but to simply keep negotiating and compromising even if it takes another 20 years.
In some very rare instances the negotiators seem to connect with their humanity and actually feel sorry for the fate of these Palestinian negotiators. But then you could sense how they curb their own feelings (as irrelevant) and go back to the scripted positions of their governments which are simply antagonistic to anything that is not 100% in support of Zionism. Erekat’s occasional threats of a one state seem vacuous and not serious. My book on Sharing the Land of Canaan showed with lots of data that “two state for two people” approach can never lead to genuine peace (if apartheid was the problem in South Africa, why is it considered a solu tion here?).
I have a suggestion for the Palestinian authority: try to deal with the issues and do release your own documents instead of trying to shoot the messenger. Take lemons to make lemonade. Help introduce an even stronger resolution at the UN security council (e.g. in support of the Goldstone report or to recognize a Palestinian state along the borders of 1967) or a resolution at the UN General Assembly that calls for expelling Israel from the UN since it has never honored its commitments when it was admitted in 1949. Maybe announce publicly that the Oslo Process was a mistake or at least is now dead (now every idiot knows it was and most of those who are getting salaries from the authority know in their hearts that it was contrary to basic human rights and to basic international law). This suggestion essentially is to show courage and backbone. It could also mean the difference: making mistakes is human, continuing the path as in the past only validates those who accuse the authority figures of treason. Abbas says he will surprise us in September but I believe he and those around him do not have that kind of time.
I, like Edward Said and millions of Palestinians, disagreed strongly with the choices made by this Oslo group to built the Palestinian autonomous administration (of the Palestinian people warehouses or concentration camps) that relieved Israel from the burdens of managing us and from International isolation based on not even promises of freedom or return of rights. But I also can’t help but feel sorry for those who took that path. It must be very painful for a human being to go down a tunnel where there is no possibility of a light at the end and during this trip into the depths of darkness feel the leaches crawling up his back sucking his blood and voices from behind calling him back (some of them his political enemies, others ex-comrades in Fatah). Palestinian negotiators are fearful of going back because they think it might give political opponents a PR tool. They are just fearful of losing face; I am always grateful to a wise advisor who 30 years ago convinced me to drop this fear of admitting mistakes (a fear common especially among men). They may also be fearful of losing a job. The Palestinian people are very angry though many feel afraid to speak out for fear to lose their sources of income, fear that the alternative to Fatah maybe just as bad, fear of Israel, fear of the US or just simply fear of their own power. But ultimately fear is a lack of self-confidence to take another course. And their fear should be balanced by the fact that people are literally dying for justice and wanting leaders to care about them and not about themselves.
[Here we must remember the thousands of martyrs who gave their lives and hundreds of thousands who were injured or lost homes and livelihood and still yearn for freedom].
The status quo is to many humans a comfort in the known/predictable. Taking another path is feared because humans fear the unknown. I believe that fear is the most destructive and paralyzing human emotion. Common people around the world are just beginning to break the barrier of fear and speak up more for themselves. From Tunisia to Egypt to Lebanon, the walls of fear are cracking. We common people and even some leaders must realize that many of these walls are far weaker than we may think. I can actually hear them cracking.
The Arab world is in revolt. The fire is spreading. Responsible people need to step forward with courage and conviction. There could be surprises along those lines even from Central Committee members of Fatah. Already Nabil Shaath took a position different than Mahmoud Abbas. This is just the beginning. Palestine will survive. The Palestinian people are not sheep.
They are mature enough to take the truth and to rebuild our national liberation movement. History marches on and I am 100% sure that Zionism will fail and Palestine will be free.
——————– Palestinian Students take over Palestine London offices demanding representation of all Palestinians. I think their call for representation based on the Prisoner’s documents and the Cairo Declaration) should be taken-up by all Palestinians of conscience. See ;http://ploembassysitin.tumblr.com/ and http://ploembassysitin.tumblr.com/
A Call to the People and Governments of the Free World from the Egyptian National Coalition: We call upon all of you to support the Egyptian people’s demands for a good life, liberty and an end of despotism. We call upon you to urge this dictatorial regime to stop its bloodshed of the Egyptian people, exercised throughout Egyptian cities.. We believe that the material and moral support offered to the Egyptian regime, by the American government and European governments, has helped to suppress the Egyptian people. We hereby call upon the people of the free world to support the Egyptian people’s non-violent revolution against corruption and tyranny. We also call upon civil society organizations in America, Europe and the whole world to express their solidarity with Egypt, through holding public demonstrations, particularly on People’s Anger Day (28/01/2011), and by denouncing the use of violence against the people. We hope that you will all support our demands for freedom, justice and peaceful change.
The Guardian Newspaper: Palestinian distrust of Iran revealed in leaked papers. Mahmoud Abbas asked businessman to donate $50m to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents, according to the documents
Media Matters M.J. Rosenberg stated about the Papers: “The bottom line is that, despite the assurances the Palestinian Authority gave to the Palestinian people that it was driving a hard bargain with the Israelis, the Palestinian Authority accepted Israel’s position on every key point: borders, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees. On no major issue did the PA hold the line. None. The Palestinians offered Israel everything Israel wants and Israel still said “no” with the backing of the United States.”
It is interesting to see such analysis as from former top CIA official Robert Grenier:
But even though career diplomats are voicing interesting opinions and diversions from official policy, the Obama administration still shows the notion of just drawing on AIPAC associated fossilized brains. (see Why Obama’s “new thinking” initiative on Middle East peace is doomed to fail – By Lawrence Davidson
Palestinian intellectuals and activists articulated why this is the end of the charade of the peace process industry Karma Nabulsi gives a pointed analysis
Posted on January 21, 2011 by uprootedpalestinians
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Five Items in this week’s digest:
1)Wikileaks reveals US, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian “cooperation” during Israel’s war crimes in Gaza (and in the case of the US pre-knowledge of the humanitarian crisis that would develop before the attack even commenced). PA officials clearly did not want any demonstrations where confrontation with Israeli soldiers occur (something that is natural in civil popular resistance)
2) The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) reiterates its firm opposition to any bilateral or multilateral relationships between Palestinian and Israeli academics
3) Videos of reality of colonial apartheid in Palestine including must-see videos about our activities over Christmas (Come join us next time) and the destruction of a whole village by the Israeli occupation authorities
4) The farce of Israeli “investigations” into their own actions. Shooting someone 13 times while he is sleeping in his bed (initially called mistaken identity and now called, “he made what appeared to be a threatening move”. This happens daily here and Israeli soldiers feel impunity for murder.
5) Two articles in Foreign Policy this week one that looks favorably at the Palestinian authority actions and one that looks at it as a creation of a police state. My own view falls somewhere in the middle.. ———————–
1)Significant wikileaks documents shed light on cooperation before and during the war on Gaza by the US, Egypt, Palestinian Authority and the Israeli apartheid system. Before the attack, one message from Ambassador Cunningham evaluated that there will likely be both an Israeli attack and a humanitarian situation developing and then concludes that this should be dealt with as follows:
“We strongly recommend that the Department consider now the U.S. response to the above-mentioned range of Israeli military operations, including press guidance, talking points and even Security Council action, bearing in mind that we are likely to have little to no advance warning and that even a relatively restrained operation could rapidly grow into something much bigger. Our recommendation is that the USG start with putting the blame on Hamas for the illegitimacy of its rule in Gaza, its policy of firing or allowing other factions to fire rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian targets, and its decision to end the “tahdiya” calming period; and support for Israel’s right to defend itself, while also emphasizing our concern for the welfare of innocent Palestinian civilians and U.S. readiness to provide emergency humanitarian relief. On this last point, USAID points out that large-scale U.S. and international humanitarian assistance will be urgently needed in Gaza if the IDF ends up carrying out a broad-scale military operation. ”
During the attack, the US Embassy reported “PA commanders said they told IDF officers that President Abbas and PM Fayyad both directed them to avoid situations that could develop into confrontations with the IDF. The security chiefs said Abbas and Fayyad passed a message to all Palestinian factions, at a PLO Executive Committee meeting on December 29, that only peaceful marches away from flashpoints would be permitted. PA commanders noted they have no control on over B/C areas such as Qalandiya and Nil’in, and would need IDF approval to move PA forces to those areas to prevent clashes between protesters and the IDF.
PA commanders said both sides agreed that Hebron is a problem, and cooperation on a case-by-case basis is critical. PA commanders said their IDF counterparts agreed to expedite coordination and movement requests and exchange information on possible disturbances, as both sides have an interest in preventing West Bank violence. They said both sides also agreed not to leak substantive discussions about the meeting to the press, given the sensitivity of security coordination in a time of Palestinian outrage over events in Gaza.” Wikileaks Cables on Israel’s Gaza Onslaught
2) Statement of Position: The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) wishes to reiterate its firm opposition to any bilateral or multilateral relationships between Palestinian and Israeli academic institutions. ..
3) Videos of reality of colonial apartheid in Palestine Must-see video about our activities over Christmas (Come join us next time)
In south Hebron Hills in the occupied West Bank, a child tries to stop soldiers from kidnapping his father (who is accused of tapping into water pipes that steal Palestinian water to serve settlers and soldiers)
Destruction of the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib (it was destroyed 9 times) by the apartheid state that intends on ethnic cleansing (maximum geography with minimum demography)
4) The farce of Israeli “investigations” into their own actions. Shooting someone 13 times whiel he is sleeping in his bed (initially called mistaken identity and now called, “he made what appeared to be a threatening move”. This happens daily here and Israeli soldiers feel impunity for murder.
5) Two articles in Foreign Policy this week one that looks favorably at the Palestinian authority actions and one that looks at it as a creation of a police state. (I tend to fall in the middle).
After I finished my last book on popular resistance in Palestine over the past 130 years, I became 100% sure that political Zionism will fail and that Palestinian refugees will return to their homes and lands. My certainty is based on the lessons of history in Palestine and lessons from similar struggles like South Africa, Vietnam, and Algeria. Some of the peculiarities that will be critical for our success are:
– The incredible and inspiring history of the local popular resistance: The subtitle of my book is “A history of hope and empowerment”. Over 200 forms of popular resistance are practiced including a wide spectrum of what we call in Arabic Sumud. Resistance is the main thing that stood in the way of the Zionist project. Five and a half million Palestinians still live in the dreamed of “Eretz Yisrael”.
– The logarithmic growth of the boycotts, divestments and sanctions movement. In five years alone (2005-2010), we achieved more than what we were able to achieve in BDS movements in South Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s.
-The unrest in in Algeria and Tunisia tell us that the era of backward selfish undemocratic Arab leadership will (and must) come to an end. There are tremendous intellectual resources in the Arab world that can then be unleashed to build a vibrant society (at levels of culture, economics, scientific, etc.)
– Despite the heavily censored/controlled mainstream media, people of good conscience were and are able to get the truth out and many of the myths of Zionism were demolished. The internet only accelerated this.
-The publication of the civil society call to action in 2005 and the Palestine Kairos document in 2009 has given tremendous push to activism around the world including in mainstream churches.
– The growth of International solidarity was unparalleled in history. Despite the attempts by the Israeli authorities to stop this international support by many methods (including refusing entry to many activists), the movement only grows stronger. We went from few hundreds to tens of thousands and from one ship to seven; and as many as 60 ships are coming to break the siege on Gaza later this year.
– We are very proud and persistent people. The thriving art and culture scene in Palestine and among Palestinian community in exile are a testament to this spirit of a people who seek life and refuse to be dehumanized. We do not and will not resort to the tactics of those who chose to be our enemies. From Dabka to good food to other cultural traditions, Palestine remained not only physically in our surroundings but deep in our hearts. We developed the most educated populace in the region.
In Palestine, these and many other reasons increase our certainty in the inevitability of a successful end to our decades of repression, colonization and occupation. We faced, almost alone, the best-organized, best-financed, most western-supported colonial enterprise in history. Rational human beings see that the spread of fundamentalism is only fostered when Israel is made an exception and is funded and protected while it flouts human rights and International law. Zionists act to control and manipulate and we must continue to calmly resist and refuse to be enslaved. We tell our stories with dignity and we explain why this racist/tribalistic system is harmful to all of humanity. We do it without hatred to any person but with anger and hatred at the inhuman actions of a deluded few who think they can get away with war crimes and crimes against humanity forever. People around the world increasingly see the reality and join our struggle. I talk and show reality in Bethlehem area to groups of visitors almost every day in Palestine. I get invitations to speak abroad frequently but I chose to limit such trips abroad because there is so much to do at home.
We speak to diverse groups sometimes to the consternation of puritans on all sides. I spoke for example at colleges and schools in the US where the majority of students and faculty were Jewish (e.g. Brandeis, Manhattenville), I spoke at NATO defense college, at conservative Churches, at synagogues and Jewish community centers, at editorial board meetings of influential papers largely owned by Zionists, and we even spoke at a US Naval Academy. In the West Bank I spoke to visitors ranging from Church leaders, to US congressmen, to British Parliamentarians, to the US consular officers, and even to Israeli academics. Some people especially on the left balk at these events and some even openly criticized us for these kinds of engagements. But if we are willing to speak to Israeli soldiers telling them how they are committing war crimes by obeying orders and we manage to occasionally (though rarely) touch a cord in the heart of our direct oppressors, why can’t we talk to all other human beings regardless of their background. It is counterproductive to imagine the worst in humanity; misjudge the trends in history; and insist that we can only talk to those we agree with or go with the flow. This is a losing attitude that relegates many on the left to holding signs at street corners without creatively thinking how do we get power. It also relegates those in power to complacency and corruption and mistrust of people. Many develop their diagnostic language (the corporate media is controlled, the Zionist lobby is too strong, the politics cannot change, power structures are what they are etc.) but are not willing to seriously take action to make this world a better place.
In this year, we will be seven billion human beings on this earth. The distortions in many countries (including Italy and Israel/Palestine) of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer cannot and will not continue. Fear of change is what paralyzes many people. As others have pointed out, our biggest fear is not that we will fail but that for many human beings, the biggest fear is that we can be more successful than our wildest dreams. I believe indeed it is fear of success that keeps most people complacent. After all, for many if they really go seriously after their dreams (personal or collective) and succeed then it will show that the years they spent worrying and being afraid have indeed been only because of their lack of courage to change themselves.
Neurobiologists tell us that we humans only use a tiny fraction of our brain (we are told that geniuses use 1-2%). In the 1950s civil rights movement in the US, a common saying was “free your mind and your ass will follow”. I think positive change always comes after people changed attitude in life to a positive direction. This is not only possible but it is imperative and inevitable. The more people realize this, the quicker we will get there. And we should all be working on the nature of the society to follow our inevitable win: one based on human rights and the rule of law not of military might and repression.
Posted on December 9, 2010 by uprootedpalestinians
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In this week’s email:
1) Follow-up on Stuttgart conference and
2) the final dropping of all veils and dissolution of the last empires
Videos from the One State Conference in Stuttgart, November 26-28, 2010 available at website: https://www.publicsolidarity.de
From the number of hits, we can see that there is a big interest in the speeches and discussions so far and we hope there will be much more. It looks like the conference could be a turning point for the promotion of the BDS-campaign in Germany. For this reason the local organizers launched an extra homepage for the German BDS-campaign: http://www.bds-kampagne.de/
Individual videos for some of the talks are also posted:
The extent of the Arab governments’ conspiracies against their own people and sub-serviance to the US and Israeli governments was known to most people. But the documents released from Wikileaks simply confirm and extend this knowledge.
For example, we now know how a Mr. Marwan Hamadeh, Lebanese official ran around to the US, France, Saudi, Jordanian and other officials to mobilize against Hizbollah’s fiberoptic network in Lebanon.
The first people he informed about this network were Hanna (Foad) Seniora (now discredited who was then prime minister, Walid Jumblatt, and the Maronite Patriarch, clearly factional interests.
And we learn that Elias El-Murr, Lebanon’s “defense” minister informed US officials that the Lebanese army would not interfere if Israel invaded Lebanon as long as the Israeli army does not attack Christian villages.
We also learn of Egyptian foreign minister mirroring his boss Hosni Mubarak to refuse to talk about human rights and freeing of political prisoners and instead kept emphasizing dangers of Hamas and their possible connections to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and to Iran. The way the governments work revealed via these cables proves what Barbara Tuchman had to say
“Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian’s statement about Phillip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence ” (The March of Folly. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1984).
In short the released cables while theoretically showing a fear of Iran and Islamic spread in the Middle East will only discredit Arab leaders and encourage people to start to look for alternatives to what is now a clear axis of evil: the US government, Israel, and the reactionary dictatorial arab leaders serving those.
To be blunt, we had better possibilities in the 1960s and early 1970s to standing up to hegemonic US/Israeli designs of subjugating and dividing the Arab world than we do today. Today we face(with few exceptions) a solid block across the board of collaborative Arab regimes (known before but now clearly exposed via wikileaks with more to come) and a mostly apathetic Arab public including many Palestinians. What are alternative organizing centers for the period to come of dissolution of dictatorships and empires and the bankruptcy of racist ideologies of chosenness?
There are few possibilities:
1) Leftist secular traditional parties (PFLP, DFLP, PPP, Baathists, Nasserites etc). Each of these factions/parties is small on its own. They have lost much support after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Here I am not talking about financial or direct other support (it was relatively small and came to only few of these groups). I am talking about the general decline of the left around the world that ensued with the “perceived win” of the capitalist west. It was a strong PR campaign from many quarters that enhanced this perception (wrong as it is) that the decline of the soviet union meant that the unfettered free market system is the only game in town. I do not want here to enter into an analysis of this phenomenon. Others have done a far better job at it including candid and self-critical analysis by those belonging to those various (left) parties, factions, and liberation movement. But my point is that even with their reduced cadres due to this and other challenges (e.g. the dependence of some of them on financing through the Palestinian Authority dominated but emasculated PLO), they remain collectively a potent force for the future. When they did join forces (e.g. in selected local elections), this power can be manifested.
2) Islamic forces: Again I do not presume to try and analyze the power of these factions or their diversity let alone their potential to develop in positive directions that effect real change in their societies. But I think everyone agrees that such groups are indeed gaining adherents and carry a significant weight in the streets and that they will play a role in the future.
3) Decent individuals within Palestinian elites (governing bodies and business people) and even elites in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and other Arab countries. Of those I would give more possibilities for growth and providing decent alternatives to the status quo among Palestinians Lebanese (and perhaps Jordanians and Egyptians). Some may decide that even their own long term financial and societal positions are served better by challenging the status quo.
4) Independents: people with a conscience but who do not belong to political factions and are not associated with governments. Many of those are intellectuals who might finally move to activism as happened in the past (in Palestine and elsewhere).
These issues are increasingly being discussed by individuals within those sections of society. I believe it is possible to organize those (or most of them) into a coherent positive force that challenges the roads of wars, racism, colonization, and occupation. But my own humble opinion is: A) Do not discount the likelihood of the dissolution of the Israeli/US empire on its own ala the Roman and Soviet empire out of their own arrogance, hubris, and disastrous policies (the signs are all around us from the $3 trillion dollar war on Iraq, to the attacks on the freedom flotilla, to the bitter arguments in Israeli society about the reliance of this 4th strongest state in the world on foreign aid to put out a few fires, literal and otherwise etc).
B) Do not discount people (Palestinians, other Arabs, internationals etc). History teaches us that when we discount what people are able to do, we are almost always wrong.
Think of the perception of the French and after them he US government of what the Vietnamese peasants could do in the few years ust before their liberation.
Think of South Africa in the early 1980s.
Algeria in the 1940s and 1950s. India in the 1920s and 30s.
Think of the US outh in the 1940s.
Even here in Palestine, just think of the dismissal and pinions of pundits about the end of Palestine offered in 1928 (before the 929 uprising), 1935 (before the 1936 uprising), 1955, 1970, 1981, 1986, and 999.
That even the US administration has stood unable to effect even the minor change in Israeli colonial settler activities is just one indication that we are reaching a dead end in the old ways and the new ways and new actors must step forward. Things will change as power shifts to the people. Around the world, many are now realizing what is happening and few are leading the way of change.
Posted on December 4, 2010 by uprootedpalestinians
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WildfiresThe news about the tragic “wildfires” in Northern Palestine is a reminder of several facts:
Ethnically cleansed document.write(formatNumber(daysBetween(date2000)+18797) );22,787 days ago
1) the areas was forested by non-indigenous conifers after uprooting indigenous trees and destroying the terraced landscape and ethnically cleansing over 50 villages from the area that is now supposedly “forested”. Ecologically very destructive behavior done for political purposes to wipe out the ancient landscape and make the area Jewish European. Few people remained from one village but rebuilt a new village nearby and are prevented from going back to their own village which is now an Israeli “artist colony”
2) Over the past few decades Israel acquired hundreds of the most advanced fighter aircrafts with no aircraft to fight wild-fires.
3) Most countries ask and receive help from their neighbors and most countries have sympathy of the world community. Apartheid Israel by contrast is despised by most people and the only support comes from governments in the west (under Zionist pressure) or those dictators in the Arab world who believe (erroneously) that they must depend on Western support to stay in power. Such an artificial situation cannot last.
4) Even amidst this tragedy, the racist and most right wing government of Israel refuses to admit any culpability for its failure to protect its citizens and wants to merely advance Zionism (hence the bizarre statement of Netanyahu that the tragedy will bring Turkey and Israel together!).WikileaksThe whole world is talking about the Wikileaks leaking of previously classified US documents. NowI personally am skeptical about the selective leaking of documentsthat show only a tiny whiff of scandal for Israel.
Most US foreign policy communication with world leaders and diplomats has been about protecting Israeli war crimes and strengthening Israeli positions. This is known to be true of both public communication and secret communications (e.g. already declassified material from the Truman era). So I would be excused to be skeptical when 300,000 documents are released and only few of them deal with Israel. Much of them deal with how various actors (especially western leaning Arab dictators) dutifully tell their masters in Washington (themselves beholden to the Israel-first lobbyists) that Iran is indeed the new Nazi Germany or the new Soviet Union. There are really two possibilities here
1) That these “leaks” are a form of psy-ops engineered (selected) to benefit Israel’s plan of confronting Iran. See for example:
That they are psy-ops that are calculated by the US and Israeli governments to do a small amount of exposure of sensitive material but a lot of confusion among public opinions in the world (in Europe and Arab countries) to change the focus from the disastrously failing policies in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. (I saw such analysis in Arab media but little of it in Western progressive media).
Here is another analysis by Jonathan Cook: Wikileaks and the New Global Order “At work here is a set of global forces that the US, in its hubris, believed it could tame and dominate in its own cynical interests. By the early 1990s that arrogance manifested itself in the claim of the “end of history”: the world’s problems were about to be solved by US-sponsored corporate capitalism. The new Wikileaks disclosures will help to dent those assumptions. If a small group of activists can embarrass the most powerful nation on earth, the world’s finite resources and its laws of nature promise a much harsher lesson.”
I disagree with many aspects of Fisk’s analysis below but it is witty and worth reading. Now We Know. America Really Doesn’t Care about Injustice in the Middle East. By Robert Fisk
Political fires are raging and spin doctors in governments are trying hard to contain the fires and change the subject but the real solution for most of our problems remain obvious to most people: free Palestine — end apartheid.(Get out of Palestine)Come visit us in Palestine this Christmas season.
The new NATO Strategy was adopted last week at a meeting in Portugal by heads of state of the 28-member NATO alliance while outside over 10,000marchers shouted “no to war, no to NATO”. Internally, I heard that career officers of NATO were not happy either. I am a citizen of the USA as well asPalestinian who lives under occupation. The US, the only remaining superpower (although declining rapidly) played the key role in forming theNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and still largely shapes its policies.
Thus, as a US citizen, I am entitled to question the document andexamine it in detail. But as a human being we should all care what politicians plan for our ailing planet.
The document states innocuously in the beginning that “NATO member states form a unique community of values, committed to the principles of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law” [1].
Many citizens of NATO countries wondered where were these lofty ideals of individual liberties, human rights, and democracy in the past 10 years. Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, secret CIA torture camps around the world, kidnapping, extrajudicial executions and more were practiced by our countries.
All the data are now available for anyone to confirm these. If these were aberrations and mistakes, why has no high officials (Bush, Blair, others) paid for them? And why the strategy paper does not state that member countries are committed to these liberal principles both inside and outside their borders?
Why do many NATO countries fund and support dictators (for example in Egypt) if they are sincere about democracy?
The new strategy affirms that “the Alliance is firmly committed to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and to the Washington Treaty, which affirms the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.”
So how come NATO member countries have not pushed for implementation of any of the passed 35 UN Security council resolutions that deal with Israel?
And how come they allowed one member state of NATO to veto dozens of other security council resolutions that attempt to secure international peace?
Israel regularly violates the UN charter and even its own commitments when it was allowed into the UN (e.g. to accept UN resolutions including the right of return to Palestinian refugees). So if NATO is committed to this charter why not ask the US (the chief sponsor of the rogue state of Israel) to insist that Israel complies with International law? But then again, the US was forced by Israel’s lobby to invade Iraq, an act clearly in violation of the charter of the UN [2].
The new strategic concept paper adopted states that “NATO will actively employ an appropriate mix of those political and military tools to help manage developing crises that have the potential to affect Alliance security, before they escalate into conflicts; to stop ongoing conflicts where they affect Alliance security; and to help consolidate stability in post-conflict situations where that contributes to Euro-Atlantic security.” I kept thinking of one word not mentioned anywhere in the document but clearly in the minds of those drafting it: Afghanistan. Any rational reading of the role of NATO in Afghanistan would have to conclude that it decreased not increased stability. The war on this impoverished country was ill-advised from the beginning. The rulers of Afghanistan had simply demanded from the US proof that Osama Bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks. The US refused to put-out any evidence and chose to occupy the country.
Here we are, nearly 10 years later and Osama Bin Laden is supposedly now in Pakistan (itself destabilized by the NATO actions) and the Taliban insurgency is stronger than ever.
Some 2/3rd of Afghanistan is actually now under the rule of the resurgent Taliban. The puppet government of Karzai in Kabul is corrupt and is maintained only by Western support and by bribes to corrupt war lords. Heroin trade, nearly decimated by 2001 under the Taliban rule, is now flourishing.
NATO forces regularly use unmanned aircraft to bomb civilians and hatred of all Western countries increased round the Middle East. Now copy-cat “Al-Qaeda” cells are sprouting like mushrooms in places like Somalia, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and sub-Saharan Africa.
An average citizen like me asks the question: is this the employing of “an appropriate mix of those political and military tools to help manage developing crises” or is it what creates crisis?Then the strategy paper gets even more bizarre by noting that “Terrorism poses a direct threat to the security of the citizens of NATO countries, and to international stability and prosperity more broadly.” It is bizarre because it does not bother to define what “terrorism” is.One can only deduce that terrorism is left to those with big sticks to define. State terrorism seems excluded. Freedom fighters or even non-violent resisters to occupation and colonization can be labeled as terrorists. International law that guarantees rights of resistance can be dismissed.
NATO leaders add that “Extremist groups continue to spread to, and in, areas of strategic importance to the Alliance, and modern technology increases the threat and potential impact of terrorist attacks, in particular if terrorists were to acquire nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological capabilities.” But the paper does not explain WHY “extremist groups continue to spread.
There are really only two scenarios, the one promoted by the Zionist media around the West (that Islam is the cause) and the one academic researchers and strategists showed that it had to do with western policies (pressured by the Zionists themselves).
If Islam is the cause of extremism spreading, then NATO should explain why now (not 400 years ago) and what they plan to do about it other than follow the script prepared for them in Tel Aviv. Later in the document it states NATO will work to “enhance the capacity to detect and defend against international terrorism, including through enhanced analysis of the threat, more consultations with our partners, and the development of appropriate military capabilities, including to help train local forces to fight terrorism themselves.”
But this is what NATO has been doing for 10 years and it does not seem to be working. Is it not time to dig a little deeper in the analysis for example by examining the role of the Western implanted state of Israel and the World Zionist Organization in fostering hatred and anger in the Arab and Islamic world and in false-flag operations that are then blamed in Muslims?
Then we see these even more vague assertions: “Instability or conflict beyond NATO borders can directly threaten Alliance security, including by fostering extremism, terrorism, and trans-national illegal activities such as trafficking in arms, narcotics and people” and “Crises and conflicts beyond NATO’s borders can pose a direct threat to the security of Alliance territory and populations. NATO will therefore engage, where possible and when necessary, to prevent crises, manage crises, stabilize post-conflict situations and support reconstruction.”
Indeed, but why does NATO chose to get involved in Afghanistan and its key members (US, Britain etc) choose to get involved in Iraq?
Why not get involved in Israel?
Will NATO strategists objectively examine these interventions to decide what could have happened if alternative strategies were pursued?
Will they objectively examine why most people see the hypocrisy of causing the death of over 1 million civilians in Iraq for alleged violations of a couple of UN Security Council resolutions while giving billions to Israel (a habitual violator of International law)?
Need anyone comment on this next pearl of wisdom from NATO other than to say “show me how, where, and when”: “The best way to manage conflicts is to prevent them from happening. NATO will continually monitor and analyse the international environment to anticipate crises and, where appropriate, take active steps to prevent them from becoming larger conflicts.” But wait, they maybe giving us a hint: “Where conflict prevention proves unsuccessful, NATO will be prepared and capable to manage ongoing hostilities.
NATO has unique conflict management capacities, including the unparalleled capability to deploy and sustain robust military forces in the field. NATO-led operations have demonstrated the indispensable contribution the Alliance can make to international conflict management efforts.” If all you have is a hammer, surely everything looks like a nail.
Is NATO thinking of intervening in Iran and Venezuela instead of Israel and Columbia?
How many areas in the world will NATO be willing to send troops to?
And if NATO keeps misdiagnosing the etiology of the problems they are facing (minor symptoms of a more systemic disease), then how can they design effective therapies or even give people a hope of a reasonably decent prognosis?
More ominous statements are included in the new strategy that is revealing: “All countries are increasingly reliant on the vital communication, transport and transit routes on which international trade, energy security and prosperity depend. They require greater international efforts to ensure their resilience against attack or disruption. Some NATO countries will become more dependent on foreign energy suppliers and in some cases, on foreign energy supply and distribution networks for their energy needs. As a larger share of world consumption is transported across the globe, energy supplies are increasingly exposed to disruption.”
One wonders what does this mean. Who will determine “threats” to “supplies”? Where is the mention here of free trade and supply and demand?
Will these NATO countries dependent on getting natural resources from other countries be entitled to NATO defense to ensure their supply is not disrupted if sellers get better offers from other buyers?
The NATO document vagueness gets rather scary:
“Deterrence, based on an appropriate mix of nuclear and conventional capabilities, remains a core element of our overall strategy. The circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated are extremely remote. As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance.” and NATO will work to “sustain the necessary levels of defense spending, so that our armed forces are sufficiently resourced”.
Madness is indeed continuing on a path that produced more destabilization, doubled the number of countries with nuclear weapons since 1950, and increased global insecurity.
With the economies in Europe and North America struggling, one wonders what is going on in the heads of these politicians as they promise to keep pumping more resources into the bloated military budgets. Even seasoned NATO officers (many retired) are questioning this logic. The US spends half its discretionary budget on its military, a military that already has enough weapons to obliterate life on earth many times over.
The Nonproliferation Treaty that all these countries signed stated that they would work to reduce and then completely eliminate nuclear weapons. Yet, they proliferate them to their client states (Israel, then India and Pakistan as examples). And what does it mean that “as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance”? How will they cease to exist if those with the biggest stockpiles write such bizarre statements? The document also claims that the alliance will work to foil “cyber attacks”. But will this include such cyber attacks as clearly carried out by US and Israeli intelligence agents against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities (facilities regularly inspected by the IAEA and certified annually to be in compliance with international treaties)? And what message is sent to any country (friendly or not-so-friendly to the US and Israel if the rules of the game do not apply to powerful countries and the rules are discarded to punish smaller countries on the whim of the powerful?
Other issues seemed positive but again vague: -“increased cooperation with UN”: Does this mean NATO member states like the US will now obey the UN charter and stop invading and undermining sovereignty of other countries -” fully strengthen the strategic partnership with the EU, in the spirit of full mutual openness, transparency, complementarity and respect for the autonomy and institutional integrity of both organisations”: The EU has human rights and other treaties central to its operations but NATO does not do that. What is the way to reconcile the differences?
The document ends by reiterating that “Our Alliance thrives as a source of hope because it is based on common values of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and because our common essential and enduring purpose is to safeguard the freedom and security of its members.These values and objectives are universal and perpetual, and we are determined to defend them through unity, solidarity, strength and resolve.”
And what about the most egregious violations of these principles by the fifth strongest army in the world (an army with a state called Israel)? Where is the insistence on individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law?
Why is a key NATO country giving this rogue nation 20 of the most advanced jet aircraft? [3].
As a colonial apartheid regime, the Israeli violations of all these principles indeed foster instability that affects NATO member state security at every conceivable level.
Further, the presence of strong Zionist lobbies in NATO key members has pushed these states (e.g. Britain and the US) to engage in elective and costly wars (e.g. on Iraq) that undermined global security. And most significantly, where is the honesty about how the misplaced priority of NATO governments makes the rich richer and the poor poorer in these countries? Where is the discussion of people’s rights to economic security?
Isn’t the job of government to ensure people have a future worth living or is the job of governments to secure corporations and wealthy aristocrats in their endless greed that is already destroying our planet? Isn’t global warming a more important threat to our survival than some manufactured threat from a bearded man in Afghanistan (or is it Pakistan or is it Langley base)?
I ask these questions since I am a US citizen (a NATO country). What of non-NATO countries?
I am also a Palestinian citizen and thus can equally criticize the Palestinian government which like many non-NATO countries is intimidated into silence about issues that affect the welfare of people around the world.
Our representatives (whose tenure had ended but still remain in office without elections) are not even allowing a discussion of options going forward [4]. But the more I look into machinations of politicians in this new world order, the more convinced I am of my life long persistence in trying to effect change at the grass-root level.
Cu Chi Tunnels consist of a network of more than 200 km of underground tunnels used by resistance fighters during the U.S./Vietnam War.
After all, that is how real change happens in society not because of political leaders but in spite of them (see women’s rights, civil rights, worker’s rights, environmental regulations, ending the war on Vietnam – Mr. Mazen, Are you sure??, It is mainly the blood of Freedom fighters that ended the war- that ending apartheid South Africa etc).
Thus I felt friendship to those 10,000 people on the streets in Lisbon and I felt sorry for those politicians with the body guards and the shiny suits shaking hands in well guarded buildings.
History will show indeed that we, the people, hold the answers.
Posted on November 11, 2010 by uprootedpalestinians
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“Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment” was just published and is available in Europe and by mail from the publisher Web page for the book is available at the author’s website.
The book can be pre-ordered in the US from McMillan Books and retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble and is available in Australia through Palgrave McMillan. It is also available soon in the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem. Soon available in Arabic (looking for publisher, version ready) and other languages.
The author Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh will be speaking in Stuttgart, Germany at this conference http://senderfreiespalaestina.de/konferenz/index.html November 26-28 and will be in Italy January 4-14 (some slots for additional invitations in Italy are still open). A book tour is being planned for February and March in the US and Europe.
The book summarizes and analyzes the rich 130-year history of popular resistance in Palestine discussing the challenges and opportunities faced in different historical periods. The aim is to put before the reader the most concise, yet most comprehensive and accurate treatment, of a subject that has captured the imagination and interests of the global community. Looking at the successes, failures, missed opportunities and challenges in this period allows people to chart a better direction for the future.
“This is a timely and remarkable book written by the most important chronicler of contemporary popular resistance in Palestine. Mazin Qumsiyeh brilliantly evokes the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Edward Said, Rachel Corrie and many others, to tell the unvarnished truth about Palestine and Zionist settler colonialism. With its focus on ‘history and activism from below’, this is a work of enormous significance. Developing further his original ideas on human rights in Palestine, media activism, public policies and popular, non-violent resistance, Mazin Qumsiyeh’s book is a must read for anyone interested in justice and how to produce the necessary breakthrough in the Israel-Palestine conflict” Prof. Nur Masalha, author of ‘The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem’
“Qumsiyeh’s inspiring accounts of both the everyday and the most extraordinary acts of Palestinian indigenous resistance to colonialism expose the misguided claims that Palestinians have never tried nonviolence; in fact, they are among the experts, whose courage, creativity, and resilience are an inspiration to people of conscience everywhere. Even with the arms of a military superpower, the Israeli government’s failure to quell the Palestinians’ spirit and insistence on human rights reminds us that the greatest strength of all belongs to those with justice on their side, who will ultimately triumph.” Anna Baltzer, author of ‘Witness in Palestine’
“Mazin Qumsiyeh’s insider’s chronicle of Palestinian civil resistance and its quest for self-reliance, independence, political rights, and self-liberation clearly shows that collective nonviolent action by Palestinians has been neither episodic nor an aberration, but remarkably consistent and for nearly a century. His sweeping account belongs on the bookshelves of Israelis who are fearful, Palestinians who are unsure of next steps, and a global community that has yet to take a meaningful stand for peace with justice. Anyone concerned about the future for all the peoples of the Middle East will take encouragement from his invigorating analysis.”
Mary Elizabeth King, Professor of peace and conflict studies and author of ‘A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance’
“Mazin Qumsiyeh’s book is enlightening and powerful. It reveals the human suffering and destruction of Palestinian people and land, which are the appalling consequences of Israel’s ethnic, nationalist, military, project that has displaced the indigenous Palestinian population and committed crimes of genocide and apartheid. In spite of such injustice, we can all take hope and inspiration from Mazin’s stories of the lives of the courageous Palestinian people who make the real, often unrecorded, history.
Their peaceful spirit and persevering struggle for human rights and international law, has been, and continues to be, carried out (in the main) by popular nonviolent resistance. Their method of active NV resistance deserve to be known more widely by the International community who need to see such examples, so they too can reject violence, militarism, and war, and build their security and freedom on Human rights and International Law.” Mairead Maguire, Nobel Prize Winner River toSeaUprooted Palestinian
We didn’t sail today, because the cargo ship which was on its way from Greece to collect us, our vehicles and aid was delayed by bad weather. Instead we received a list of 17 names from the Egyptian…
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Added on 18/10/2010
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Olive harvest opportunities
Sunday Staring at 9:30 from the orthodox club in Beit Jala (Sunday also at my back -yard in Beit Sahour :-))
(all societies include some bigots and racists but only in Israel do they get state funding and official support and laws to advance racism) Safed Rabbis urge Jews to refrain from renting apartments to Arabs
To understand some of the background, I recommend these books: Jesus in the Talmud by Peter Schafer, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years by Israel Shahak, The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand. Ofcourse one could have criticim of other religions (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) especiallty when they are used to justify wars and conquests instead of being about personal relationship between humans and their God (crusades foe example). That is why I am convinced that any society that aspires to be modern and avoid conflict should start by insisting on separating state from religion.
Our Man in Palestine: “This cooperation (between Israeli and Palestinian security forces) has reached unprecedented levels under the quiet direction of a three-star US Army General, Keith Dayton, who has been commanding a little-publicized American mission to build up Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/14/our-man-palestine
Al Nakba, documentary (200 min) -produced by Al Jazeera- was first broadcasted in Arabic on the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian catastrophe. It was translated into English in 2009 and then into four different languages: French, German, Spanish and Italian. Al Nakba won the prize for the best long documentary about Palestine in Al Jazeera Fifth International Film Festival (Doha/Qatar) and the audience award in Amal Ninth Euro-Arab Film Festival (Santiago/Spain). It participated in other film festivals in Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=30A8F80C4E383847
A new Israeli colonial outpost appeared near the colonies of Nokdim, Tekoa and Kfar El-David in the past few weeks. The new outpost consists of several caravans and semi-permanent structures in a valley to the east of the El-David colonial settlement. It sits on land belonging to people from Jib Atheib, Zaatara, and Dawahra. We toured the site October 1, 2010 with locals Hassan Breijiya and Mubarak Zawahra and two international observers from EAPPI. This video summarizes the situation in the area.
‘Early detection saves lives’. Patient’s Friends Society – Jerusalem announces major cancer awareness event. Location: Bethlehem University (in co-operation with the College of Nursing and Health Sciences). Saturday 9th October from 10:00 – 15:00 see http://www.pfsjerusalem.org/ and become a friend at our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/pages/Patients-Friends-Society-Jerusalem
Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in Beit Fajjar near Bethlehem. This comes after a series of such attacks in which settler’s promised to respond to the government move to curb settlements or on any international support for Palestinian rights by a policy of exacting “price tags”.
Donate to UNRWA (UNRWA is facing an 80 million deficit this year). You can donate tax deductible in the US via friends of UNRWA. http://unrwa.blackbarn.net/about-us
Posted on September 15, 2010 by uprootedpalestinians
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Mazin Qumsiyeh,
Seven million of the 11 million Palestinians are refugees or displaced people. Israeli war criminals and US officials complicit in ethnic cleansing meet in fancy hotels to claim they are “negotiating” for peace (while in the meantime giving green light to further ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestinian lives to strengthen the apartheid system….
Israeli colonial officers destroy the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib in the Negev for the fifth time (the village existed in this location before Israel was created in 1948)
Must Read: Where has the hypocrisy gone? Amira Hass in Haaretz No one thinks to ask about the consensus among the residents of Palestinian cities and villages on whose land the settlements have been built. The millions of Palestinians don’t count at all. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/where-has-the-hypocrisy-gone-1. 313887
But popular resistance is growing and more people are getting involved. There is widening gap between government officials and the people around the world on this issue. Millions of activists are being mobilized for the boycotts, divestments and sanctions movement and as the negotiations lead nowhere, the apartheid system is being exposed more. It will happen just as suddenly and unexpectedly as the fall of apartheid in South Africa. Your involvement can help.
B R E C H T F O R U M and COMMITTEE FOR OPEN DISCUSSION OF ZIONISM
Present Resolving the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict: Why One Democratic State Is the Best Solution featured speakers: Joel Kovel& Norton Mezvinsky
Wednesday, October 27 – 7:30 p.m. at the Brecht Forum, 51 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets, New York, NY 10014 – Phone: (212) 242-4201 Email: brechtforum@brechtforum.org
Join Professors Joel Kovel and Norton Mezvinsky as each presents his respective argument for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kovel will argue that a two-state solution cannot solve the conflict, because it continues the Jewish ethno-chauvinism that lies at the core of Zionism. Mezvinsky will propose that a democratic and just two-state solution is highly unlikely to occur and that the presently constructed one state can and must be changed by an emphasis upon and implementation of fair and equal human rights for all inhabitants of the state.
Discussion to follow. Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15 Free for Brecht Forum Subscribers
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD A Bedouin in Cyberspace, a villager at home http://www.qumsiyeh.org Professor, Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities Chairman of the Board, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People, http://www.pcr.ps
Posted on September 13, 2010 by uprootedpalestinians
>Mazin Qumsiyeh
I met the family of Mohammed by accident as I offered them a ride back to their home in Dheisheh refugee camp from Gush Etzion colonial offices where they were seeking (unsuccessfully) a permit to enter Jerusalem for medical treatments (and I was called for questioning). What I learned about this family is almost unbelievable and could certainly be material for a book or at least a documentary.
The father was 12 years old when Israeli soldiers shot him in the head with a rubber coated steel bullet fragmenting his skull and damaging part of his brain. Ten years later, Israeli army officers severely beat and tortured him. He got married to his cousin immediately after. The family originally comes from Al-Walaja village, the village was destroyed and ethnically cleansed in 1948. Most of this village land came under Israeli rule. The part that came under Jordanian rule was used to build a new Al-Walaja where some of the relatives returned and built homes in the early 1960s. After having their first child, the young couple received a blessing in the form of a donation of a very small plot of land from their uncle and they built a humble one room house (literally one room) in Al-Walaja. Both had jobs.
They moved out of the refugee camp and lived in this house for 3 years during which time, they delivered their second child who then died at 18 days of age (by SIDS.) Then the Israeli army demolished the home saying that it was built without permit (Israel gave no permits for any houses in the village since the occupation began in 1967.) The family rebuilt the house but Israeli threats forced them to not live in it (Israel wants also some NIS 20,000 for the cost of destroying the home and wants to levy other fines on the family.) So the young family came to live in a small dwelling underground and without windows (bought with money from selling the wife’s wedding jewelry) in the refugee camp of Dheisheh. There, the third child (second who is alive) was born and they named him Mohammed. He turned out to have Bardet-Biedl Syndrome (a genetic disease characterized by obesity, eye problems, kidney problems, hexadactyly or six fingers and toes, developmental delay etc.) An uncle and an aunt of Mohammed (refugees in Jordan) died before age 20 with this condition (we took blood samples from the family for genetics study at Bethlehem University.)
The first snow in years came and the roof of their dwelling collapsed. The husband had developed a psychiatric disorder and was treated at a local hospital. Both he and his wife were unable to hold jobs anymore. They had one more son (healthy) and she is now pregnant. Thankfully, UNRWA rehabilitated the home in the refugee camp, and the home in Al-Walaja remains unoccupied and unfinished (and no water or electricity). The family is loving, hopeful and steadfast (we call it sumud in Arabic). We spent a few hours during Eid Al-Fitr together and visited the home in Al-Walaja. I personally witnessed how the family cares for each other. Their eldest son Khaled (in 5th grade) is simply brilliant and very loving for his two younger brothers.
This is one of millions of Palestinian stories of tragedy and persistence after ethnic cleansing and under colonial occupation.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD A Bedouin in Cyberspace, a villager at home http://www.qumsiyeh.org Professor, Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities Chairman of the Board, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People, http://www.pcr.ps
Mazin Qumsiyeh 
Uprooted Palestinian
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
