From Mazin Qumsiyeh's Journal--

Dear friends:

My wife and I are now in Italy to give a few talks and maybe get a break
from the jail of Bethlehem under apartheid.    Every time I visit Europe or
other countries I wonder why can't we get to live a normal life in a normal
country in Palestine.  Israelis pretend they live in a normal country.
Having removed most of the natives and confined the rest to ghettos and
bantustans, the Israeli public by and large goes around pretending that
everything is normal; that Israel is like any European country.  It has a
parliament albeit it spends time deciding who is a Jew entitled to automatic
citizenship and how to strip non-Jews of citizenship), a military, a high
tech industry, universities, bars, fancy restaurants, elites and poor
people, religious and secular etc. But deep down Israelis know that this is
all a mirage and an illusion.  Afterall, here in Europe, there are no walls,
no checkpoints, and no two systems of laws for people living in the same
country.  As I was leaving the occupied areas through the only crossing
allowed to us (into Jordan via King Hussain Bridge), a man on the bus
commented as we reached the fifth checkpoint that the reason Israelis are so
paranoid with all this security is because they know the country is not
theirs.

Ofcourse many Zionist Israelis were brainwashed to think that the reason
they are paranoid is because the world is anti-Semitic; they hate us for
being Jews not for anything we have been doing to them.  The victimhood
pathology started rather early with the myth of the exodus from Egypt
(archeologists and historians have long shown that this notion of
enslavement in Egypt and redemption is simply not consistent with the facts
or the historical record).  People who believed in certain ways indeed were
persecuted for their beliefs/who they are but this is not unique for a
particular group of people.  Christians were historically persecuted (they
were literally hunted down and fed to lions for the first 300 years) and
Muslims and Armenians, and Gypsies and all others.

Perhaps no people on earth have suffered as much as Natives in North and
South America.  Estimates of 50-100 million people perished in the 100 years
after the European invasion.  What we are being told at schools in the West
(under great pressure from Zionist lobby groups) is that Jewish suffering is
somehow different than suffering by others (as if we are children of a
lesser God or that God does have a chosen ppeople). While each atrocity in
the world is unique, it is simply not valid to engage in comparative
martyrology let alone determine a priori who has suffered historically the
most. Just because someone is Jewish (or Christian or Muslim) today does not
mean that they are related to those Jews (or Muslims or Christians) who
lived in the Arab world hundreds of years ago let alone have a continuity
obligating them to get revenge for the atrocities from people who had
nothing to do with it. It is simply not right or decent (or sustainable) to
use injustice done hundreds of years ago to justfy doing an injustice to
someone else TODAY.

Today 11 million Palestinians live in the most deplorable coonditions.  7
million are refugees or displaced people, the rest live in isolated ghettos,
impoversished and marginalized.  Israeli authorities come up with scheme
after scheme to continue this process of marginalizing and hurting us.
Using their leverge with great powers, they get puppet regimes in Egypt and
elsewhere in the Arab world to do their bidding.  Egyptian government's lame
attempts to justify sealing off 1.5 million people in Gaza (70% of them
refugees) from the outside world simply does not hold water. More and more
people see the injustice.  Yet Israeli defenders and their puppets still
cling to self-delusions.  Histrory will not be kind to them.  But history
will not be kind to Arabs also nor to other people who go about their daily
life ignoring glaring injustice. Even in dictatorioal regimes, governments
do not get away with what they do unless they are able to get the consent
and acquiescence of the people.  People can believe the lies and the
distortions or not believe them and still acquiesce because they have little
self confidence.

People have more power than their governments want them to have and (more
importantly) want them to believe they have. Effecting change first of all
requires education.  The first is education to let people know that their
governments lie to them all the time.  Thus, when the Israeli government
tells its people that building walls and oppressing others is for their
security, this should be exposed as lies.  When the Jordanian government
uses the slogan "Jordan First" or the Egyptian government uses the slogan
"Egypt above all" that these are lies. Egypt security and sovereignity for
example is not threatened by the starving Gazans but by the enslavement of
its rulers to outside agendas (and two billion in conditional US aid that
goes to support the elites). People are first and people of this part of the
world would all prosper if all these governments step aside and let people
connect to other people.  Direct rail links and direct travel without
restrictions without borders would be good for people, for their economy and
for their prosperity. Narrow nationalism (especially the fake varieties of
it like ethnocentric chauvenistic nationalism exemplified by Zionism) is not
good for anyone. Does it make sence that I can travel between France,
Germany, Spain and Italy without visas or checkpoints while traveling even
with one and among several middle Eastern Countries is like traveling in
Apartheid South Africa while being black? This when the total population of
the five countries in the Eastern Mediterranean region does not add up to
half the population of Italy or even the population of one city in China.
Ironiaclly, all these "countries" were created and supported by Europeans
(who are now abandoning nationalism).

Anyway, those of us who like Arundhati Roy believe "not only is another
world possible, on a quiet day I can hear her breathing", those of us who
believe in people not governments, will contnue to work to welcome this new
world. BTW, If you are in Italy, email us so that we can get together while
we are here (through the 12th).

Action as always is required and is the antidote of despair.  Boycotts,
divestments and sanctioons as well as reaching out with education to others.

Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
A bedouin a cyberspace, a villager at home (and whose tent now is pitched in
Rome)
http://qumsiyeh.org