Part of the comments I made at a conference in
Warsaw, Poland on Arab Revolts. Speakers
included people from Lebanon, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Russia,
France, US and more http://www.geremek.pl/index.php?id=408&lang=en
It is very meaningful for me to be in Poland
for the first time. In 1989, you had the peak of your inspiring uprising in
Poland. We in Palestine also had an inspiring uprising that peaked in that period. Unlike your uprising, we did not succeed
then. We have had a total of 15
uprisings in the past 130 years. Gaza had several uprisings each reminiscent of
the Warsaw uprising. In Gaza 1.5 million
people, most of them refugees are forced to live on a small desert regions, now
one of the most densely populated areas on earth. In fact, we draw inspiration
from each other.
There is a joke about a reporter in Jerusalem
visiting the wailing wall and noticing an old Jewish man praying so he
interviewed him. What do you pray for at
the wall? I pray for world peace! How
long have you been praying for world peace at the wall? 27 years! And how does
it feel to be praying for 27 years at the wall for world peace? How do you
think if feels..it feels like praying to a freaking wall!!!
I said yesterday I am optimistic about the
future in our part of the world. I
actually wrote a book called sharing the land of Canaan looking to a shared
future, one democratic state for all its people in our homeland. I was talking to Dr. Geremek yesterday over
dinner and we both share medical background which makes us optimistic
always. For knowing the diagnosis is
important but giving therapy and giving patients some information on prognosis
is equally important.
Yet, we live in an age of universal deceit
where proper diagnosis is obfuscated by propaganda. This is the age in which truth telling, as
one author said, becomes a revolutionary act.
Words seem to be switched on us in this Orwellian era. Two speakers
yesterday tried to use verbal acrobatics to justify the unjustifiable while proclaiming
that French and US governments are trying to promote human rights in the middle
east. One thing that brings to mind is the Orientalism discussed by my late
friend Edward Said. Western governments have been engaged in destructive
partnership with the most repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Israel. Just
imagine what would have been the reaction if the roles were reversed. What if Arabs and Muslims who were living in
their golden age joined party with the repressive kingdoms of Europe during the
Middle Ages! The best thing European and American governments can do is stop
being partners in crime with those who repress us and leave us alone. We would surely develop much faster. Certainly faster than what even we
expect. Surely the Berlin Wall tumpled
faster tahn we expected. Certainly Soviet
collapse also happened faster than we expected and also the end of apartheid in
South Africa.
We have to remember that France, England and
Russia joined forces to divide the Middle East in the Sykes-Picot
agreement. It was France that issued the
Jules Cambon declaration in 1917 just before England issued the Balfour declaration
in support of the racist Zionist idea which was to give our country to the
Zionist movement. And it is the US and
the Soviet Union that almost simultaneously recognized the theft of Palestine
to create a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world. America, far from
being a promoter of human rights used nuclear bombs on civilians and used Napalm
and Agent Orange in Vietnam. They then
played their chess game at our expense. People do not forget things like the
CIA’s toppling of the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 to
install the brutal Shah!
Martin Luther King who opposed American
imperialism and exceptionalism gave his last speech in 1968 stating:
God
didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call
America to engage in a senseless, unjust war ….. We have committed more war
crimes almost than any nation in the world.
King went on to talk about peace and economic
justice saying:
What I'm
saying to you this morning is that communism forgets that life is individual.
Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found
neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a
higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of
both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to
see that the problems of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the
problem of war are all tied together.
Israel provides the most blatant case of
double standards and the achille’s heel of empire that tries to cover its
nakedness by empty talk about human rights, democracy, and international law
while everywhere the same people mouthing those directly support war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and the antithesis of democracy.
The largest remaining post-WWII refugee crisis
is the Palestinian refugees. We have 7
million refugees or displaced people coming from 530 ethnically cleansed
villages and towns. Israel still refuses
to allow us to return to our homes and lands.
Why does the West tolerate this and continue to support Israel
Israel has over 50 laws that make it an
apartheid racist state that discriminates against non-Jews. And even though both US law and European law
says that countries that persistently violate human rights should not be
supported, yet Europe follows US policy of blind obedience to the short-sighted
Israel lobby. One wonders why every neighboring country to Syria except Israel
each received at least half a million Syrian refugees? There is so much that is not being discussed
in discussing the Arab revolts including the negative role that global and
regional powers play. We have to remember who pushed for US war on Iraq and who
is now pushing for the US war on Syria and Iran.
I am optimistic because I travel a lot (just
in the past few months to Jordan and its Syrian refugee camps, to Egypt,
Turkey, India, South Africa, and Japan) and see a growth of the same kind of
global movement that helped end apartheid in South Africa trying to end Israeli
apartheid. I am optimistic because wars no longer achieve their intended goals
of promotion of imperialism and racism.
Good examples of this in the past 10 years are the US war on Iraq and
Israel’s war on Lebanon and Gaza. I am
optimistic despite the stupidity of both the Hamas leaders in Gaza and the
Fatah leaders in Ramallah; both focused on their narrow personal interests than
they are the interest of millions of Palestinians.
So I have the same dream as Martin Luther King.
Getting past the European 19th century ideas of ethnocentric nation states
towards a a socjety in which citizens share and live in equality and with
respect to human rights. A society in
which war is a thing of the past, where justice rolls like a mighty stream,
where each person is valued regardless of his/her skin color or religion. This
is the dream of our world and it is a dream that is worth for us to sacrifice
and struggle for.
