Truths
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 14 Sep 2020
Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance – TRANSCEND Media Service
11 Sep 2020 – George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” So let us all tell the truth:
-The Western governments have never really cared about human rights or democracy. They propped dictators, toppled democratically elected governments (like in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1970), and engagedin policies that killed many millions of innocent people. They support murdering genocidal pyromaniacs like the rulers of the “UAE” and “Saudi Arabia” and ”Israel”. They label as terrorists any genuine resistance movements (in fact how vicious the attacks from racists are on a country or a people tells us precisely how honorable those being attacked are!).
-Palestine is just a physical base for Zionism to conquer the Arab world and much beyond. The Zionists actually speak openly of how we will be their servants and they our masters. All the data is there for people to study and investigate. And as time went by, they made it impossible to criticize Zionism or Israel and even increasingly “illegal” to do so. Again, it is an assault on free speech and democracy in countries such as Germany, France and the UK that claims the mantle of human rights.
-Colonial-Native struggles end in one of three scenarios: a) Algerian model (nearly 2 million killed, 1 million colonizers and their descendents left the country), b) genocide of natives (USA, Australia), c) coexistence in one country of descendents of colonizers and of native people (the rest of the world >140 countries). There is no fourth scenario. Palestine will not be an exception. It is the last struggle and prolonged only because of the resourcefulness and wealth of Zionists and the weakness of their adversaries with collusion of corrupt dictators. But Zionists and all those collusionists’ regimes need to decide on which of the three outcomes they want. Prolonging it is not helpful to them. The number of Palestinains today is 13 million (12 times what we were in 1917 when the Balfour and Cambon declarations were made in support of Zionism). Impoverished natives reproduce more than economically empowered minorities and the world will eventually democratize or die.
-Those who engaged in exploitation and destruction in the past century (Belgium in the Congo, British in Afriua and Asia, US in Cambodia and Vietnam etc.) largely got away with it because the world was fragmented. Now, the world is far too crowded and us far too connected such taht military might no longer can be used effectively to dictate things without repercussions. Hence the last attempts at this were failures (US in Iraq, Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, US client states attack on Syria and Yemen). This gives hope.
-Whether the PLO leadership of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas signed the Oslo accords out of ignorance or knowing its criminality, staying with it for three decades knowing how much of a charade it was and doing so to keep their positions is indeed criminal behavior. And for the remainder of Palestinain body politics, acquiescence is collusion. Why none of these so-called leaders is willing to admit that this horrific delusion of apartheid couched as “peace process” was a second catastrophe/nakba at par with 1948/1949 nakba.
-The so-called Arab league since Jamal AbdelNasser died in 1970 (perhaps assassinated) serves as a tool for US/Israeli of oppression and imperialism. The gulf monarchies in particular used to tremble at the speeches of AbdelNasser. Now they even get away with murdering and dismembering an opposition journalist in their own embassy in Turkey. They get away with committing genocide in Yemen and occupying it to give Israel bases in the Island of Socotra. They get away with funding Israeli apartheid and destruction of their own religious heritage. They impoverish their people, and are happy to give hundreds of billions of dollars to enrich coffers of imperialists and Zionists as long as those allow them to keep oppressing people.
-The fault is not merely in our “leaders” who put short term financial profit ahead of people and planetary survival. That would be easy to remedy if it was. The fault is in us for keeping these “leaders” in power. Clapping for them, facilitating their dominion over us, playing along with their games of divide and conquer (fear mongering) and overall abandoning our own dignity. We must believe in ourselves and our people (something elite politicians do not want us to do). That is how we get rid of colonialism (including Zionism), pandemics, the environmental nakba (catastrophe) and the risk of nuclear war.
-Yet, the growth of the BDS movement and of people’s support for Palestinian human rights miraculously continues to grow. If I look at the number of attendees to webinars I am invited to speak to (2-3/week) and growth of networks and actions, the conclusion is inevitable: Palestine cannot and will not be liquidated. The question is where each of us stands: the side of Biden, Trump, Netanyahu and ilk, or the side of native people. If we were to tackle climate change, threats of nuclear war, global pandemics, and much more, we should reconnect to native people and empower them. Being on the wrong side here is existential.
The ultimate bit of truth is as Martin Luther King said: we either live together as fellow human beings or die together as fools. A “win” of business deals to control the world’s wealth will ultimately mean we either wake up and reverse this or we ALL die as a species. We are afterall 7.5 billion people and they are a tiny minority who hope to run the world to their short term advantage but will cause long-term catastrophe (extinction as a species). Their children can have billions or they can have a livable world but not both.
As for us common people, it is time to “revolt against the machine” as the old song used to say OR we will all not survive (even our oppressors will die with us).
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Mazin Qumsiyeh, associate professor of genetics and director of cytogenetic services at Yale University School of Medicine, is founder and president of the Holy Land Conservation Foundation and ex-president of the Middle East Genetics Association. He won the Raymond Jallow Activism Award from the national Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1998. He is co-founder and national treasurer of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, and has written extensively about the Middle East. Qumsiyeh is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, author of Sharing the Land of Canaan and Popular Resistance in Palestine, a professor at Bethlehem University and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History in Bethlehem. http://palestinenature.org
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