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[Image by Carlos Latuff]

I never once put the term “rare” in association with news coming from Occupied Palestine, but hearing good news from there is rare and seldom.

Yesterday we came to hear about Bilin victory and the celebration of Bilin villagers in this occasion. For a moment I thought: “what are these guys celebrating? Palestine is still under occupation.” But then I thought, we - Palestinians - might have lost everything in this world, but we still have hope.

What Bilin villagers actually celebrated is this hope which we all were born with and live for. We are hopeful because despite all efforts at truth suppression, truth will surface and show up. Take for example Carter’s book on Israeli apartheid and other books such as Mearsheimer and Walt’s on the Israel lobby, both which rocketed to the top 100 best selling books in the first week of their availability.

We are hopeful because of the exponential growth of the boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) as an alternative to violence. See initial compilation of examples at
http://tinyurl.com/3ypx6b (PDF file)
http://www.quakerpi.org/QAction/ECON-SURVEY-Version2.html

Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza was denied by Israel the right to travel to the latest UN Conference in Geneva. He wrote stating: “I am one of nearly 1.6 million human beings residing in the Gaza Strip. We are caged in a large, open-air prison. The border crossings are at the mercy of an occupying power; and these terminals, the Strip’s veins of life, are hermetically sealed. Over the past year and half, our movement in and out of the Strip has been impossible. Irrelevant of illness, education, employment, or any other humanitarian necessity, the prison gates are closed. My wife and 2 kids have been in Egypt for 1.5 years. The situation is beyond economic and political siege; it is social and humanitarian strangulation, where people cannot move to attend to their basic needs. As a result, Gaza lives in an unprecedented catastrophic situation. The international community and Israel are parties to the crime.”

Yet we are hopeful because the UN Conference in solidarity with the Palestinian people was held despite Zionist-Racist efforts to shut it down completely (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3444096,00.html ). The UN conference supported BDS. We are hopeful because Israeli apartheid cannot be any more successful than South African apartheid. Our tasks is to speed up the day of the dismantling of apartheid to begin creating a society of equality for people of all religions in Western Asia. This is because when this natural process is accelerated it reduces the ongoing destruction, lost lives, and lost potential. Every week in Palestine, innocents are being murdered and land is being confiscated and more people are plunged into poverty (UN report documents skyrocketing poverty caused by the Israeli occupation, http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39100 ). Even according to Israeli journalists, Israeli occupation forces do not care if they kill children (five Palestinian children this past week, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/899694.html ). And the wall that Israeli authorities call wall of “segregation/separation” (in Hebrew “hafrada”) and others call “wall of hate” continues to be built (see documentary at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5110030555620432782&q=wall+of+hate&
)

We must remember that none of this would be possible without the Israeli Lobby’s influence that makes the US government provide unprecedented diplomatic, military and economic support to a colonization and apartheid system. Nor would this be possible without the weakness of leadership among many (including among Palestinians). Meanwhile Zionist racism goes on; for example in its continuing drive to shape Palestine into a Jewish state. Even the few remaining Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship continue being stripped of their basic human rights (see “Dark side of Jewish dream” by Ed O’Loughlin, The Sydney Morning Herald
http://tinyurl.com/3yltww
and my earlier article “Is Israel Unique?” http://www.qumsiyeh.org/isisraelunique/ ).

Indirect complicity in the form of Apathy and direct complicity remain our main obstacle to speeding up the inevitable demise of racist systems. Yet, we are hopeful that there are millions of good people getting off the sidelines and working for human rights and justice (and thus exponentially increasing the torches of hope). We are hopeful because Scott Ritter, US Veteran and UN arms inspector now routinely speaks about the Israel lobby’s push for the war on Iraq and now the upcoming war on Iran. And there are many, many others who were not intimidated and who decided to speak out, see just a few examples at http://qumsiyeh.org/honorlist/ (and send me candidates).

[Credit: Mazin Qumsiyeh]

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