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"Besuchen Sie uns in Palästina in der Weihnachtszeit" (Mazin Qumsiyeh) [05.12.2010]

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.

Die neueste Rundmail des palästinensischen Bürgerrechtsaktivisten Mazin Qumsiyeh, Professor an der Bethlehem und der Bir Zeit Universität, enthält interessante Einschätzungen zu den Waldbränden, vor allem aber zu Wikileaks.

Über Flächenbrände und Wikileaks

Wildfires The news about the tragic "wildfires" in Northern Palestine is a reminder of several facts:

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" (see http://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa/Ayn-Hawd )
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!).

Wikileaks

The whole world is talking about the Wikileaks leaking of previously classified US documents. Now I personally am skeptical about the selective leaking of documents that 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 here, here and here.

2) 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 e.g. here 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.

Come visit us in Palestine this Christmas season.

Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
A Bedouin in Cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor, Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities
Chairman of the Board, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People,

 (ts)