An
Encounter With Israeli "Police”: More Of Zionist Pure
Chutzpah Claims
28 February 2010By Mazin Qumsiyeh
Every day here sees new injustices and no one escapes
them. On Wednesday, my wife, I, and a graduate student
drove up to Salfit area where my student is doing a
master's thesis on the impact of the Burqan Industrial
settlements on the health of the Palestinian
villagers. The Israeli industrial settlement dumps
daily hundreds of cubic meters of industrial waste
water laden with heavy metals and other chemicals down
into the valley where residents of Brukeen breath air,
use the fields for raising crops and feeding their
animals. This pollution of private lands has been
going on for years. For summary on this area See
http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1161
On the way back, a private car with yellow license
plates (Israeli) cut in front of me and I had to hit
my brakes hard not to hit him. He drove later in front
of me for bout a kilometer, stopped in front of me in
the middle of the road and then two heavily armed
Israeli "police" walked out of the car. Gruffly and in
Arabic they asked for ID cards and from my wife they
asked in English for her passport. They refuse to
answer any questions after that in any language and
insisted on speaking only in Hebrew to give us
twoviolations 1) for me to go to a military court in
the settlement of Ofer (not even a simple fine) and 2)
for my student for sitting in the back seat without
tying her seat belt (250 shekels, roughly US $70 for
her, nearly a month salary). I checked with a lawyer
later who told me that the police regularly pick on
Palestinian drivers with extremely large fines; mine
islikely to be in the range of $500 if not more after
the "trial" (or worse). So we will get tos ee an
Israeli military judge choose between believing three
in my car telling teh truth or two Israelis in the
Israeli car with a grudge against Palestinians (I will
let you know) . When one considers the average income
of Palestinians in the West Bank is about $100 per
month, you can see how devastating these Israeli
"traffic violations" can be.
Many Zionists still live in la la land thinking that
oppression, including war crimes and crimes against
humanity, coupled with hasbara or Israeli propaganda,
will paper allow them to get away with the ethnic
cleansing of 530 towns and villages in 1948-1949 and
continued land theft ongoing to this
day (including in our village of Beit Sahour). They
thought that the massacres in Gaza and the blockade
and starvation of millions of people living in
concentration areas (ghettos or cantons) called "area
A" will cause us to kneel. And: "Israel's latest
conscripts in the fight to improve the country's image
have been unveiled: ordinary Israeli citizens. Armed
only with a government-issued hasbara pamphlet and a
winning smile, they will be sent to wage war with
their detractors, in an effort to present Israel as a
benign, democratic utopia whose only Achilles heel is
poor public relations."
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/israel-pr-campaign).
I read the bizarre quote from a senile Shimon Peres
(father of Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal) that:
"There are millions of Indians who love us, a billion
Chinese who love us, and millions of evangelicals, who
love us. We
have a problem with Sweden, but we're working on it."
A recent study shows 1.57 billion Muslims in the world
and a survey in Europe shows most people think the two
countries that are most dangerous in the world are the
US and Israel (not Iran and North Korea!). It is
amazing that some delude
themselves to think the world can be molded to follow
their racist agenda. Instead of adjusing their racist
behaviors they are desperate to get others to become
like them. But with the internet, even their Zionist
implants, like Wolf Blitzer of CNN and Mort Zuckerman
of Newsweek, don't seem to be
able to stem the tide of truth. Even our little humble
video of Beit Sahour attracted over 6000 of you (
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4he1vayLrfo> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4he1vayLrfo).
The fact that the boycotts, divestments, and sanctions
movement is spreading rapidly despite all the hasbara
(Israeli propaganda) is telling. More and more people
wake-up and join the millions of us who are acting for
justice (realizing taht silence is complicity). Just
this week, the University of Michigan's Dearborn
Student Government passed a divestment resolution and
starting Monday in over 40 cities around the world,
Israel apartheid week will mobilize thousands more for
BDS (see <http://apartheidweek.org/> http://apartheidweek.org/
and ACT in your area).
In other good news, Europe's highest court ruled on
Thursday that Israeli products manufactured in
settlements in occupied Palestinian territories are
not exempt from paying EU customs duties. This
essentially means the EU does not consider the West
Bank to be part of "Israel." The next step is that
enough Europeans would pressure their governments to
revoke the Europe-Israel association agreement which
gives free access to European markets. When enough
pressure built on those same governments, they stopped
supporting apartheid South Africa.
Locally, there were demonstrations against the Israeli
government decision to add two Palestinian holy sites
to the "Israel Heritage Site list". There is growth of
resistance and if we just get better leadership that
believes in its people instead of believing in Oslo
and the US vacant promises, the
upcoming and inevitable uprising will be the last one
before we get our freedom and return. Join us Sunday
at 11 AM in Ush Ghrab in Beit Sahour for a land
reclamation and protection activity.
Finally, my letter published in response to a
misleading letter in Indian Country Today
Claims are pure chutzpah
A letter "Remember who the real victims are," from
Elliot Kalman published Feb.12 [Vol. 29, No. 37]
stated that "The Jews, who only wanted to live in
peace with their neighbors, rightly defended
themselves. Indians, who tried to live in peace with
the two-faced invaders they were faced with, rightly
defended themselves. Let's remember who the actual
victims are: American Indians, European Jews, and the
poor Gaza Palestinians who would live in peace with
their Israeli neighbors if not for Hamas, the
religiously motivated thugs who run Gaza." I found
these verbal acrobatics not only
factually wrong but rather offensive.
Hamas was established in 1988, 40 years after the
ethnic cleansing that made the Gaza strip hold nearly
a million Palestinian refugees, and 22 years after
Israel occupied and economically destroyed this desert
strip now holding 1.5 million starving people living
under an Israeli blockade.
There is no such thing as "the Jews" with a uniform
agenda as there is no such thing as "the Whites" or
"the Blacks" with a uniform agenda. Not all European
whites decided to colonize the "new world" and not all
whites in South Africa supported apartheid. Similarly,
not all Jews supported the
colonization of Palestine or claim eternal
victimization and chosenness (parallel to "manifest
destiny").
Zionism resulted in dozens of massacres and left
two-thirds of the total population of natives
(Christians and Muslims) as refugees or displaced
people. Even Moshe Dayan stated: "Jewish villages were
built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even
know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not
blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not
only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not
there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul;
Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in
the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place
of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in
this country that did not have a former Arab
population."
Rather than being a victim, Israel is in violation of
dozens of UN resolutions and has violated just about
every article of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights per International human rights organizations
(and even Israeli ones like B'Tselem).
Thanks to the Zionist lobby, the U.S. government sent
billions of dollars of military aid to Israel every
year and even went to wars to serve Zionist narrow
interests. Israel is now well recognized as the fourth
or fifth strongest army in the world. Israel was also
shielded from international law by more than 35 U.S.
vetoes at the UN; 400 children were slaughtered in
Gaza only a year ago and our lands continue to be
colonized, including here in the Bethlehem district
where we lost nearly 80 percent of our lands. After
all these and many other horrors, to cynically claim
victimization and to claim kinship to Native American
struggles should offend any decent human being. In
Yiddish it is called chutzpah and what we call "aib"
(shameful) in Arabic.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Bethlehem, Palestine http://qumsiyeh.org
©
EsinIslam.Com
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