From Palestine: Open Letter to the US Government and Those That Toe Its Line

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 3 May 2021

Mazin Qumsiyeh – TRANSCEND Media Service

27 Apr 2021 – News in Al-Quds newspaper today, a newspaper close to Mahmud Abbas (testing reactions):

Palestinian authority/Mahmud Abbas] decided to delay elections after pressures from the US government based on the idea that the US is about to give some things like re-opening PLO office in Washington and reinstituting aid to Palestinians. The US government argues that this will give incentives to vote for “moderates” (read collaborators) and avoid a loss for the main Fatah faction (western leaning and accommodating to Israel). This will also supposedly reduce tensions [stoked by Israel in regular practices of colonial oppression!!!!!

Any rational examination of history sees that short term planning based on narrow and not people interests always backfires. Chickens come home to roost. There are hundreds of examples from US history. I can just cite a few clear examples that anyone now recognizes. US (with British) toppling of democratically elected Iranian government led by Mosaddeq was done to serve narrow oil interests (so that Iran people do not control their natural resources).

The institution of a US/Israeli puppet (the Shah of Iran) in 1953 led to a quarter century of repression which left scars of hatred to US imperialism that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979. This started a series of changes in Western Asia for self-determination and resistance to US/Israel hegemony. In the 1980s, Henry Kissinger famously said that the US policy with regard to the Iran-Iraq conflict was “to get them to kill each other”. He and the neocons pushed then in the 1990s for genocidal sanctions that killed millions of People. Then the US used lies to attack Iraq in 2003 hoping to create a government as collusionist with the US/Israel as UAE or Bahrain dictators. The backlash actually strengthened the Iran-Syria-Lebanon-Iraq axis of resistance. US/Israel attacked Lebanon and Gaza repeatedly and in each case strengthened hatred of the people to the “Stooges” that serve their interests.

The “Oslo” (US/Israel) stooges (whether of ignorance or malice but who profit from the status quo) feel the pressure; we are not surprised that they (and their sponsors) will not allow elections unless they guarantee they remain in power. Israel and the US do not want those who resist their hegemony to win whether those are on the right (like Hamas) or on the left (like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). They do not even want Oslo supporters who are not 100% subservient (like the group of Marwan Barghouthi, Naser Al-Qudwa, and Hani Masri).

The US and Israel do have leverage. For example CIA/Mossad/UAE asset Mohammad Dahlan is getting his own factional list and this is kept as a boogie man against Abu Mazen in the same way that Abu Mazen was kept as a boogie man against Yesser Arafat lest he gets the idea to rebel against the US/Israeli dictates [In the end they did assassinate Arafat and we got Abbas]. But history is not on the side of injustice. Even in US history, we have to remember that people made positive changes when they said “enough is enough” and worked to change the system. Examples: getting women’s right to vote, civil rights, ending the war on Vietnam, ending US support for apartheid in South Africa, 40-hour work week, social security etc.

Thus, rational human beings see the following:

• All these shenanigans eventually backfire just like happened in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Cuba among others.
• History judges people with principle far more honorable than it judges those who collaborate (whether using the excuse of weakness or other excuses).
• Governments do not want people power and try to suppress it but people do and will get more power (if they liberate their minds).
• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.
• As Jesus said what is one to gain if they gain the whole world and lose one self. Even if people do not believe in an afterlife, think of whether you want to be remembered as a “Che Guevara” or as one of the many dictators over the past few thousand years that should remain nameless. We all die.
• As we articulated in many books and papers before, the Zionist project has ambitions that are far bigger then Palestine. Even if all 13 million Palestinians disappear, Zionism will still be a colonial expansionist movement that already is colonizing some areas in many Arab countries (and also colonized the American mind and shapes US foreign policy). No peace can happen with Jewish Suprematism any more than having peace with white suprematism or any other racist ideology.
• “The arc of the moral universe maybe long but it bends towards justice”.
• “Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.”
• Truth cannot be hidden. We have been calling this apartheid for decades and more recently human rights organizations concluded the same thing. For example B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch.

Finally, oppression in the past had localized effects while the 21^st century showed connectedness of human destiny. Knowledge is power and it is hard to isolate one country now. Witness for example climate change, nuclear proliferation, cyber power, and ease of development of weapons even by besieged groups (e.g. in Yemen or Gaza). Power is being democratized whether racists like it or not. Thus, NOW is the time to act based on what is right:

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”

____________________________________________

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

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation’s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.

DON’T BUY PRODUCTS WHOSE BARCODE STARTS WITH 729, which indicates that it is produced in Israel.    DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 3 May 2021.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: From Palestine: Open Letter to the US Government and Those That Toe Its Line, is included. Thank you.

If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

Comments are closed.