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34. I CALL FRIEND OF PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU - I AM ARRESTED
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•22 Feb 2020
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iakkfir37nA
The Jewish Mafia, by Hervé Ryssen.
The Jewish Mafia, by Hervé Ryssen.
LA MAFIA JUIVE
Entretien avec Hervé RYSSEN
Réfléchir et Agir, septembre 2008
R&A : Vous publiez un quatrième livre sur le judaïsme, et c’est
encore un livre de 400 pages. Qu’apporte-t-il de nouveau ? On pensait que vous aviez déjà tout dit ?
Hervé Ryssen: C’est aussi ce que je pensais, figurez-vous ! Mais le
judaïsme est un monde très fermé, très secret, et vous voyez, après toutes ces années d’étude, on en apprend encore des vertes et des pas mûres. Cette fois-ci, j’ai exploré le monde criminel issu de la communauté juive internationale, et ce que l’on y découvre est à proprement parler hallucinant.
Le fait est que la mafia juive est la principale mafia qui existe aujourd’hui sur cette planète : racket, proxénétisme, trafic de drogues, trafic d’armes,trafic de diamants de contrebande, trafic d’œuvres d’art, meurtres sous contrat, escroqueries en bande organisée, vols à main armée, etc. La pornographie, les milieux des casinos et des discothèques sont aussi largement tenus par ces mafieux israélites.
R&A : Vous prétendez que le trafic de drogue international est en
grande partie entre les mains de la mafia juive. Êtes-vous bien certain de ne pas trop vous focaliser sur votre sujet ?
H.R.: Je ne prétend pas que la mafia juive contrôle la majeure partie du business international de la drogue, puisqu’il n’y a pas de statistiques sur le sujet, mais la chose ne me paraît pas invraisemblable, à en juger par toutes les informations que j’ai pu réunir. Le fait est que depuis le trafic de l’opium dans la Chine du XIXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, cette mafia est très entreprenante dans ce domaine. Pour le trafic d’ecstasy, on peut affirmer
avec certitude que la mafia juive est en position de monopole. L’ecstasy est la drogue qui fait le plus de ravage actuellement dans la jeunesse européenne. Une pilule d’XTC donne une sensation de force et de bien-être pendant quelques heures, mais c’est surtout une véritable poubelle chimique. Ses effets, sur le long terme, sont effrayants, car irréversibles : pertes de mémoire, troubles du comportement, du sommeil, de la concentration, lésion cérébrale chez les enfants des mères droguées. Le premier pays producteur est la Hollande, mais les gros trafiquants qui ont
été arrêtés depuis une dizaine d’années en France, en Belgique, aux Etats-Unis ou en Australie, possèdent tous là encore, des passeports israéliens. Le business d’ecstasy est à 100 % entre les mains de mafieux juifs, qui ne sont pas tous originaires de Russie, puisque l’on trouve aussi des trafiquants
séfarades. Si vous achetez une pilule d’XTC, en tout cas, vous pouvez être certains de financer la mafia juive. Certains gros trafiquants sont aussi très impliqués dans le business de l’héroïne et de la cocaïne.
R&A: La mafia juive est-elle en lien avec les fameux cartels de la drogue colombiens ?
H.R.: Cela ne fait aucun doute. Voici un seul exemple : Le 16 février 1993, les policiers russes de Viborg, près de la frontière russo-finlandaise, à côté de Saint-Pétersbourg, mettaient la main sur plus d’une tonne de cocaïne colombienne dissimulée dans des boîtes de conserve de corned-beef. C’est un Israélien résident à Bogota, Elias Cohen, marié à une Colombienne en cheville avec l’un des clans liés au cartel de Cali, qui assurait l’approvisionnement de la filière aux côtés d’un certain Yuval Shemesh. Le destinataire final de la cocaïne était un groupe de trafiquants israéliens implantés aux Pays-Bas. La tête du réseau était un certain Jacob Korakin.
Korakin était un juif religieux, portant la kippa, et il était respecté dans le quartier diamantaire d’Anvers.
R&A : Certains diamantaires d’Anvers, de New York et Tel-Aviv
semblent effectivement avoir un rôle important, et notamment dans le blanchiment de l’argent sale.
Les diamantaires sont au centre des opérations de blanchiment de
l’argent de la drogue des cartels colombiens. A Manhattan, la 47e
rulanchisserie d’argent de la drogue. Le rabbin Yosef Crozer avait été arrêté en février 1990, alors qu’il se rendait à Brooklyn avec des valises et des sacs bourrés de billets de banque en petites coupures. Il y en avait chaque jour pour 300 000 dollars.
Sa coopération avec les policiers avait permis d’arrêter le mois suivant une trentaine de personnes dans les milieux juifs orthodoxes, dont Avraham Sharir, un autre juif pieux, propriétaire d’une boutique de vente d’or sur la 47e rue, et qui s’avéra être l’un des personnages clef du blanchiment de
l’argent de la drogue à New York. Avraham Sharir, citoyen israélien de 45 ans, confessa par la suite avoir blanchi 200 millions de dollars pour le compte du cartel de Cali. Ses employés, qui comptaient les billets de banque, étaient régulièrement obligés de sortir s’aérer, parce que nombre des billets de banque, en petites coupures, avaient été roulés et avaient servis à “sniffer” de la cocaïne.
R&A : Certains juifs religieux ne s’embarrassent pas trop de scrupules, on dirait...
H.R.: Des juifs hassidiques sont même très impliqués dans les trafics.
En 2001, la police avait démantelé un réseau dirigé par un autre juif hassidique, Sean Erez, qui avait investi le trafic d’ecstasy. La drogue était passée en fraude dans les chapeaux ou encore dans les rouleaux de prières de ces juifs pieux, que les douaniers n’étaient pas censés soupçonner.
En juillet 1998, la petite communauté des diamantaires d’Anvers en
Belgique, avait aussi été fortement secouée après une série d’arrestations chez les Loubavitchs. On avait découvert que le business du diamant dans la ville flamande couvrait un trafic international d’héroïne. Quinze kilos avaient été saisis. Un juif orthodoxe, Dror Hazenfratz, était à la tête du réseau. Né à Haïfa, Hazenfratz avait un passeport israélien ainsi qu’une
carte d’identité belge. Devant le tribunal, il apparaissait en habit
traditionnel, caftan noir, chapeau et papillotes, ce qui ne l’empêcha pasd’être condamné à onze années de prison. Il existe de nombreux autres exemples.
R&A : Vous êtes remonté jusqu’aux gangsters “américains” des années trente...
H.R.: Oui, je me suis intéressé aussi à ces gangsters mythiques qui
avaient travaillé avec les malfrats siciliens. Les gangsters juifs étaient notamment impliqués dans la “Murder Incorporated”, une sorte de mutuelle de l’assassinat grâce à laquelle un chef local pouvait bénéficier des services de tueurs venant d’une autre localité et éviter ainsi l’inculpation. Murder Incorporated était un gang composé de malfrats principalement juifs, qui se chargeaient des basses besognes du Syndicat du crime. On estime que, de
1933 à 1940, l’organisation fut responsable de plus de 700 assassinats, mais certains parlent de 2000. Les exécutions par armes à feu étant trop facilement identifiables, on préférait la noyade, l’arme blanche, la batte de base-ball, la corde à piano, et surtout, le pic à glace. Tout cela fait aussi
partie de l’histoire du peuple juif.
R&A: Comment expliquez-vous que l’on en entende jamais
parler ?
H.R.: C’est toujours ce fameux réflexe de projection dont j’ai parlé
dans mes deux livres précédents. Les intellectuels juifs projettent toujours sur les autres ce dont ils se sentent coupables. Ils se disent victimes du communisme, par exemple, alors qu’ils en étaient les principaux instigateurs. De la même manière, Freud a projeté un problème propre au peuple juif − l’inceste − sur un plan universel, et tout le monde est tombé dans le panneau.
Dans les années 1990, les médias nous parlaient de la terrible “mafia russe”. Mais la vérité oblige à dire que tous les mafieux “russes” qui ont été arrêtés étaient aussi en possession de passeports israéliens. Le principald’entre eux, Semion Mogilevitch, un gros trafiquants d’armes qui faisait
aussi travailler des centaines de filles russes et ukrainiennes à Prague et Budapest, a été arrêté à Moscou en janvier 2008. En France, le Courrier international a été le seul journal à en parler, mais bien évidemment, la judéité du personnage n’apparaissait pas : c’était un “russe” !
Dans le cinéma hollywoodien, pareillement, les trafiquants de drogue, les malfrats, les “méchants”, quand ils ne sont pas siciliens, sont très souvent des hommes blancs de type nordique : jamais des juifs ! Les réalisateurs cosmopolites sont sans doute pour quelque chose dans ces tours de passe-passe.
Les Espérances planétariennes, 2005, 432 pages, 26 €.
Psychanalyse du judaïsme, 2006, 400 pages, 26 €.
Le Fanatisme juif, 2007, 400 pages, 26 €.
La Mafia juive, 2008, 400 pages, 26 €
Le Miroir du judaïsme, 2009, 400 pages, 26 €
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THE US-ISRAEL UNPUNISHED CRIME
TEHRAN
33. ONLY VIDEO OF RACHAEL CORRIE STREET - TEHRAN
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•22 Feb 2020
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Category NEWS and POLITICS
Rachel Corrie’s parents: ‘Our concern is for the Palestinian people’
Father,
Craig Corrie (L), and mother Cindy Corrie (R) of U.S. activist Rachel
Corrie, who died under Israeli bulldozer in Gaza on March 16, 2003
Edward Saïd on the Death of American Activist Rachel Corrie
From One of His Last Speeches in 2003
The following was originally delivered in 2003 as a lecture to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C., and was subsequently published as “Dignity and Solidarity” in Al-Hayat on July 2, 2003. In this essay, Said reflects poignantly and profoundly on the death of Rachel Corrie, an American activist who was killed earlier that year by an Israeli bulldozer driver while she was protecting a home from demolition in the Gaza Strip. This essay, a meditation on courage and commitment, was one of Said’s final publications before his death on September 25, 2003.
Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the United States with their daughter’s body. They had immediately sought out their U.S. senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story, and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, and anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn’t materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the United States without so much as an official peep or even the de rigueur investigation that had been promised her family.
But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman’s action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern shown her by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government’s insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her, “You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it.”
What shines through all the letters she wrote home, which were subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same. We have heard so much recently about the road map and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of the United States and Israel.
It is that extraordinary fact that is the reason for the existence of a road map and all the numerous so-called peace plans before them, not at all because the United States and Israel and the international community have been convinced for humanitarian reasons that the killing and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing, which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings and all its mistakes, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project, and so-called solutions have perennially been proposed that minimize, rather than solve, the problem.
All the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian. The official Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word “occupation” or whether he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals nor ever to admit that their rights were scandalously violated all along by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority of Americans have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace.
Moreover, the road map says nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie’s work in Gaza recognized, however, was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national community, not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there but is recognized the world over. In the past six months I have lectured on four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people, which is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies.
Whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate recognition and an expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its behalf. It is an extraordinary thing that Palestine was a central issue this year both during the Pôrto Alegre antiglobalization meetings and during the Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of the worldwide political spectrum. Just because our fellow citizens in the United States are fed an atrociously biased diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media—the occupation is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks, the apartheid wall 25 feet high, 5 feet thick, and 350 kilometers long that Israel is building is never even shown on CNN or the networks (or is so much as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the road map), and the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming, house demolitions, agricultural destruction, and death imposed on Palestinian civilians are never shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that they are—one shouldn’t be surprised that Americans in the main have a very low opinion of Arabs and Palestinians.
After all, please remember that all the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian. Look at the pusillanimity of the media during the buildup to an illegal and unjust war against Iraq, and look at how little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society done by the sanctions, and how relatively few accounts there were of the immense worldwide outpouring of opinion against the war. Hardly a single journalist except Helen Thomas has taken the administration to task for the outrageous lies and confected “facts” that were spun out about Iraq as an imminent military threat to the United States before the war, just as now the same government propagandists, whose cynically invented and manipulated “facts” about WMD are now more or less forgotten or shrugged off as irrelevant, are let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable, situation for the people of Iraq that the United States has now single-handedly and irresponsibly created there. However else one blames Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant, which he was, he provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place.
It is no wonder, then—with the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war against innocent unarmed Palestinian civilians or criticizing the U.S. government and being called “anti-American” for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation—that the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture, history, and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes has cowed far too many of us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent, and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world in being retarded, behind the times, unmodernized, and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda.
This is a parody of Hitlerian science directed against Arabs and Muslims, and we must be very firm so as not even to go through the motions of arguing against it. It is pure drivel. No one would deny that most Arab countries today are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to ruthless forms of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as the New York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally controlled, and that there is no freedom of opinion, that there are no civil institutions, no functioning social movements for and by the people. Press laws notwithstanding, you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a Communist Party newspaper as well as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies are given credit for; the satellite channels are bursting with diverse opinions in a dizzying variety; civil institutions are, on many levels having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates, and research institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must be done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are on the way.
In Palestine alone there are more than a thousand NGOs, and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that has kept society going, despite every American and Israeli effort made to vilify, stop, or mutilate it on a daily basis. Under the worst possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn’t worked at all and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must help them to understand this, not by suicide bombs but by rational argument, mass civil disobedience, and organized protest, here and everywhere.
The point I am trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in particular in more comparative and critical ways than superficial and dismissive books like Lewis’s What Went Wrong? and Paul Wolfowitz’s ignorant statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world even begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a real society with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents that can’t be easily caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism. The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one expresses solidarity rather than endless criticism, exasperated, frustrating discouragement, and crippling divisiveness. Remember the solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.
I want now to speak about dignity, which of course has a special place in every culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and humanists. I shall begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong Orientalist and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans and Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy, and understanding, which are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures such as those of Europe and America, which had a Renaissance, a Reformation, and an Enlightenment. Among many others, it is the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this rubbish, which has, alas, been picked up by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab intellectuals—I don’t need to mention any names here—who have seen in the atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more diseased and more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism is a sign of a wider distortion than has occurred in any other culture.
We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the United States account for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the 20th century, the Islamic world hardly a fraction of it. And behind all of that specious, unscientific nonsense about wrong and right civilizations is the grotesque shadow of the great false prophet Samuel Huntington, who has led a lot of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct civilizations battling against each other forever.
On the contrary, Huntington is dead wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilization exists by itself; none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are completely exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of community, love, value for life, and all the others. To suggest otherwise, as he does, is the purest invidious racism of the same stripe as people who argue that Africans have naturally inferior brains, or that Asians are really born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race. This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today against Arabs and Muslims, and we must be very firm so as not even to go through the motions of arguing against it. It is the purest drivel. On the other hand, there is the much more credible and serious stipulation that, like every other instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and dignity, which are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style, and those expressions needn’t resemble or be a copy of one approved model suitable for everyone to follow.
We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the United States account for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the 20th century, the Islamic world hardly a fraction of it. The whole point about human diversity is that it is in the end a form of deep coexistence between very different styles of individuality and experience that can’t all be reduced to one superior form: this is the spurious argument foisted on us by pundits who bewail the lack of development and knowledge in the Arab world. All one has to do is to look at the huge variety of literature, cinema, theater, painting, music, and popular culture produced by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that needs to be assessed as an indication of whether Arabs are developed, and not just how on any given day statistical tables of industrial production either indicate an appropriate level of development or show failure.
The more important point I want to make, though, is that there is a very wide discrepancy today between our cultures and societies and the small group of people who now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such power been so concentrated in so tiny a group as the various kings, generals, sultans, and presidents who preside today over the Arabs. The worst thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they do not represent the best of their people. This is not just a matter of the absence of democracy. It is that they seem to radically underestimate themselves and their people in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of change, frightened of opening up their societies to their people, terrified most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United States. Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler’s power.
This is the real failure, how during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader had the self-dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine, it is an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein’s appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the United States to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the United States to take over the Arab world allegedly on behalf of its citizens and bring it something called “democracy,” especially at a time when the school system, the health care system, and the whole economy in America are degenerating into the worst levels since the 1929 Depression? Why was the collective Arab voice not raised against the flagrantly illegal U.S. intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve, in dignity, in self-solidarity.
With all the Bush administration’s talk about guidance from the Almighty, doesn’t one Arab leader have the courage just to say that, as a great people, we are guided by our own lights and traditions and religion? But nothing, not a word, as the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified that his country may be next. How unfortunate the embrace of George W. Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by the combined leadership of the major Arab countries last week. Was there no one there who had the guts to remind George W. what he has done to humiliate and bring more suffering to the Arab people than anyone before him? And must he always be greeted with hugs, smiles, kisses, and low bows? Where is the diplomatic and political and economic support necessary to sustain an anti-occupation movement on the West Bank and Gaza?
Instead all one hears is that foreign ministers preach to the Palestinians to mind their ways, avoid violence, and keep at the peace negotiations, even though it has been so obvious that Sharon’s interest in peace is just about zero. There has been no concerted Arab response to the separation wall, or to the assassinations, or to collective punishment, only a bunch of tired clichés repeating the well-worn formulas authorized by the State Department.
Slowly, the situation is changing, and the old regime is passing and will gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel, and the United States precisely because he has no constituency, because he is not an orator or a great organizer or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasir Arafat, and because, I am afraid, they see in him a man who will do Israel’s bidding.
But how could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce words written for him, like a ventriloquist’s puppet, by some State Department functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering but then amazingly says next to nothing about his own people’s suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-dignity as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century, just because the United States and Israel have told him he must?
And when Israel simply says that there will be a “provisional” Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer sadistic, systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian, man, woman, and child, I must confess to a complete lack of understanding as to why a leader or representative of that long-suffering people doesn’t so much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity?
Has he forgotten that he is not just an individual but also the bearer of his people’s fate at an especially crucial moment? Is there anyone who was not bitterly disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and stand with dignity—the dignity of his people’s experience and cause—and testify to it with pride, without compromise, without ambiguity, without the half-embarrassed, half-apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white father?
But that has been the behavior of Palestinian rulers since Oslo and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth do they always think it absolutely necessary to read scripts written for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs in Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in America, is that we are our own people, with a heritage, a history, a tradition, and above all a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from the experience of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian since 1948. Not one of our political spokespeople—the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time—ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go.
Slowly, however, the situation is changing, and the old regime, made up of the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars [Arafats] of this world, is passing and will gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most promising is made up of the members of the Palestinian National Initiative; they are grassroots activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a desk, or juggling bank accounts, or looking for journalists to pay attention to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working classes, the young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors, lawyers—working people who have kept society going while also fending off daily Israeli attacks.
Second, these are people committed to the kind of democracy and popular participation undreamed of by the Authority, whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself. Lastly, they offer social services to the unemployed, health care to the uninsured and the poor, and proper secular education to a new generation of Palestinians who must be taught the realities of the modern world, not just the extraordinary worth of the old one. For such programs, the PNI stipulates that getting rid of the occupation is the only way forward and that in order to do that, a representative national unified leadership must be elected freely to replace the cronies, the outdated, and the ineffectiveness that have plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century.
Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from the International Solidarity Movement, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us.
I conclude with one last irony. Isn’t it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity from ourselves—that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn’t it time we caught up with our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or be embarrassed about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done and proud also to represent them.
–from From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map
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From The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966–2006, edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. Used with permission of Vintage Books. Copyright © 2019 by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin.
