Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD, A Bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home

Editor's Note:  Mazin Qumsiyeh has been sharing his first-hand experiences with our readers for years. Often his letters provide a careful accounting of the sad realities in which Palestinians live. His true stories are more powerful than any polemics, mental exercises and "peace plans" created by the Zionist entity and its attendent western governments, media and think tanks. Despite his education and intellect, he tends not to engage these fallacious arguments and political maneuverings. In the essay that follows, he provides all of us who are fed up with imperialism, zionism, deceptions and war with a refreshing view to move our lives and world forward. His words command deep respect and our self-evaluation as individuals. They are imperative in a chaotic world where governments and media feed cynicism and not hope. From the refiner's fire, Palestinians like Mazin Qumsiyeh offer us the beginning of knowledge. 

- Les Blough, Editor

Our biggest challenge in my opinion is not the Israeli occupation, corrupt politicians, the apartheid wall, the economic deprivation, the moral slide, or the environmental catastrophe unfolding. Our biggest challenge is excess and paralyzing cynicism. How can one not be cynical when even just the past week:

• Israeli courts ruled that any Jew can claim land supposedly owned even after 100 years (or 2000 years for collective ownership) evicting others whereas a "non-Jew" has no similar rights.  Palestinian refugees in East Jerusalem for example cannot reclaim their lawfully registered property in West Jerusalem but a Jew can claim property (rightly or wrongly) anywhere even with forged documents. Meanwhile evicted Jerusalemites sleep on the street outside their homes (see video on Axis of Logic.)
  
  
• The Palestinian authority reported $1.5 billion deficit (it spends most of its budget on “security”). Some 75,000 “security” personnel are here to manage a presumed restless Palestinians living under Israeli brutal colonial occupation.  The sad reality is that these are inmates ensuring other inmates do not act “irrationally” especially against the concentration camp guards.
  
  
• We commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the largest deliberate attack on civilian population in history but few bothered to even ask how can we get rid of the stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the US, Russia, England, Israel, and other countries.  Instead, diversionary tactics are used ensuring we remain hostage to these horrible weapons.
  
  
• Hamas rulers reiterated they are willing to accept a state on the border of 1967 and that they can maintain law and order just as well as the next guy (to prove it, no rockets were fired on Israel for seven months).  The Israeli jailors still not satisfied, they maintain the medieval siege of the concentration camp of Gaza. These war crimes and crimes against humanity are tolerated (nay - abetted) by a supine Western World.
  
  
• Demand for refugee return is marginalized or even totally ignored by ruling factions and that is on the good days.  On bad days, they wage outright war on this most simple of human rights: the right to go back home.
  
  
• There is still a lot of International effort to free the Israeli occupation soldier captured by Hamas but few seem to care about the horrible life of the 11,000 kidnapped Palestinian political prisoners.
  
  
• At the Fatah convention, Fatah activist delegates wanted accounting for the past 20 years especially financially since Fatah spent hundreds of millions and owned lots of properties around the world.  The current leadership said it was sufficient to hear the oration of Mahmoud Abbas and that the new central committee can take up the issue of finance after the election (presumably because any such transparency could disrupt the election outcome)!
  
  
• Italian legislator and arch racist Fiamma Nirenstein wants to create a group of Israeli legislatures who would increase the hostility of Israelis toward Europe because the Israeli public "is not hostile enough when one considers how hateful some European institutions are of Israel." She says she expects the members of the new body to come to European forums and "attack ferociously those who call to demonize Israel."  Apologetic tactics, she told Haaretz at her home in the colony of Gilo (built on occupied Palestinian land), won't work: "You Israelis must have courage to say you are at war and how much it costs you"!!!
  
  
• The Israeli foreign minister lives in the colony of Nokdim (one of the dozens of colonies that reduced the Bethlehem district to 15% of its former size.  This foreigner who became foreign minister “summoned for consultation a senior Israeli diplomat who in a confidential memo criticized the [Israeli] government for harming ties with the U.S. last week” according to Haaretz.
  
  
• The same fascist wants to promote more Israeli arms sales to countries in Latin America and Africa.  Zionist elites have always made money by promoting conflicts, wars and oppression.  Israel has a long history ranging from the close working relationships with apartheid South Africa to its training of the thugs of Somoza and other dictators around the world.  The Israeli voices that ask for changing such long-term destructive policies are feeble.
  
  [Axis of Logic inserts: Israel is also supplying war planes and other arms to the drug-running fascist in Colombia - Alvaro Uribe.]
  
  
• Bethlehem district lost over 80% of its lands to Israeli settlements (illegal under International law) and what is left of it has become a concentration camp with horrible environmental trends.  The European Union and USAID continue to pump millions here and well-dressed local politicians meet with well-dressed donors pretending everything is normal (or on the way to normality).  SUVs, dinners, security, and more give the illusion that we are a “state in the making”.  Everyone pretends that current negotiations would lead to better conditions (or at least non-deterioration since there is the threat that all that is built up could be destroyed as happened in 2003 and 2004).  Facts and population trends and ecological and environmental disasters in the making are ignored.

These and hundreds more every week are what balances and keeps our excess cynicism in check.  We feel lucky that we interact with so many people daily who show us what positive energy feels like. To these interactions, we owe so much.  Sometimes friends need to point these things out to each other.  So come where ever you are, let us visit together and walk around the streets of this troubled land and point out to each other all the great things that lift our spirits and keep our cynical side a bit more realistic :-)
 
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
A Bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
http://qumsiyeh.org 

READ MAZIN'S BIO AND MORE OF HIS ESSAYS IN
"LETTERS FROM PALESTINE".