Our dear friend Saliba Rishmawi (father of George Rishmawi of Siraj and the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People) passed away of heart failure and we had his funeral yesterday.  The church was packed with hundreds of people.  After we took his body to the cemetery, I stopped by to visit the graves of my grandparents, my father and uncles.  Death of a father is devastating and our condolences to the children of Saliba and his beautiful and kind wife.  For my notes on my own father’s death 6 years ago, see Pain and Love in the Holy Land. But such occasions of deep sadness are also occasions of Palestinians getting together in solidarity and friendship as we did for thousands of years.  It is as if our loved ones, our mentors, and spiritual guides are doing us one more favor on their way. 

As our country is fragmented under Israeli apartheid system, it is hard to connect beyond the local area and even in a local district like Bethlehem, the frustration and anger that most people feel (at politicians, at the system, at themselves) make it hard for us to gather more than a few individuals in friendship and solidarity.  We long to the days when we had more direct access to our Palestinian colleagues in Jerusalem, in Jaffa, in Acca, in Gaza, and in diaspora.  When we could share in suffering and share in planning strategies of resistance. 
 
Now, many of us just hear of things on the news even when we are a few miles away. Jerusalem is only 5 miles away and is cut off from us (really suburbs of the city). We hear in frustration how Israel has intensified its efforts to ethnically cleanse the city.  A hundred and one ways of doing this are invented: from denial of any building permits, to revocation of residency, to refusal to give family reunification, to denial of work permits, to racist immigration laws, to taxation policies to drive small Palestinian businesses out, to forcibly removing people from their homes and bringing in European Jews to colonize their ancient houses.  Just this week, the authorities fined many business owners for displays outside their doors! For anyone who knows the character of roads in old Arab cities and the size of space inside stores knows that it is impossible to make such a demand without bankrupting these stores (and in the process change the whole magical feel of making your way through old market places unchanged for five thousand years).

Canaanitic cities and towns that have been changed to be clones of European metropolitan areas are now everywhere in Palestine from Haifa and Nazareth in the North to Beer EsSaba (Beersheba) in the South.  Israel seems intent on having Jerusalem lose its ancient character and simply become like a large Jewish neighborhood in New York.  With few feeble voices being an exception, the world leaders still do not act.  The public is ahead of the leaders in many Western countries (even in the US).  I have no doubt that there will be a day of reckoning when this apartheid will be exposed just like the apartheid of South Africa was exposed.  But I am not certain of how much politicide (word of Kimmerling) or Spacio-cide (word of Hanafi) will happen in the interim.  Zionist Jews continue to have a huge privilege and most of them have no clue that they are racist in their attitudes or that their wealth and power is built on the destruction of another society.
 
Zionism was aided and abetted by the West to create a foreign implant in the heart of the Arab world.  It has succeeded in retarding development towards pluralism and democracy, it has succeeded in promoting fanaticism (on all sides), and it had created instability that went way beyond the borders (examples: Al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, Israeli interventions in Latin America).

Naguib Azoury predicted in 1905: "Two important phenomena, of the same nature but opposed ... are emerging at this moment in Asiatic Turkey. They are the awakening of the Arab nation and the latent effort of the Jews to reconstitute on a very large scale the ancient kingdom of Israel. Both these movements are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins. And the result of this struggle between two people representing two opposing principles lies the future of the world." (Neguib Azoury 1905 . Le Reveil de la nation arabe dans l’Asie turque en presence des interests et des rivalites de puissances etrangeres, de la curie romaine et du patriarcat oecumenique, parties asiatique de la question d’Orient et programme de La Ligue de la partie Arabe . Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie.
 
I was bemused to hear US President Barack Obama parrot neoconservative rhetoric at a speech in front of military people:

“We must never forget. This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” 

As Hegel stated “What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”.  We have yet to even investigate 9/11 and what happened and who attacked and why (and some testimony to the 9/11 commission was suppressed including Israeli connections). We have yet to digest the fact that Israeli-shaped US policies PROMOTE extremism and violence (and the rise of fundamentalism among Jews, Christians, and Muslims).

• CIA-Trained Security Chiefs Elected to the Palestinian Leadership: What Actually Happened in Fatah's Elections? 
  
  
• Israel wrecked Arafat, crowned Hamas, and gave birth to Al-Qaida in Gaza By Nehemia Shtrasler 
  
  
• Israel's Fifth Column: The People in Between
  
  While working as a Washington correspondent for Jerusalem Post (1973-1990), Blitzer served as an editor of Near East Report, a publication founded by Isaiah Kenen, a registered foreign agent of Israel, who also founded the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC coordinates a network of transnational political operatives known loosely as "the Israel lobby." Neither AIPAC nor Blitzer has yet registered as a foreign agent in the U.S.. Between the U.S populace and the facts they require for informed consent lies an "in between" domain. In that realm is found a network of like-minded fifth column operatives whose pro-Israeli bias works unseen-yet in plain sight-to shape public opinion around a predetermined agenda. That agenda-shaping "news" routinely features commentators from think tanks who share the same bias.