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What we Palestinians need

By Dr. Mustafa Barghouti
 

(source: Palestine Chronicle)

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 Adopt the slogan of the freedom fighters of South Africa: Freedom in our lifetime!

Irrespective of what political settlement is ultimately embraced, Palestinians need a unified strategy for confronting and overcoming Israeli racism, apartheid and oppression.

Palestinians have only two choices before them: 1) either to continue to evade the struggle, as some have been trying to do, or 2) to summon the collective national resolve to engage in it.

The latter option does not necessarily entail a call to arms. Clearly Israel has the overwhelming advantage in this respect in both conventional and unconventional (nuclear) weapons. Just as obviously, neighboring Arab countries have neither the will nor ability to go the military route. However, the inability to wage war does not automatically mean surrender and eschewing other means to wage struggle.

As powerful as it is militarily, Israel has two major weak points. Firstly, it cannot impose political solutions by force of arms on a people determined to sustain a campaign of resistance. This has been amply demonstrated in two full-scale wars against Lebanon and, most recently, in the assault against Gaza. Secondly, the longer the Palestinians have remained steadfast, and the greater the role the demographic factor has come to play in the conflict, the more clearly Israel has emerged as an apartheid system hostile to peace. If the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the colonialist expansionism describe the circumstances surrounding the birth of the Israeli state, the recent bills regarding the declaration of allegiance to a Jewish state and prohibiting the Palestinian commemoration of the nakba more explicitly underscore its essential racist character.

Ironically, just as Israel has attained the peak in its drive to fragment the Palestinian people, with geographical divides between those in Israel and those abroad, between Jerusalem and the West Bank and the West Bank and Gaza, and between one governorate and the next in the West Bank by means of ring-roads, walls and barriers, Palestinians have become reunified in their hardship and in the challenges that confront them. Read More »What we Palestinians need

Would Iran be the same again?

By  Dr. Mahjoob Zweiri – Professor – University of Jordan

protests
Ayatollah Montazeri, Ayatollah Saanei and Makarem Shirazi condemned the security forces’ aggressive reaction to the protests.
 

Iran’s Reformists claim that they were the only ones who could feel that there was a behind-the-scene plan regarding the tenth presidential election. That is what the losing candidate Mirhossein Mousavi said during a meeting with the members of the Medical Syndicate on August 13, 2009.
 
Mousavi stated that – based on information that his offices in different Iranian cities had received – he was sure that the election would be rigged. Using this information, Mousavi contacted prominent officials, from the Supreme Leader to members of the judiciary.
 
Mousavi’s statement were preceded by calls made by various Reformist figures for reconsidering the election’s results. However, the Conservative camp, with whom the Supreme Leader clearly sided this time, described the election as the “most honest” in the history of the Islamic Republic.
 
The ongoing dispute between the Iranian political forces will continue, and it does not seem that the reconciliation efforts would end the current state of tension on the Iranian political scene. Read More »Would Iran be the same again?