The foreign education of Chris Christie: Palestine is part of the Holy Land

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

http://blog.nj.com/dr_aref_assaf/2012/04/the_foreign_education_of_chris_christie_palestine_is_part_of_the_holy_land.html

by Aref Assaf

Published: Tuesday, April 03, 2012, 6:06 PM

Chris Christie arrived in Israel Monday for a visit billed as a “Jersey to Jerusalem: Economic Growth, Diplomacy, Observance” - accompanied by his family and a delegation of 14 business and Jewish leaders. Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, is in Israel for four-day trip that mixes official and personal business. I had Tweeted to our governor on Saturday March 29, extending an invitation to visit my mother in the Palestinian refugee camp, Kalandia, which lies at the now-infamous checkpoint that separates Israel from the occupied West Bank: “@GovChristie, please visit my Palestinian mother in Kalandia camp to really learn the story of democratic Israel.”
I sent the invitation because I learned that the governor had no plans to visit the Palestinian territories or to meet with average or official Palestinians. For a governor who said he will “tread lightly” and that he wanted the visit to be an opportunity to inform him about the world, ignoring the elephant in the room, the Palestinians, seems at odds with his principled political outlooks. Moreover, it is a regrettable oversight not so easily brushed aside by the large Arab and Muslim residents of New Jersey.

The governor, I believe, has received the wrong advice about the obvious political insensitivity, even if unintentional, exhibited by his decision to forgo a visit to the Palestinian territory. In fact, most if not all foreign dignitaries, incumbent, or aspiring politicians have attempted not to appear to take sides in the volatile Israel-Palestine conflict by visiting both areas. After all, no one can honestly expect to become even familiar with the inexorably linked past and future of both the Jewish and the Palestinian people without seeing firsthand the outcome of de facto decisions that have changed both the demographic and topographic landscape of historic Palestine. As it happened, when the governor visited the Mount of Olives overlooking the golden Dome of the Rock, he was in fact standing in occupied Arab lands, which Israel conquered in 1967. 

That is why I invited the governor to visit my 87-year-old mother in her refugee camp. My mother has been living in this wretched place since she and my late father were forcibly expelled from their native village, Allar, which was destroyed in 1948...READ  MORE