The Palestine Industry: The Rats of Gaza and the Opportunists among Us: The struggle for Palestinian freedom must remain anchored in the soil of Gaza. The global solidarity movement must not be permitted to mutate into a careerist industry.- By Ramzy Baroud

Volunteers in Gaza spray pesticides in an effort to combat rodents and insects. (Photo: via QNN)

 By Ramzy Baroud 

It all started with a call to my family in a displacement camp in northern Gaza.

Since internet lines rarely stay connected, I managed to send a message to the widow of my cousin—who was killed along with all of his sons during the ongoing Gaza genocide. I asked her a simple question: what do Gazans want?

My purpose was to gather raw testimonies from her neighbors to weave into a letter to a European official whose country is active in pursuing justice for Palestinians. I chose this approach to bypass clichéd political discourse and avoid the pitfall of speaking on behalf of those enduring genocide and famine. Palestinians in Gaza are entirely capable of speaking for themselves.

The responses, however, reframed my entire approach. While I am deeply tied to my community in Gaza, I had anticipated a direct focus on macro-political language—on statehood, rights, and global justice. Instead, I was met with the visceral reality of immediate physical survival.

“We want a life… we want a dignified life,” she said. “A dignified life with food, water, and even the ability to breathe. One feels so suffocated. We need so many things… so, so many things. We need psychological support, financial support, and moral support.”

Another neighbor said: “They (Israel) fight us with everything, absolutely everything; even when we are sleeping in our beds .. the mosquitoes drain us. Insects and rats are all around us, fleas, and the heat is killing us. There are no fans and there is no electricity.”

Yes, many spoke about Karameh (dignity), hurriye (freedom), and Haq al-Awda (the Right of Return), but these broad political and social rights were almost always tied directly to the everyday struggle for education, for water, for basic medical care, and—against rats.

The rats. This is the recurring nightmare in the minds of Gazan parents who find themselves unable to protect their children even from rodents. Nearly two million Palestinians remain displaced in horrific conditions, trapped in barely 40 percent of an already tiny, besieged Strip.

I spent the day trying to process the pain, grief, and humble expectations of these proud people.

Yet later that evening, a seemingly separate matter came to my attention. I learned of two characters—Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian from the 1948 areas, and Maoz Inon, an Israeli—who have been touring for months, promoting what they call their ‘The Future Is Peace’ tour.

These two individuals have achieved global celebrity status, sitting down with the likes of famed US comedian Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and ultimately meeting with Pope Francis himself.

To the unexamined eye, the two are peddling a message of ‘peace’ and ‘forgiveness’, routinely staging a display where they forgive each other at the end of their talks. All of this serves as a promotional springboard for their week-long ‘peace tour’ inside Israel, sold commercially at the competitive price of $4,200 per person, air tickets excluded.

The sad truth is that this corporate approach to ‘peacebuilding’ is not unique; it is a symptom of a broader trend exploiting Palestine. Even more tragically, many individual Palestinians have capitalized on the well-intentioned but often misunderstood concept of ‘centering Palestinian voices’ to accumulate personal wealth, status, and prestige, while their own brethren cannot find drinkable water and teeter on the brink of starvation.

The Arabic maxim, famous in Palestine for generations, has long contended that “the revolution is a tree watered by the blood of the martyrs, and its fruits are plucked by the opportunists and the cowards.”

Shouldn’t mass extermination be a moral threshold that stops opportunists from feeding their pathological greed?

Desperate for solidarity, Palestinians in Gaza continue to hope that global efforts will eventually aid their raw struggle for freedom, dignity, clean water, and relief from the rats. And millions worldwide are indeed well-meaning; they care about Gaza in ways that no social media post can ever capture.

The crisis is that the balance between genuine solidarity and outright exploitation at times risks tipping in favor of the exploiters. We are witnessing the rise of a lucrative cult of personality, built on high speaker fees and business-class tickets, circumnavigating the globe under the guise of advocacy... READ MORE https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-palestine-industry-the-rats-of-gaza-and-the-opportunists-among-us/

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War on Palestinian Memory: Israel Resolves Its Democracy Dilemma by Ramzy Baroud

War on Palestinian Memory: Israel Resolves Its Democracy Dilemma

by Ramzy Baroud

April 7, 2011

Palestinian citizens of Israel must have been proud of the fact that their collective tenacity always proved stronger than any Israeli attempt at dislocating them from their rightful historical narrative. Now, they are being told to cease and desist from commemorating al-Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948, which saw the brutal seizure and depopulation of most of Palestine in order to construct the Israeli 'miracle’.

Currently estimated at a fifth of the population of today’s Israel , Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have endured appalling treatment for decades. As Muslims and Christians, they have been regarded as an anomaly in what was meant to be a perfect Jewish utopia governed by the laws of democracy. This is the quandary that Israel has never mastered, as the non-Jewish citizens of Israel have represented a major obstacle to that vision.

The question of what to do with Palestinian citizens of Israel has long haunted Israeli politicians. Discriminatory laws, unlawful seizure of land and even violence have all failed to deter Palestinians from demanding equality and exposing the moral inconsistency of Israel ’s selective democracy and dubious history. More, all attempts at fragmenting Palestinian national identity – through different sets of laws for Palestinians in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and millions in Diaspora – were hardly enough to disfigure the innate sense of solidarity and belonging that Palestinian communities felt towards one another. When Palestinian activists gather in Jerusalem , Algiers or London , one fails to trace borderlines, the details of identity cards, or any other desperate forms of classification used by Israel . When Palestinians meet, Israel ’s divisive laws prove frivolous.

Israeli politicians have "lost sight of a basic concept in democracy," claimed the Association for Civil Rights in Israel ( ACRI ) in a recent statement, as cited by the BBC . The statement was a response to the Israeli parliament’s approval of a bill that "allows courts to revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted of spying, treason or aiding its enemies." Like scores of other bills introduced to the Knesset, many of which have been approved, the most recent amendment of the Citizenship Law of 1952 targets the Palestinian population of Israel .

The bill, passed on March 28, was sponsored by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party, the proud sponsor of nearly two dozen other discriminatory bills. Liberman’s 2009 campaign was largely based on the slogan: "no loyalty, no citizenship." The latest bill is another manifestation of this idea.

But it was hardly the only bill targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel . Another had been passed only a few days earlier. The "Nakba Bill" passed its final reading on March 22 and was sponsored by Alex Miller (Yisrael Beiteinu). This bill can be understood as a war on the collective memory of Palestinians, as it targets those who mark and commemorate the Catastrophe of 1948.

"We are ready to go to jail," was the response of MK Jamal Zahalka, of Balad party, who warned of "civil rebellion" against recent bills. "Nakba law won’t stop Arabs – we’ll just increase our protests."

Haneen Zoabi, also of the Balad party, told The Electronic Intifada: "This is a kind of law to control our memory, to control our collective memory. It's a very stupid law which punishes our feelings. It seems that the history of the victim is threatening the Zionist state."

A stupid law maybe, but one rooted in Israel ’s historical fear of Palestinian memory. Indeed, the war on memory has its own convincing, albeit cruel logic. From Vladimir Jabotinsky's 'Iron Wall’ of 1923 - aimed largely at sidelining the 'native population' from the 'Zionist colonization’ of Palestine - to Uri Lubrani's desire to "reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters", attempts at forcefully removing or reducing the Palestinian population is the cornerstone of Zionist reasoning. The reasoning, which was essentially predicated on presenting Palestine as a "land without people", is often challenged by the fact that the Palestinian people are too stubborn to terminate their historical, intellectual and very personal relationship to their land. Their persistence has made a mockery of Israel ’s first Prime Minister Ben Gurion’s faulty prediction in 1948 that "the old will die and the young will forget."

Palestinian steadfastness cannot bend natural phenomena. Yes, the old will continue to die. But the young are far from forgetting. So how do you now exact forgetfulness from Palestinians? Israel has always enjoyed a broad definition of 'democracy’, which purported to reconcile ethnic and religious exclusivity on the one hand, and the inclusive parameters of true democracy on the other. Outside Israel , those who dared question this wisdom were labeled anti-Semites. Palestinians in Israel , who fought against the iniquitous and dehumanizing definitions, were often labeled a 'fifth column’ and were designated 'enemies’ of the state. It is they who now risk losing their citizenship or being fined for the supposedly sinful act of remembering the tragedies that have befallen their people.
Although racist and discriminatory laws have defined the Israeli parliament for years, the unmistakably bigoted nature of these laws and the frequency at which they are being passed reflect the level of fear in the Zionist project. The major obstacle to this project remains a people who refuse to be defeated or to be relegated as "woodcutters or waiters." Israel seems to be resolving its quandary of being a Jewish and democratic state, and it has decidedly chosen to be the former. There is nothing democratic about the most recent bills that have passed in the parliament. Israel is now officially an Apartheid state, and all the Hasbra in the world cannot resolve the moral crisis that is now at the core of Israeli politics.

Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on March 2 that veteran diplomat Ilan Baruch had quit his post as he was no longer able to defend Israeli policy. It seems Mr Baruch made his decision in the nick of time, as it would be a truly arduous task now to try and justify Israel ’s war on Palestinian memory.