Grief and Hope Alive and Well in Palestine
by Mazin Qumsiyeh - palestinenature.org
March 13, 2019
Like our friend Reem Al-Banna she was a freedom singer who died young.
Israel high court ruled with government to block release of archives that expose Israel's role in the genocide in Bosnia.
In a separate ruling the high court rejected human righs groups petition to make it illegal for Israeli soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians.
...Meanwhile Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (originally Miliekowsky) [2] responded to an Instagram message that suggested Arabs are part of Israeli society by saying that Israel is not a state of its citizens but it is a Jewish state!
He is right; and to confirm the point, Israel election committee ruled against allowing the United Arab party to run in Knesset elections but allowed the terrorist Kahanists Jewish (ultra-right fascists) to run.
While there is significant pressure on many western politicians who dare to criticize Israeli apartheid policies, this is backfiring [3] and the delusions about our part of the world are dissipating. Empires do fall!
The world population is waking up: in France with the Yellow Vests, Haiti, Venezuela, Yemen, Palestine and elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands protested in Yemen after seeing the stooge, self-declared Yemeni "foreign minister" (Saudi appointed and living there) seated between Netranyahu and Pompeo at the failed conference organized by a failing US administration to create yet another war for oil and for Israel (this time on Iran)!
There will be other repercussions including bringing governments like China, Russia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Venezuela together against imperialism and Zionist colonialism. Soon other countries will follow (maybe even Britain and other European countries). Those who have bet on the maintenance of the US as a world imperial power (albeit guided in its foreign policy from Tel-Aviv) are beginning to realize they have bet on the wrong horse (even some Palestinian leaders). We must draw the right lessons but then also act responsibly.
We at Palestinian universities are under pressure.[4] We at the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability are grateful for the incredible support we are getting from so many people (volunteering, donating, collaborating).
We are rising to the challenge:
1) We work with hundreds of school children for empowerment.
2) We work with university students on areas like research (e.g. theses), education, and empowerment.
3) We are supporting 80 farmer families in areas of organic and ecological agriculture and we are working with local communities on resilience through ecotourism, agricultural, and cultural tourism.
4) We have dozens of collaborations around the world and we just hosted a workshop for 15 faculty from University of Notre Dame and another 20 Palestinians from various universities to expand collaborations.
5) We submit research papers almost weekly and two papers just got accepted (one is our first paper on fossils).
6) On Women's Day March 8, we took 65 people (mostly young women) on a hike through a world heritage site and they learned from women of Battir lots of information on cultural heritage, resilience, and more.
7) We have many international volunteers (this week from Ireland, UK, US, Israel) and continue building and growing our infrastructure of museum and garden (palestinenature.org).
8) We will soon open the exhibit on ethnography (connecting people and the land) and will launch a database of Palestinian cultural heritage (tangible like old agricultural tools and intangible like knowledge of medicinal plants, proverbs etc).
Thus, stay tuned, continue to think globally but ACT LOCALLY. For daily postings of activities and action calls, visit our facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/Palestine-Museum-of-Natural-History-1454309858180882/
Notes:
[1] https://kiaoragaza.wordpress.com/2019/03/09/the-world-has-lost-a-beautiful-soul/
https://jfp.freedomflotilla.org/participants/remembering-divina-levrini-shipmates-friends
[2] Here is a video of him thinking the camera was off explaining his true contributions during his first stint as Israeli prime minister in the 1990s https://youtu.be/JrtuBas3Ipw.
[3] The shameful attack that backfired https://lobelog.com/the-shameful-attack-that-backfired/ see also this video https://youtu.be/6kOtbJ33Y-8 Israel’s Stranglehold on American Politics By Chris Hedges. - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51255.htm
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy says: "What, after all, has Omar said? That pro-Israel activists demand “allegiance to a foreign country”; that U.S. politicians support Israel because of money they receive from the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, and that “Israel hypnotized the world.” What is incorrect in these statements? Why is describing reality considered anti-Semitic?"
[4] Palestinian universities on the front line by Sam Bahour
http://epalestine.blogspot.com/2016/10/palestinian-universities-on-frontline.html
Stay Human and come visit us in Palestine
Mazin Qumsiyeh
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine
http://qumsiyeh.org
http://palestinenature.org
facebook pages
Personal https://www.facebook.com/mazin.qumsiyeh.9
Museum
https://www.facebook.com/Palestine-Museum-of-Natural-History-1454309858180882/
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