Munib Al-Masri, an unarmed American citizen, was shot by the Israeli military on May 15 while protesting against Israel on the day Palestinians mark the Nakba -- or catastrophe -- of our dispossession in 1948. He is the grandson of Munib Al-Masri, the philanthropist, businessman and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Symbolically, the younger Munib was at the border seeking in the liberating spirit of the Arab Spring to help Palestinians return to stolen homes and land in territory Israel pushed Palestinians out of in 1948. He was on Lebanese soil and behind an electric fence dividing the two countries when the live bullet entered his abdomen and caused explosive damage to his kidney, spleen, and even his spine. Munib now will live the rest of his life without his spleen and a kidney. So grave was his injury that doctors initially feared he would die due to blood loss. Like many of those injured that day, Munib remains in critical condition. Due to his American citizenship, his story may just be told in the United States and a handful of questions asked about what possessed an Israeli sniper to fire on unarmed peaceful demonstrators behind an electric fence in another country.
Indeed, the first of those questions was raised on June 1 when a journalist at a U.S. State Department briefing vigorously asked Deputy Department Spokesman Mark C. Toner about Munib's injury. The official knew nothing, but said he would look into it.
As a long-time friend of Munib's family and living in the Palestinian Diaspora myself, I am deeply pained over the harm done to him and all the other protestors. Now Munib may well face permanent physical hardship because he dared to dream of Palestinians' right of return to homes to which many still retain keys and deeds.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) witnessed his shooting. Later that week, Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at HRW, asserted, "Israel should not be allowed simply to shrug off the evidence that its soldiers reacted with unnecessary and disproportionate force that killed civilians. There needs to be a credible, criminal investigation, and where there is evidence that crimes took place, prosecutions and appropriate punishment." But HRW has said this time and again, yet time and again Israel is culpable of killing and maiming Palestinian civilians. Israel regards itself as above the law because the United States protects it at the United Nations.
It is often said everyone knows what the parameters of the two-state solution will be. American and Israeli officials have long declared this. But in recent days it has become clear that Prime Minister Netanyahu, along with his allies in AIPAC and the U.S. Congress, did not get the memo.
They are calling foul now that President Obama has very timidly and conservatively suggested two states, Palestine and Israel, along the 1967 borders with "mutually agreed swaps." On May 20, Netanyahu publicly lectured -- hectored really -- the American president and the previous day he released a press statement about what he "expects" from the American president.
Netanyahu comports himself as if he's the superpower dressing down the out-of-order satellite. Indeed, a livid President Clinton once said after meeting with Netanyahu "who's the [expletive] superpower here." Obama is likely thinking the same as Republicans assail him for allegedly "throwing Israel under the bus" and as Democrats, joined at the hip with AIPAC, fail to back him up.
Side by side, the visions of Netanyahu and Munib for the region are very different, though both challenge President Obama. Netanyahu, on the one hand, is pushing colonization in violation of international law and received a standing ovation from an out-of-touch U.S. Congress -- seemingly intent on making a bad situation worse -- for his claim that Israel is not a foreign occupier in "Judea and Samaria." On the other hand, young Munib, a young Palestinian man long powerless in the eyes of the world, is advancing international law and a remarkable Arab Spring which has made young people all over the region primary actors in securing freedom in Egypt and Tunisia. The freedom aspirations of young people in those two countries differ little from the hopes and dreams of Palestinians long denied their rights by an Israel which stands accused of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, the crime of apartheid, and persistent serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions. The terms are rarely used in the United States, but are increasingly discussed by an international community that tracks Israeli deeds far more closely than the U.S. Congress.
President Obama has tentatively embraced Arab protestors everywhere save those challenging Israeli occupation and land theft. The double standard is evident to all throughout the Middle East. NATO took the decision to protect the Libyan people from the wrath of Gaddafi, but leaves the Palestinians to fend for themselves against the might of the Israeli army. The U.S. frequently criticizes the powerful Chinese government over human rights abuses yet it turns a blind eye to Israel's human rights violations and war crimes against the Palestinians. Instead, every year Israel is provided with $3 billion in U.S. military aid to carry out more of the same abuses.
Arabs see what happened to Munib and regard it as little different from the slap received by the street vendor in Tunisia or the violence perpetrated by Mubarak's thugs in Tahrir Square. It's the unfair, old order defending the status quo. Yet in the United States there appears to be no concern or outrage that the penalty for enthusiastic young Palestinian demonstrators attempting -- however symbolically -- to reclaim stolen family land is apparently to be faced with an Israeli firing squad.
Munib is now learning the hard and unfair lessons of life previous generations of Palestinians endured regarding Israeli military might making "right." But this generation is far more effective at communicating with the outside world than earlier Palestinians. Would that we had had Facebook in 1948 when Palestinians were fleeing and being expelled from our homes by the hundreds of thousands even before the Arab states declared war on Israel.
President Obama spoke on May 19 of the "humiliation of occupation" suffered by Palestinians in 1967, but said not one word about the pain of dispossession which is rooted far more deeply in Palestinian psyches than even the territorial losses of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem in 1967. That dispossession is the original sin of all efforts to partition Palestine since 1947.
Tunisians and Egyptians have achieved the impossible this year. So, too, might Palestinians. Time, as President Obama indicated regarding the changing demographic landscape, is not on Israel's side. If apartheid rule can fall in South Africa and the American South, the same is possible with expansionist Israel.
Human decency is too frequently discarded when it comes to Palestinians. Surely a demonstration inside sovereign Lebanese territory to mark the day Palestinians were driven from their homes 63 years ago cannot seriously be regarded as a threat to Israel's security.
Israel, in my view and the view of a growing part of the international community, too frequently gets away with the murder of young Palestinians. The entire civilized world has turned a blind eye to Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses and the consequence is that such actions do not stop, but become more egregious with time.
The message many Diaspora Palestinians received repeatedly in May is that Israel does not seek peace with the Palestinians and other Arab states. And the message that the U.S. Congress sent on May 24 to Palestinians the world over is that it backs Israel to the hilt, while Palestinian aspirations for freedom and for a life free of discrimination and inferior rights matter very little. But then we've had 63 years to absorb that painful lesson. If the United States will not support our hopes for freedom then we will look for other pathways to achieve our rights, including the United Nations this September.
The U.S. Congress may ignore the efforts of a young Palestinian American like Munib Al-Masri, but at the United Nations, Munib's efforts, and those of countless Palestinians, will very likely soon be heard with an overwhelming September vote in favor of Palestinian statehood.
I wouldn't bet on that!!
An American murdered by a Palestinian though - front page news everywhere for weeks.
But as we're betting, I'll raise you a Rachel Corrie and a Tom Hundall.
1) al-Nakba, the catastrophe, in Arabic, refers to a specific catastrophe: the proclamation of the nation-state of the Jewish people, Israel.
If the re-institution of Jewish sovereignty on a tiny part of Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), done with the blessing of the United Nations, is considered a catastrophe, why should anyone have any respect for those commemorating it...??
2) Munib al-Masri is a simple name for the vast majority of non-Arabic speakers. Yet, for those know the language the name, al-Masri, the Egyptian, tells a bit of the story of the "Palestinian Arab" people; people, many of whom have, for purely economic reasons, migrated from various parts of the Arab Middle East AFTER the beginning of modern Zionist settlement in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) and who, only in the very late 1960s and early 1970s, this time for political expediency, began to call themselves "Palestinian Arabs". The last name of al-Masri is indicative of his family's origin: Egypt. This would be true about such family names as al-khourani (the person from the Khouran, Syria); al-Iraqi (the person from Iraq); al-Kurdi (the person from Kurdistan), etc.
Sadly, the "intellectually honest" advocates of anti-Israel/anti-peace, be they Arabs or not, would not share such information with you!!
2. Obama is a Kenyan name. He must not be American. (That seems to be your logic.)
Palestinians who murder Israely infants, children or adults are just peacefully and kindly seeking to regain the never existed country known as Palestine. As soon as Israel knuckles under to Palestinian demands and turns the coutry over to them a new age of enlightenment will glow in the Muslim world and Arabs will no longer murder their own women in an effort to retain family honor while never punishing their sons who may have raped a woman who will have to be murdered by a family member because she survived her male attacker's attentions.
Islam in and of itself is not bad idea. Its execution under the tutelage of its ignorant and vicious clerics is a horrific botch job and is rejected by Israelis as a vaible partner.
A man was injured while protesting an event which happend many decades ago. This is reminiscent of Serbia and Bosnia where horrific acts were commited due to a battle fought more than 600 years ago..
Hezbollah sends people out to be injured while its leaders hide in bunkers and scream that Israel kills while they only murder children as their sole means of protest at Israeli reprisals.
The US State Department has a track record of being more interested in protecting Israel than its own American citizens. it's disgraceful.
Imagine the reaction if a US citizen was shot by Iranians across the borer with Iraq.
You might know your finances, but when it comes to history of "your* people, I give you an F.
"Palestinians return to stolen homes and land in territory Israel pushed Palestinians out of in 1948. "
It is intellectually dishonest to refer to Israel as stolen land. I know you'd like to think that it was, but it wasn't. Furthermore, "your" people, as you fondly refer to them, were invited to stay by Ben Gurion himself, but "your" people chose to take the advise of their hostile brethren and flee while they attacked Israel. Things did not turn out as "your" people planned.
It is my sincere hope that "your" people will learn to make wiser more intelligent decisions than they have thus far. Decisions that will ultimately land them sovereignty and independence.
That is what happens when you back aggression and it fails.
Same thing happened to the Palestinians.
Intelligence, cooperation, testing grounds for new weaponry, medical advancement, technology, furthermore thousands of jobs for American citizens.
Based on your brilliant suggestion, if we don't get anything in return we should cut aid, yes? If that's the case, the Palestinians shouldn't be getting a single copper penny, after all we get absolutely NOTHING, not a single thing back from aiding them.
Scron from the rest of the world, which sees clearly the staggering hypocrisy of parroting the world Freedom all over the place while supporting land theft, illegal collective punishment and murder.
Also, perhaps more remarkably, you get scorn from Israeli politicians like Natanyahu! Your politicians are bought and paid for, no wonder he talks to your president like he does.
1. "Intelligence"; You mean the falsified nonsense that Israel uses to persuade the US to isolate and demonize Israel's enemies despite the fact that this is contrary to the interests of the US?
2. "Cooperation" This benefits Israel by giving it access to vast quantities of sophisticated American weapons which it uses to oppress innocent civilians and invade other nations, but this does not benefit the US in any way.
3. "Testing grounds"??? I think the US has plenty of these already and does not require any more.
4. "medical advancement" The US scientific community, US investment in medical research, etc immeasurably dwarfs Israeli investment, so Israel benefits more than the US.
5. Yeah, instead of having trade relations with free and democratic states which would create even more jobs, it is much better to build weapons to kill people.
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Losing a war, as you did, is a catastrophe.
Refusing to acknowledge that fact and then refusing to sue for peace on Israeli terms keeps that catastrophe in the present tense.
Yes, no one should fight for freedom, self determination, or liberty from foreign occupation and oppression. The Algerians should just have accepted their subjugation by the French. People in the US should still sing "God save the King." The Indians should not have demonstrated for their freedom. And of course, no one should have resisted the Germans in WWII, instead they should have asked for peace. What a wonderful world we would live in if that had happened.
Palestine has always been a country and will always be, as quotes "I believe Palestinians should go back to Palestine" and they will, peace.