Does anyone find it interesting that Israel is the only country on the planet going around with this incessant insistence that everyone recognize her right to exist? Given that we Palestinians are the ones who have been dispossessed, occupied, and oppressed, one might expect that we should be the ones making such a demand. But t hat isn’t the case. Why? Because our right to exist as a nation is self-evident. We are the natives of that land! We know we have that right. The world knows it. That’s why Palestine doesn’t need Israel or any other country to recognize her right to exist. We are the rightful heirs to that land and this can be verified legally, historically, culturally, and even genetically. And as such, the only true legitimacy Israel will ever have must come from us abdicating our inheritance, our history, and our culture to Israel. That’s why Israel insists we declare she had a right to take everything we ever had — from home and property, cemeteries, churches and mosques, to culture and history and hope.

Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs who set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948. Those Palestinians and their descendants still languish in refugee camps. Israel attempted a similar scenario in 1967 when they conquered the remainder of Palestine, but Palestinians then couldn’t be dislodged from their homes as easily. This remains true, despite 40 years of Israel’s violent and oppressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Despite home demolitions, land confiscations, rapacious building of Jewish-only colonies, endless checkpoints, targeted assassinations, bombings of schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and malls, closures and denials; despite the massive human rights abuses, the imprisonment and torture of men women and children alike, the separation of families, the daily humiliations; despite the massive killings — Palestinians remain. We still resist. We still live, love, and have babies. As much as we can, we rebuild what Israel destroys. Such are rights!
Rights are inherent and inherently just, like the right to live with dignity and to be masters of one’s own fate. It is a human right not be persecuted and oppressed because you happen to belong to one religion and not another.

That Israelis simply take property belonging to Palestinians is not a right. That is theft. That Israel cut off the movement of food, medicine and other basic goods to the Gaza strip, causing massive malnutrition, economic collapse and misery because Palestinians elected particular leaders is not a right. That is an affront to humanity. That Israel rain death from the skies on an already battered and starved Gaza, murdering over 3000 human beings and maiming thousands more in a single month is not a right. It’s a war crime. That Israel has employed every imperialistic tactic to subjugate, humiliate, break, and expel an entire nation of principally unarmed civilians because of their religion is not a right. It is a moral obscenity. That every Jew from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia be entitled to dual citizenship, one in their native country and one in Israel, while the rightful heirs to the land linger as refugees without citizenship anywhere is not a right. It is an outrage.

I’m sure my words will be twisted in some way to imply that I’m advocating pushing Israelis “into the sea” or some other asinine claim. So let me be explicit: We all have the right to exist, to live, to be masters of our own destiny. We all have the right not to be oppressed by others. Such rights are inherent to every individual living in that land: Jew, Muslim, or Christian. But Israelis do not have the right to create particular religious demographics by causing the demise of the natives. To be a Jewish [or Muslim or Christian] state, where privilege is accorded to those belonging to a particular religion at the expense of those who do not is not a right.

A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight. And to recognize such racism as a human or national right goes against every tenet of international law. It defies the basic sense that the worth of a human being should not be measured by their religion, any more than it should be measured by the color of their skin or the language they speak.

Schools, universities, mosques, police stations, homes, water treatment plants, factories, and anything that supports civil society, including the only mental health clinic in Gaza, have been blown to rubble from planes that rain death from clear skies without any resistance, because Palestinians have no opposing air force. Nor do they have an army or navy. No mechanized armor or heavy weaponry. Thanks to Israel, they haven’t even had continuous electricity or fuel for the past two years. Or food and medicine. Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza has prevented the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza, including the import of the most basic goods necessary for survival.

A recent study by the Red Cross showed that 46 percent of Gazan children suffer from anemia. Malnutrition affects 75 percent of Gaza’s population, half of whom are under the age of 17. There has been widespread deafness among children due to Israel’s intentional and frequent sonic booms from low overflights. An alarming number have stunted growth and serious mental disorders due lack of food. The only way they have been able to survive thus far has been due to the tunnels that smuggle food and goods from Egypt.

Half of Gazan children under 12 have lost their “will to live.” Can anyone fathom the kind of oppression that leads small children en mass to lose their will to live?

This is what Israel has done to Gaza over the past two years. They ghettoized Gaza and turned it into an open air prison – a concentration camp of civilians with no way to earn a living, no way to defend themselves and no place to run from the slaughter bombarding them from air, land, and sea. From the white phosphorous disemboweling young and old alike. Hear eyewitness accounts.

But Gazans dared to try to resist with pathetic homemade rockets that, until Israel’s barbaric attack, generally landed in open desert. The rockets were mostly symbolic of resistance, very much like the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But who would have called on a ceasefire there, in 1943, for “both parties” to “cease the violence”? Who would have blamed the Ghetto fighters for their ultimate fate? Who would say they had no right to resist? No right to fight back?

Just as Nazis gave Jews only the right to die silently, Israel starves and besieges Palestinians, giving them only that same right. Just as the Warsaw Ghetto was blown to rubble, Gaza is left to burn in an inferno, its hospitals bursting with the puss of death and unspeakable wounds. The entire population of Gaza is terrorized and traumatized. No one is spared the insecurity and fear. Imagine, please, that you are a Gazan.

What have Palestinians done to deserve such a fate? To be endlessly hunted like animals? To have their homes demolished, their ancient history and heritage cast into forgotten space? To languish in refugee camps and slums, while Jews from all corners of the earth flock to fill their confiscated homes and farms? To be tortured, imprisoned, and denied in every conceivable way?

What have we done that leaders will not speak against this massive and cold aggression against our people? With what logic do you call Palestinians terrorists when their streets flow with the blood of their own children? When they have been stripped naked of possessions, dignity and hope?

Why? Because they elected Hamas? Hamas has held power for less than two years. Yet, Palestinians have suffered this kind of slaughter for 61 years. Whether now in Gaza, in 2002 in Jenin, in 1947 and 1948 in Deir Yasin, Balad el-Sha, Yehida, Tantura, and the list goes on. Or 1982 in Sabra and Shatila.
Palestinians are killed as if insects not because of Hamas or Yasser Arafat before them. Not because of Qassasm rockets or hand thrown rocks. Palestinians burn and bleed because they are the non-Jewish natives of that land. There is no other reason. Just like Jews were killed for being Jewish. Palestinians are killed for being the Muslims and Christians who hold historic, legal and even genetic title to that land.

But unlike Jews of Europe, Palestinians are killed slowly over decades. Unlike Israel, Nazi Germany did not establish such an effective global propaganda machine that would demonize its victims and blame them for their own ghastly fate. But most importantly, like the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, Palestinians do not march like mice to their death. In six decades of enduring unspeakable oppression, their will has not been broken. Now is no exception.

Israel, and the United States with its unconditional support, will only succeed in radicalizing a whole new generation of its victims. Of revving world hatred and resentment against this unholy duo.
Palestinians will not forget this, as they have not forgotten the past 60 years. But what will you remember a week or a year or a decade from now, when a Gazan, who stood before the long rows of corpses and vowed vengeance, creates your 9-11? When one of those few million children without a will to live straps on a belt that rips through your daily routine? Will you remember what we did to them?

It’s true that Mr. Biden brings some political experience to Mr. Obama’s ticket, but so could many of Mr. Obama’s other choices. Mr. Biden also narrows the race gap, which unfortunately still exists in America. But again, so could any of the other choices.

So, what then? Mr. Biden, the self-proclaimed Zionist, assuages Israeli and Jewish American fears that Mr. Obama might not be so accommodating to Israel.

I know it’s hard for the average American to believe that Israeli interests could have such influence on a presidential election. Israeli propaganda does an outstandingly good job of diffusing any meaningful debate on the Middle East or Israel’s role in shaping our foreign policies. Whether by defaming Jimmy Carter for daring to speak out or by censoring or ignoring important scholastic books such as The Israel Lobby by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, Americans are kept ignorant of just how important it is to please Israel in order to have a real chance at occupying an elected post in Washington. Every politician, newsman, and pundit knows that you cannot be elected in Washington without the blessing of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), known simply as “The Lobby” in Washington.

Under the Clinton administration, the head of AIPAC had to resign after someone leaked a tape of him discussing how AIPAC was negotiating with the president about whom he should select for Secretary of State. It is undeniably the most powerful foreign interest group in Washington, and arguably the most powerful lobby in general.

Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress and a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations admitted that, “When it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict, the terms of debate are so influenced by organized Jewish groups, like AIPAC, that to be critical of Israel is to deny oneself the ability to succeed in American politics.” A noteworthy example of the great influence Israel wields on American foreign policy came in the summer of 2006, when Israel attacked Lebanon. As the world over condemned the attack, we stood alone in support of Israel. On July 18, the Senate unanimously approved a resolution “condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel’s exercise of its right to self-defense.” After language was removed from the bill urging “all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure,” the House version passed by a landslide, 410-to-8.

Thus, in response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers (which followed the killing of a Lebanese man inside Lebanon), Israel killed and maimed thousands of civilians, decimated civilian infrastructure, and littered Southern Lebanon with over 100,000 of the world-banned unexploded cluster bombs. Congress unequivocally approved and supported Israel’s actions with this resolution, which AIPAC actually wrote! Even when a post-war analysis by the State Department was delivered to Nancy Pelosi and Mr. Biden, asserting that Israel may have violated the Arms Export Control Act with its use of American-made cluster munitions in Lebanon, bipartisan support of Israel remained unwavering.

This potentially explosive report detailing how Israel may have used American supplied weapons to commit war crimes was ignored by Mr. Biden and Mrs. Pelosi, both of whom have traveled to Israel repeatedly, along with scores of other politicians, genuflecting as they always do to extol the virtues of the Jewish State and profess undying and uncompromising support for a country that is currently in violation of at least 200 UN Resolutions and has been condemned in the harshest terms by human rights organizations worldwide. It is a country that has been repeatedly caught spying on America (most recently, two top AIPAC officials were indicted based on evidence that they accepted and passed on to Israel confidential national security secrets from a Defense Department analyst working with AIPAC) and which continues to defy U.S. demands to stop annexing and colonizing private Palestinian property with illegal Jewish-only settlements. One would think such behavior would at least draw some criticism from candidates. But rarely does any politician dare.

Mr. Biden has proved himself an acolyte of Israel. In an interview with Shalom TV, Mr. Biden proclaimed: “I am a Zionist.” Ira Forman, the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council said that “Biden is a great friend … with a solid pro-Israel record.” Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Biden brings “The Lobby” to Mr. Obama’s corner and that’s why he was picked. Let us at least open up the discussion to include the influence of this foreign interest lobby. Americans deserve to understand the forces behind decisions that affect us all individually and collectively as a nation.

I listened carefully to each of my fellow panellists talk about the two-state solution and heard potential fixes for everything from the settlements and water, to regional balance of power and refugees. The other Palestinian on the panel still believed in the two-state solution even though it is neither “ideal nor just” but he was willing to compromise anyway. Just to live. To walk home without going through five checkpoints. I wasn’t as willing. He lives there, I don’t. I get it. But I’m Palestinian too. And the country they stole was also my inheritance, my history and heritage, my home where my family has lived for centuries.

Creating a disjointed Palestinian state completely surrounded by Israel on what is now less than 16% of historic Palestine is and always was unjust and immoral, as it overrides basic principles of justice and international law and precludes repatriation for over 5 million refugees. The other panellists felt that I essentially was unrealistic or naïve. I listened again to all the things that Israel would “never agree to” and a rehashing of the endless “peace initiatives” in all the glory of their persistent failures to do anything but increase Palestinian misery.

What Israel will or will not “agree to” ought to be moot because Israel has never been vague about its nefarious intentions to have all of Palestine without Palestinians. Everything they’ve said and everything they’ve done and continue to do speak to this fact. It is not about what Israel will or will not accept, but whether we and all of humanity, Jews and Gentiles alike, will accept that Palestinians should not have certain self-evident and inalienable rights accorded to the rest of humanity.

Each initiative to settle this conflict reflects some creative design to circumvent Palestinian basic human rights in order to accommodate Israel’s desire for religious purity. The world is willing to leave five million Palestinian refugees out in the cold (”to be settled at a later date”) because Israel insists on “Judaising” the homes, cemeteries, farms, and history they stole from them.

The international community raises no objection to Israel’s eternal control of all Palestinian borders, economy, water, and air. Gaza’s 1.6 million human beings languish in darkness, mass hunger and misery deliberately imposed by Israel, without so much a peep from the Security Council.

It is not clear to me what we have done to the world that we should be so excluded from humanity, but this persistent trampling of our human rights must end. Either nations have accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a document that applies equally to all human beings, or we do away with that document all together and join to Israel’s law of the jungle. There can be no selective application of its principles – principles that guarantee the right of refugees to return to their homes; that promise us a right to our own history and heritage and freedom from foreign occupation and oppression.

We are not less human that we should be expected to continue to “negotiate” with our oppressors for basic human rights. For decades now we have extended our collective hand in willingness to accept the two-state solution, a desperate offer of great compromise on our part. And for that same length of time, Israel has continued to steal more and more of our land, to kill, maim, and dispossess more and more of us. The daily horrors inflicted on my countrymen have nothing to do with terrorism or our corrupt leadership. Our great crime is that we are not Jewish. We are oppressed, denied, humiliated daily, dispossessed and robbed because we are not Jewish.

The concepts of human equality, human dignity, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not the exclusive privies of West. They are also ours and we are not powerless to demand them. Ours is the power of an indigenous people struggling against a colonial oppressor hell-bent on taking our place, even though there is space enough for both peoples.

History has already taught us that military might is no match for such a power. Increasingly, people of conscience, including our Jewish brothers and sisters, throughout the world are speaking up for our rights, often at great personal expense to themselves. Academics, labour unions, churches, and civic institutions around the globe are divesting from Israel. We should stop engaging in theoretical debates about a dead and bloated two-state solution, rummaging through the wreckage of countless peace initiatives, giving up more and more, hoping this merciless military occupation will have mercy on us.

Human worth cannot be measured by arbitrary standards, like skin color or religion. History will teach us this lesson yet again, and it will judge harshly all the 60th anniversary celebrations taking place around the world on this day when we grieve for the identity, land, and heritage taken from us because we are not Jewish. We watch these celebrations with an ineffable collective loss and grief, and an equally deep vow never to give up our basic rights as the natives of Palestine.

No matter how great the injustice done to us Palestinians or how deeply our grief curls into time and into the earth, it seems the world still refuses to hear our voice and insists that we shall not exist in history except as squatters, terrorists, or subhuman creatures unworthy of our own land and heritage or of the right to defend ourselves and resist oppression. The latest institution to contribute to the erasure of millennia of our Palestinian culture and history is the Salon du Livre, with great influence from the French Ministry of Culture.

Every year this book fair chooses one country to honor and showcase its contemporary writers. This year, the choice was Israel: a 60 year old country established in place of the ancient land of Palestine with an imported population (Europe, the former Soviet Union, U.S.A., Ethiopia, etc.) in place of the native population, the Palestinians, who were ethnically cleansed from most of the land and who still languish in the abject conditions of refugee camps, under a cruel military occupation, or at the whims of winds that swirl us about in a Diaspora. Israel, with an abysmal human rights record, leading the world with the most violations of international laws and UN Resolutions, has taken a land once multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural and turned into a place of exclusivity for Jews only. This country, called an Apartheid State by moral authorities the likes of Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter and accused of Nuremburg crimes by leading scholars of international law like Drs. Francis Boyle and Richard Falk, is the nation that France has chosen to celebrate at its most celebrated Book Fair.

Yet, until recently, I thought we still had a chance in March. I naively thought that France would welcome our narrative and present my book, The Scar of David, especially since the French version (Les matins de Jenine) is being released on 6 March. It is a story that I pulled it from the depths of my country’s anguished soul and from the most primal scream to be heard and recognized for the violated nation that we are. But no Palestinian [even Palestinian-Israelis] are invited and I was thus encouraged not to come.

How can this be? Do they know that Israel sits on top of emptied Palestinian villages? The crops that Israelis eat come from a soil fertilized and made rich from the bodies of my Palestinian ancestors and fruit from trees planted by those same ancestors, starting with my grandparents and going back centuries if not millennia? I am unquestionably a daughter of Jerusalem, even if Israel deems me not to be human enough to live and thrive there as all my ancestors before me have. Does the Salon du Live wish to pretend, as Israel does, that Palestine and Palestinians do not and never did exist? Do they know Jesus was Palestinian and many Palestinian Christians can trace their ancestry to the first century? There are Palestinians whose surnames are “Canaan”. No Israeli has roots that sink as deeply into that land as the dispossessed Canaan family must! Has it occurred to the organizers that those Hebrew tribes that existed in Palestine 3,000 years ago are more likely to be my ancestors [if indeed genetic continuity is possible over such a period], not the ancestors of Russian Jews or any other imported Israeli ethnic group?

Or is the Salon du Livre simply complicit in the ongoing efforts of Israel to rid the world of us and any memory of our heritage, culture, history and gaping wound?

The world has roared with contempt at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s alleged desire to wipe Israel off the map. And yet, Israel has actually been slowly wiping Palestine off the map for the past 60 years, in deeds and words. Every day acres of land are confiscated from what little remains to us of Palestine in order to build Jewish-only domains. Every day our men and women, as young as 12, suffer in their jails and torture chambers without charge or trial. At every turn, there is a wall, a bullet, or a checkpoint to deny, starve, or humiliate and break us. Death constantly comes at us from air land and sea with the most sophisticated weaponry. Every hope or dream we might have suffocates in refugee camps unfit for human beings but which our proud people have endured for more than half a century. Recently the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned that “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and–some would say–encouragement of the international community.” So, the world watches life being slowly and deliberately extinguished in Gaza, as Israel, with unbearable irony, turns Gaza into a massive concentration camp. And around the world, the voices of our leaders, artists, writers, and activists are silenced, ever we try to speak, to protest, or scream in agony for help. Yet our demise is met not with contempt, but with muffling of our painful narrative and celebration at international book fairs like the Salon du Livre!!

Why??

What have we done to deserve such a fate? What have we done to France or to the world that no one will stand against such injustice? Everything has been taken from us and our hearts carved out because we are not Jewish! What has been our crime that we should be so excluded from the human race, forced to negotiate endlessly with our oppressors for the basic human rights accorded to the rest of humanity? Spoken of as if animals when we dare to fight back? Why will no one hear our voice? What hope do we have if even lovers of books will pretend we do not exist and therefore have no story worth reading?

I still plan to go. I figure if little Palestinian boys with rocks are brave enough to fight soldiers with rifles and tanks, I shouldn’t be afraid of facing hypocrites with books and a suspect agenda.

And yet . . . I wish the absurdity of it were truly so benign as a hullabaloo. If you were paying attention, you’d have heard the menace of ethnic cleansing and seen the malignancy of cowardice.

George Bush made it clear that the United States will not pressure Israel into doing anything it doesn’t like. Plainly, the United States, the country that gives Israel $14,346 for every woman man and child in Israel, will not insist that Israel withdraw from the West Bank , which it has been occupying illegally since 1967. It will not insist that Israel stop detaining and torturing Palestinian men, women and children, leaving them to languish for years without charge or trial. The US, a country founded on the principle that all men are created equal, will not insist that Israel provide full rights under the law for non-Jews equal to that it accords for Jews. The US will continue to give Israel more money and weapons that it has ever given to any country and we will not even insist that Israel comply with one single UN Resolution (out of over 200 resolutions censuring Israel) or the Geneva Conventions, or any other tenet of international law. We will not require, in concurrence with our own laws, that this recipient of massive foreign aid do something to correct its abysmal human rights record. We will, however, in 2008, issue the first instalment of a brand-spanking-new $30 billion aid package to Israel.

Onto Ehud Olmert, who made it clear that Israel will only hold “bilateral negotiations” with Palestinians — no third parties allowed. Plainly, again: Palestinians can turn blue in the face and die, but they will still be denied their natural right as natives of that land to return to the homes from which they were forcibly expelled for the high crime of not being Jewish. Their resources, particularly water, will of course, always be controlled by Israel. Similarly, all borders, hence all movement and every aspect of their economy, will be controlled by Israel. Other basic human rights, for which Palestinians are required to “negotiate” include the right to education, the right to move freely in one’s own country, the right to pray in their holy places, the right to live and thrive in Jerusalem as they have for all of time, the right to life, the right to live without snipers situated all around you and checkpoints everywhere you go, the right to get to a hospital when you’re having a baby or when your father is having a heart attack, the right not to be beaten arbitrarily, the right not to be humiliated because you aren’t Jewish, the right not to have your family’s farm confiscated because Jews from New York want to come over and play cowboy with state issued Uzis, the right to visit your grandparent’s graves, the right to play. You name any inherent right, Palestinians are required to negotiate with their oppressors to have it.

I suppose this is nature of imperialism, and how cruelly it operates when good people do nothing to stand in its way. It’s a bitter truth, but I get it. No one really expected Bush or Olmert to care whether Palestinians live or die. Israel’s primary aim has always been clear: Palestine without Palestinians.

What I don’t understand, however, is what were all of those Arab leaders doing participating in that charade in Annapolis? I don’t remember what Abu Mazen said. I don’t care. Turning on his brothers said more than I wanted to hear. What was going through their heads in Annapolis, knowing that, in the meantime, Israel has cut off food, medicine, and fuel to 1.5 million human beings trapped in the open prison that is Gaza. Children as young as five years old in Gaza are forced to leave school and work 10 back-breaking hours a day to bring two shekels ($0.26) home, which now has no electricity, no clean water, no food, no fuel, no joy, and is constantly under the threat of sonic planes that fly from Israel to break the sound barrier over them, terrorizing everyone on the ground; making women miscarry and small children so traumatized that they become brain damaged. What gives Israel the right to do this? To starve 1.5 million Palestinians, half of whom are children? How do Abu Mazen and other Arab leaders turn their backs on our tortured brothers and sisters to shake the very hands that drip with Palestinian and Iraqi blood. What are we to make of that? What are Gazans to make of it?

Palestinians in Gaza are dying like dogs, of hunger and lack of medicine. This is not happening because a tsunami hit their shores, or because a drought has created famine, or because a tornado has destroyed all infrastructure of civil society. This humanitarian catastrophe, for which the UN and human rights organization around the world have condemned Israel, is man-made. Our countrymen are being intentionally starved! Or, as Dov Weisglass joked, “[Israel’s] idea is to put Palestinians on a diet”.

Nor is Hamas innocent. They have put pride and power above the welfare of their people. And so, Gazans go hungry, cold, and sick. Fishermen are not allowed to fish. The sick cannot leave for medical treatment. There are no antibiotics, vitamins, or vaccines in hospitals. Students cannot leave for university. There is no work. No industry is functional. Classrooms are as empty as the bellies of the children who should be occupying them. Israel is cutting off electricity to Gaza and so they live in darkness.

Is there no mercy for 1.5 million besieged souls? Have we not one Arab leader with the courage to put a stop to this genocide? Not one leader with courage enough to intervene in the internecine fighting between Fateh and Hamas? To demand that the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people be included in any summit or negotiations? How is it possible that Arab men who command the greatest natural resource ever known to man manage to be utterly powerless to stop the wholesale robbery and rape of Palestine or Iraq? Is attending such a farce as Annapolis the best they can do?

Now we arrive at yet another surreal meeting in the clouds: Annapolis. Everyone is invited except the PLO — the sole and only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people — and the democratically elected members of the Palestinian Authority (that would be Hamas). At this meeting, Israel will throw us a few bones, like releasing some prisoners (who will most likely get rounded up again when the hype dies down) while it is intentionally starving 1.4 million human beings in Gaza, cutting off fuel, electricity and clean drinking water. Annapolis will serve only to move Israel a little closer to stamping out the “refugee problem,” those Palestinians and their descendants whose homes, farms, property and history Israel stole.

Palestinians are the natives of the land that was called Palestine for the last several thousand years until 1948 when Jewish foreigners changed its name to Israel. We are the natives in every sense of that word: historically, legally, culturally, ethnically, and even genetically! True there were Jewish tribes in that land some 3,000 years ago. There were also Canaanites, Babylonians, Sumarians, Philistines, Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, and Brits. Palestinians are the natural descendants of all of these peoples who passed through that land, intermarried and converted between religions. When you understand this, it becomes clear why Palestine has always been a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious society. In other words, the idea of “tolerance” and co-existence that the West fought to attain and claims to cherish and hold dear, was already a reality in Palestine. Israel has taken that ideal, turned it on its head, and beat it to a pulp so every Jew in the world can have a place where he or she can go and see none but fellow Jews. Remarkably, the world sees nothing wrong or out of the ordinary with this and would like us to simply live with it, negotiate with a juggernaut military power that has made no secret of its desire and intent to take all of Palestine and get rid of as many of us Gentiles as it possibly can.

Never in history has the world so cruelly called on an oppressed, robbed, and battered native people to sit down with their oppressors to “negotiate” for their freedom. Even worse, what we are expected to negotiate away are our basic human rights, in order to have a few checkpoints removed so we can call those ghettos — surrounded by a 20 foot concrete wall with guard towers — a “state.”

We are being asked to give up our natural right to return to the homes from which we were forcibly removed because, and only because, we are not Jewish. We are asked, as native Muslims and Christians, to give up our natural right to live and thrive in Jerusalem as we have for all of time. We are told that we should not expect to have the right to control our own water, economy, airspace, or borders. Why? Why should we accept such an inferior status and inferior fate? We are not children of a lesser god that we should be expected to relinquish God-given, self-evident rights accorded and upheld for the rest of humanity. We are not animals to be disposed of so that Jewish individuals around the globe can have dual citizenship, a sort of summer country in the Hamptons.

Would anyone have thought to support the desire of White South Africans to live as separate and superior humans and expect Black South Africans to “negotiate” with the Apartheid government for their basic human rights? Of course not! Anyone with a mind and conscience took for granted that Blacks have equal rights as Whites. That is self-evident and non-negotiable. So is our right as non-Jews in Palestine to be accorded the same rights and privileges as Jews in our ancestral homeland. Human dignity and equality simply should not be topics of negotiation in the 21st century.

Even more vulgar is Israel’s insistence that we recognize its right to be a state of the Jewish people. This country that stole everything from us – our homes, our holy places, our trees and farms, our institutions, our history and heritage, the cemeteries where our grandparents and forefathers are buried – because we are not the right kind of human in their eyes. They want us not only to attest that such an affront to humanity is legitimate and appropriate, but that it is somehow a right!

Let me, as one dispossessed and disinherited Palestinian, say with all the force of my love and anguish for my country, my family, and my countrymen, that I do NOT recognize such right. A right is something inherently and unquestionably just. Jewish exclusivity and entitlement at the expense of non-Jews is not a right, for God’s sake, it is racism!

Such reactions are preposterous, not because they miss the mark, but because Paul Wolfowitz’s history before heading the World Bank and during his tenure there includes evidence of espionage, warmongering, doctoring of intelligence, abuse of power, subversion of US laws and international law, inter alia. One is left marveling at the public’s sense of moral proportion.

It is now widely known that Wolfowitz was among the chief architects of the invasion of Iraq, conceived long before September 11 and advanced with subterfuge and lies. The plan goes back at least to 1996 when Wolfowitz, along with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and other neocons co-authored a six-page document outlining a strategy for the destabilization of the Middle East to consolidate Israeli hegemony of the region. The plan, entitled “Clean Break,” included a war against Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as well as the Syrian regime. They wrote “Israel can shape its strategic environment in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq-an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right-as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” The plan also included complete rejection of the Oslo “land for peace” doctrine, a merciless reoccupation of Palestinian territories, and permanent annexation of prime lands in the West Bank and Gaza strip. Bill Clinton was reluctant when presented with the plan, but Wolfowitz found his opportunity in 9-11 to advance this agenda. According to insiders, investigative reporters, and George Tenet himself, it was he, Paul Wolfowitz, who rewrote the CIA intelligence on Iraq to include the infamous outright lie that Iraq was trying to obtain enriched uranium from Niger. In fact, an ad hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), headed by Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith, presented the White House with intelligence information, which was often contrary to that obtained by the CIA and UN inspectors. Apparently, only Colin Powell questioned the accuracy of this information at the time. The speech he was to deliver to the UN prior to the invasion was largely written by the OSP, and after going through, deleting whole pages and passages, Powell was reported to have said “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit,” according to US News and World Report.

Despite the abysmal failure of the Iraq invasion, Wolfowitz continued his warmongering by pushing the Israeli agenda for tough measures by the US against Syria and Iran. But his office as Deputy Secretary of Defense became too hot during the FBI espionage investigation into evidence that an analyst under Feith and Wolfowitz, Larry Franklin, passed classified information onto the Israeli government through its US lobby, AIPAC, arguably the most powerful lobby in Washington. Of course, this isn’t the first time Wolfowitz was implicated in espionage against the US for Israel. He was investigated in 1978 for providing classified documents to Israel regarding sensitive US military sales. He has also never been too far from other investigations into Israeli spying that includes a tangled web spanning at least 30 years and encompassing names like Perle, Feith, Bryen, Libby, Indyke, Leeden, to name a few. But the American memory is short and all this became old news. The Larry Franklin-AIPAC-Israel espionage story was quickly put down by US media, with the Washington Post burying the story in its Metro section, as if a national spy case potentially involving high-ranking administration officials were a local news story.

But Paul Wolfowitz is a clever man and he would soon find another venue to advance the Israeli Likud ideology and agenda: The World Bank.

While the FBI probe was underway and intensifying, with subpoenas of top AIPAC staffers, Israel had asked the World Bank to fund elaborate checkpoints and crossings along the internationally condemned Wall it has been building on confiscated Palestinian land deep into the West Bank. However, Israel is not eligible for monetary assistance from the World Bank because its income per capita is too high. So the application was presented on behalf of the Palestinians and described as a humanitarian plan to ease travel restrictions for Palestinian goods and labor. Thus, the money was ostensibly for Palestinians, but to be held and used by Israel. In effect, Palestinians were being asked to get loans (and pay them back) to fund the very infrastructure that ghettoized them into Bantustans and confiscated their prime agricultural lands, rendering more Palestinian farmers as cheap labor for Israel! Of course, then President of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, rejected the plan. The World Bank wasn’t about to contribute to the financing of an illegal occupation and a barrier that had been condemned by the International Court of Justice as illegal.

So, in 2005, when the Franklin-AIPAC-Israel FBI investigation was getting closer to the office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz decided to leave his post for an appointment as President of the World Bank. Most of the world was aghast and few believed a man with his perfidious record (and looming spying allegations) would actually be confirmed to the position. But he was. Lo and behold, the World Bank changed its position on Israel’s application and began plans to fund a huge undertaking that would maintain “Jews only” roads, install state of the art checkpoint systems with new scanning technologies and build industrial zones which would take advantage of Palestinian desperation in the form of a cheap labor force and put the most environmentally damaging industries of the Israeli economy on Palestinian land. The Apartheid apparatus of occupation and subjugation would thus be firmly entrenched using loans from the World Bank, which, brilliantly, the Palestinians themselves would have to repay.

So there you have Wolfowitz, with a lifetime of treachery and subversion that has contributed to the hijacking of US foreign policy in the name of Israel, the devastation, killing and rape of Iraq and Palestine, and the loss of thousands of American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. And this country is finally outraged because he showed favoritism to his girlfriend!

This case calls for a recalibration of the collective moral compass that provokes greater concern over romantic impropriety than what amounts to crimes against humanity.