Letter from Bethlehem: Mazin Qumsiyeh

 Langston Hughes wrote a poem, "Lenox Avenue Mural" in the 1930s:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Our situation in Palestine is very dire indeed.  Millions of Palestinians squeezed into shrinking concentration areas, massacred, starved, and deprived of all basic human rights.  Zionism, built on notions of privilege and choseness cannot help but spread racism, destruction and ethnic cleansing. There is a process of slow transfer from most of the West Bank to the ghettos otherwise designated area A.

On the anniversary of the start of the Nakba (the Catastrophe, when over 500 villages and towns were completely depopulated as part of the planned and organized process whereby Zionists thought they could transform a pluralistic Palestine into a racist monolithic Jewish state. I say the start of Nakba because while a major aspect of it see http://www.palestineremembered.com/ )
It is a symptom of Zionist power and callousness that became Israel's modus operandi since the international community remained silent about the original and first crime against humanity, the largest post-WWII: the theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestine precisely 78 years ago. In a letter published in the New York Times in December 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other Jewish intellectuals warned against the slide to fascism represented by Menachem Begin )who later became Israeli prime minister) and his party Herut (later Likud and now Kadima): http://www.qumsiyeh.org/einsteinetalonbegin/
Research has shown that the return of Palestinian refugees to be legal, moral, and also doable. Annulling it would set a poor precedent in flaunting international law and allowing exclusion based on religion.

Timeline of Zionist colonization in Palestine: http://www.qumsiyeh.org/palestinetimeline/

For the first time since 1948 the children and grandchildren of the refugees can see their homeland from which their fathers were expelled. When they tried to return in 1948, they were shot dead as 'infiltrators'. Now Palestinians can see Palestine as it was in 1948. They can fly over it, but only in preparation for the day when they will actually walk over its soil and recover their patrimony. https://www.plands.org/en/maps-atlases/maps/fly-over-palestine

Nakba Actions
https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2012/05/nakba-action.html
 
Alnakba History (English)  
http://youtu.be/bm7dMhE80dw
https://youtu.be/jYvimRnlTqE

Excellent documentary on life in Palestine before the Nakba (before the Palestinian holocaust) Arabic with English subtitles
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/al-jazeera-world/2014/5/14/lost-cities-of-palestine

We must all act based on the Palestinian civil society call to action including via boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (http://bdsmovement.net)

Stay Humane, act, and keep hope and Palestine alive

Mazin Qumsiyeh
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director of 

Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine