Loading ...As Congress heeds Israel lobbyists, press blacks out Abunimah, Munayyer and Blumenthal
Last Thursday in Washington, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution against Palestinian incitement following a hearing featuring the testimony of three Israel lobbyists on alleged Palestinian bloodthirstiness. The hearing got wide press coverage.
The next day the Palestine Center held a conference near the Capitol featuring analysis of the Palestinian rebellion from Yousef Munayyer, Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal. That conference has gotten no press coverage at all. You’d think that a diverse conference attended by a standing-room-only crowd and seeking to explain the causes of Palestinian violence would get wide attention– you’d be wrong. The Washington Post ran two pieces highly critical of Israel this weekend, but one was by two professed Zionists, the other by an Israeli. The mainstream is not ready for Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices.
Below are videos of Blumenthal’s and Munayyer’s comments. Abunimah’s will be posted in a day or so; and I’ll pass them along then. (There were a dozen other fine speakers on other subjects, including Laila el-Haddad, Andrew Kadi, Radhika Sainath, Bill Corcoran, Omar Shakir, and Fouad Moughrabi; I’ll get to those talks later.)
Munayyer said that “the escalated uprising in Palestine” is important because it signals to the Israelis that the occupation is not cost free. But it also has the potential to damage international solidarity for Palestinians.
His comments are in the last few minutes of the video. Israelis are not absorbing the lesson that the occupation cannot be sustained, Munayyer said; opinion polling shows that overwhelmingly they would prefer an even harsher response to the violence than what Benjamin Netanyahu has delivered. So “the radicalization and rightward drift in the Israeli polity continues.”
Then Munayyer spoke of the possible damage to Palestinian solidarity:
Where the challenge is here is whether or not the current uprising sets back what I think have been very significant advances in global public opinion around this issue, which has viewed Palestinians increasingly as the victims of Israeli occupation and has viewed the Israelis overwhelmingly as the reason why progress on the peace front does not continue. So I think for Palestinians it’s important to keep in mind that to the greatest extent that this uprising against occupation can be coordinated and can keep in mind the sensitivities of international public opinion, which are central to the solidarity necessary for the support for their cause– to the extent that that can be kept in mind in this uprising, if the energy behind this uprising can be channeled toward the kind of efforts that I believe have driven success for that change of public opinion, namely the effort for boycott divestment and sanctions, the more likely that this recent uprising can lead to positive things for Palestinians.
If, however, the rebellion continues as it has, “there are many challenges that one can see, and unfortunately because of the brutality of the Israeli occupation it is Palestinians that will continue to pay the highest price.”
Source: mondoweiss.net