Paul Thabet > Recent Status Updates

As long as the "peace process" is alive, Israel can continue to expand its settlement project in the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians there and establish facts on the ground that would render any future settlement unfeasible and impossible. Because of the dishonest brokering of the United States and Europe's impotence in international affairs, Israel continues to enjoy immunity in this process.

This language has helped Western diplomats and politicians remain ineffective-either out of will or necessity-in the face of continuing Israeli oppression. Expressions and phrases like "a land for two people," "the peace process," "the Israel-Palestine conflict," "the need to stop the violence on both sides," "negotiations," or "the two-state solution" come straight out of a contemporary version of Orwell's 1984.

و ربنا يكرمك و يضع في طريقك ست جدعه تقول لك "لأ" بحب و أمل..

Since Israel's foundation in 1948, Arabs had questioned the loyalties of Egypt's Jews, a doubt that wasn't helped by the Lavon Scandal in 1954, when Israeli intelligence recruited thirteen Jews from Alexandria to carry out terrorist attacks on Western targets so they could pin the blame on Egyptian nationalists and force Britain to maintain its presence in the country.

خرجت حنان في هدوء بعد أن دخلت في عاصفة. ومارضتش ألفت نظرها وهي خارجة إلى أنها قالت في الأول "أنا ملحدة"
وقالت قبل ما تمشي: "أنا زعلانة منك يارب"!

Then a lawyer said, But what of our Laws, master?

And he answered :

You delight in laying down laws,

Yet you delight more in breaking them.

Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter.

And a merchant said, Speak to us of buying and selling.
And he answered and said:
To you the earth yields her fruit, and you shall not want if you but know how to fill your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Yet unless the exchange be in love and kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed and others to hunger.

It may be that it would cost more lives to end the genocide than the action would save, but it is not tolerable to allow such wickedness to go unchecked.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

My father tried to restrain the beast he helped to create, but Israel will stop at nothing, because, as Frantz Fanon scathingly wrote, "Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence, and only gives in when confronted with greater violence."

After taking his (Jewish) son, and his sister to practice karate in Ramallah with a group of Palestinian karate students, Miko writes: I do believe that Israelis and Palestinians will live free side by side one day. I wanted to teach them that things will change for the better, and to encourage them to believe it and to act sccordingly. The overwhelming force of the Israeli army can make anyone feel hopeless.

After being arrested at a protest in the West Bank alongside other peace activists, and taken to a police station in an Israeli illegal settlement: "Finally, the station commander came out of his office, clearly exasperated, and explained in slow, simple terms to the army soldiers, "Look, he is an Israeli citizen and he has rights. He's not a Palestinian that I can just beat up and throw in prison."

I began to think to myself, Palestine's landscape is the kind that beckons you to open doors and its people are hospitable and always welcome you with open arms. It is a land of hospitality and kindness. Yet the settlers and their protectors have chosen to impose themselves on this land and its people, to take the land by force and close themselves within fortified ghettos, called settlements.

One has to admire Abraham for his tenacity. Stepping near as he did to confront the almighty and argue with God for the sake of a principle that he held dear, the principle that human life is sacred. Abraham wanted to get a real commitment from God, that He would indeed spare the city for the lives of innocent people.
Who was there to speak for the people of Gaza?

No army in the world can claim that it could have done better than the Egyptians in planning, managing, and storming the Suez Canal. The decision to exploit the success was a grave mistake. Let us remember well that one of the main factors in the Egyptian plan was the recognition of the great superiority of the Israeli Air Force and its almost equal superiority in mobile armored warfare.

Humans have tried to camouflage this unchanging reality under a thin and mutable veneer of myths and rituals, but we have never really broken free from the law of the jungle. Indeed, our myths and rituals are themselves a weapon used by the jungle's top dogs to deceive and trap their inferiors. Those who don't realise this are dangerously naive and will fall prey to some ruthless predator.

Do we need to go through another cycle of global empires, totalitarian regimes and world wars in order to figure out how to use new technologies benevolently? The technologies of the twenty-first century are far more powerful and potentially far more destructive - than those of the twentieth century. We therefore have less room for error.

I never thought that two thousand years of absence conferred rights to the land, whereas twelve hundred years of presence gave none to the local population.

DNA investigating, a relatively young science, has a brilliant future. But where the law prevents marriage between a "Jew" and a "non-Jew," we should be very wary about research that seeks genetic markers common to the "chosen people." Like similar investigations carried out by Macedonian racists, Lebanese Phalangists, Scandinavian Lapps, and so on, such Israeli research cannot be entirely free from crude racism.

Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.
- The declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel, 1948
Another convenient lie!

The inclusive concept briefly adopted by Zionists was based on the assumption that it would be easy to assimilate a "low and primitive" Oriental culture, and so the first violent resistance from the objects of this Orientalist fantasy shook them awake. From that moment on, the descendants of the Judean peasantry (now Palestinians) vanished from the Jewish national consciousness and were cast into oblivion.

The central myths about the primeval origin of a marvelous nation that emerged from the desert, conquered a spacious land and built a glorious kingdom were a boon for rising Jewish nationalism and Zionist colonization. For a century they provided textual fuel of canonical quality that energized a complex politics of identity and territorial expansion demanding self-justification and considerable sacrifice.

Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.

When does a joke become a "dad" joke???

...when it becomes apparent....

On "noble lies" that hold societies together: No wonder that various governments and churches have banned or limited the teaching of evolution, preferring to sacrifice truth for the sake of order.

The hypocrisy of the Christian world is so telling when it comes to its silence and even opposition to the right of return of these refugees. On the one hand, they celebrate the "return" of Jews two thousand years later to "their land" while denying the right of return to Palestinians who were expelled from their homes seventy years ago, many of whom still hold the keys to their houses.

When I see human cruelty and war, the silence of God does not trouble me; it is the silence of the church that troubles me. We are too busy with ourselves, occupied with our "festivals," "assemblies," "offerings," "songs," and "melodies of harps." And God says, "I hate all of this!"The church is too noisy. When will it quiet down enough to hear the cries of those experiencing injustice in our world?

The church has mastered the art of covering the wounds!
Real justice challenges unjust structures. As Bonhoeffer once said, "We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself."

Can we trust computer algorithms to make wise decisions and create a better world? That's a much bigger gamble than trusting an enchanted broom to fetch water. And it is more than just human lives we are gambling on. AI could alter the course not just of our species' history but of the evolution of all life forms.

Would Jesus stay silent in the face of injustice? What kind of a message do we send to those who are suffering from injustice if our answer to them is: "Sorry, we do not engage in politics." The message we communicate when we say such things is simple: "God does not care!" or rather, "I have more important religious concerns than your suffering". In fact, our silence towards injustice is an approval of this injustice