TEHRAN (FNA)- Palestinian author and activist Mazin Qumsiyeh says the besieged Gaza Strip is used as a laboratory for the Israeli regime to test its new weapons and to boost Tel Aviv’s arms industry.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, in an exclusive interview with FNA, said that Israel’s grand strategy of colonialism is shared by all Zionist parties and they only differ in their techniques to employ that strategy.
Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist, author and activist. He is the author of “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle”.
FNA has conducted an interview with Mazin Qumsiyeh about Israel’s brutal crackdown on Palestinian protesters, the Israeli legislation known as the Nation State Law and also Trump’s so-called "deal of the century.”
Below you will find the full text of the interview.
Q: It seems that killing scores of people and maiming thousands more over the past several months is no indication of what Israel thinks is enough to keep Gaza in check. Do you think Israel’s deadly clamp down on Palestinian protesters is going to end anytime soon?
A: Israel’s grand strategy is now well known and is based on typical colonial systems: separate natives from their land, destroy their economy, and build a new economy using the resources stolen. That strategy is shared by all Zionist parties but they differ on techniques. The so called “right wing” which dominated Israeli politics in the past two decades and which the US government fully supports (due to the lobby) believes in using maximum force to keep the Palestinian pacified/docile. In the case of besieged/blockaded Gaza, there is another tactic in work which is needed to boost the arms industry in Israel: new weapons have to be tested to boost sales, so Gaza acts as laboratory. This will continue unless either the International community wakes up and ensures human rights and international laws are respected OR the local resistance costs Israel significant price tag to restrain its trigger-happy leaders
Q: It’s been a year since the start of the protests known as the ‘Great March of Return.’ What do you think the march has accomplished so far?
A: Yes, these protests achieved much: pressure on the apartheid regime and on the international community in ways that are the only ways available to a captive population. But regardless of levels of success, in any case these are natural outbursts of desperate population whom much of the world governments (under pressures of strong Zionist lobbies) simply ignore.
Q: How do you think the US and some Arab states are complicit in crimes against the Palestinians especially in light with the discreet links between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states?
A: The complicity is deeper than even the strongest claims in social media and published articles occasionally expose. There are books written on this for example Noam Chomsky’s “The Fateful Triangle”. For example, the Saudi Regime was complicit with Britain in allowing Zionists to take a foothold in Palestine as early as 1916-1917.
Q: In July 2018, the so-called nation state law was adopted by Israeli Knesset. What do you think the legislation shows about the nature of the regime in Tel Aviv?
A: It is added to 65 other laws that discriminate against “non—Jews” in the Jewish state. The remaining Palestinians in historic Palestine suffer various degrees of discrimination. The 1.5 million who hold Israeli blue ID card have these 66 laws that discriminate against them. We in the West Bank and Gaza also get hundreds of racist apartheid laws in the form of military orders. It is expected in a racist settler colonial state to have racist laws.
Q: Many believe that the continuing illegal Israeli settlement activities have hammered nail after nail into the coffin of a diplomatic solution. What do you think about that?
A: I think people need to think of paradigms of outcomes for colonial anti-colonial struggles. Diplomacy has little to do with it. There are only three possible outcomes for such struggles: The Algeria model, the Australia/New Zealand model (genocide), and (the most common) the Latin America/South Africa model. The third model is the most common outcome of colonialism and the one that the vast majority of native people always support whether in South Africa or Palestine. Colonial settlements are integral to colonial mindsets and are not obstacles to “peace” since no such peace is possible unless colonialists either abandon colonial mentality or commit genocide against the natives.
Q: The current administration in the US has been boasting about its new plan for Palestine and even calling it the deal of the century. What do you think would be in the new deal for the Palestinians?
A: The so called deal of the century is the plan that is ongoing and has been ongoing for decades: ethnic cleansing, destruction, murder of natives, and normalizing colonial structures in the world. Trump and company have nothing new but to implement the Israeli wishful thinking of liquidating the Palestinian cause.
No comments:
Post a Comment