By Martin Love
I have been to Jenin in the West Bank. This was in winter 2006. I visited the cemetery there and saw the graves of Palestinians, many who died from an earlier attack on the Jenin Refugee Camp somewhat similar to the one this summer. My host was the Palestinian Red Crescent in Tubas, some 30 miles to the southeast.
What I saw and heard in Jenin was appalling, but what has happened overall since the latest Netanyahu government came to power is worse.
My host in the West Bank for several weeks in 2006 was one Dr. Adnan Mjalli, age 60, a medicinal biochemist and business whiz with a PhD earned in England as a young man. A Tubas native, he is currently running an investment firm based around a number of previous business successes both overseas and in North Carolina. He has a lavish, almost palatial home in Tubas where his extended family lives, and he may well be among the best connected and most successful of all Palestinians emerging from the West Bank.
Israel’s current government is presided over by terrorists hiding behind government titles.Back in 2006 I barely made it to Tubas through Hamra Checkpoint in the Jordan Valley. After the IDF let me go on to Tubas after a delay at the checkpoint, they had second thoughts and sent out an unsuccessful patrol to find me. Then came those delightful weeks in Tubas where I helped out at a school, The American Academy of Palestine, that Mjalli had just established to serve children in Tubas and surrounds. The school, lodged in a multi-story building Mjalli owned in Tubas, was an object of harassment by Israel and the school was forced to close after three years of operation.
I was able to conduct a brief interview with Dr. Mjalli this past week. He called me over lunch in a restaurant in Serbia where he was on a business trip. I had not spoken with him in almost a decade:
Mjalli is well aware of what the current Netanyahu government in doing: the Zionist plan is simply to make life so miserable for the natives of the Holy Land that they will pack up and leave. He recognizes that things have rarely been worse, but he believes the millions of beleaguered Palestinians are NOT going anywhere and will continue to operate with their “samud” - their “steadfastness and perseverance” against Zionist aggression, oppression and violence. And that the scattered push back from Palestinians against the Israelis will continue. As for the unpopular Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, he says it will probably survive nominally but remain weak and ineffective in addressing demands for Palestinian freedom and civil rights. He also suggests that the so-called Abraham Accords will limp along, if not expand.
Israel’s current government is presided over by terrorists hiding behind government titles. Notably Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir whom Netanyahu became dependent upon so that he could return as Israel’s prime minister and also try to avoid trial and conviction for corruption charges earlier as Israel’s leader. Lately there has been talk of some sort of civil war in Israel over the efforts by Israel’s far right to emasculate the Supreme Court and essentially destroy ANY “democracy” in the Apartheid state. Dr. Mjalli claims a “civil war” among Israelis is unlikely but not impossible.
In sum, Adnan Mjalli had no breakthrough information to offer, no precocious surprising projections or forecasts about what’s ahead except more of the same Apartheid until it one day just stops, and it will because it simply must. The Palestinians will carry on steadfastly with “samud” and if the Zionists try wholesale evictions like a second Nakba, the world will not stand for it, not even the U.S. government. Zionism is, after all, one of the greatest crimes ever.
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