A temporary ceasefire and release of some Palestinians in a prisoner exchange is not a “peace agreement” and it is far from what is needed — ending colonisation; freedom for the >10,000 political prisoners still in Israeli gulags (also tortured, nearly 100 have died under torture in the last two years); return of the millions of refugees; and accountability for genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

That is why this global uprising (intifada) will not stop until freedom, justice, and equality are attained.

Here are brief answers I gave to questions about the agreement for Gaza:

1. How has life in the West Bank changed for you and your community during the past two years of conflict?
The West Bank has been illegally occupied since 1967 (ICJ ruling) but it was not merely an occupation but intensive colonisation and ethnic cleansing. The attacks on our people accelerated in the last two years with over 60,000 made homeless in the West Bank and denial of freedom of movement (including hundreds of new gates installed in these two years separating the remaining concentration camps/ghettos of the West Bank ).

2. What is your assessment of the new peace deal that brought an end to the fighting in Gaza?
It is not a peace deal. It is an agreement to pause the genocide which will not work because the belligerent occupier — “Israel” — has not respected a single agreement it signed since its founding. Even the agreement to join the United Nations was conditional on respecting the UN Charter and UN resolutions issued before and after 1949.

This continued to even breaking the signed ceasefire agreement of last year. I have 0 percent confidence that this latest agreement would be respected even on the simple aspect of “pausing” the genocide and ethnic cleansing going on since 1948.

3. In your view, why did war drag on for two years despite multiple ceasefire attempts?
Simply put because colonisation can only be done with violence. And the war on our people has gone on not for two years but for 77 years without ending (sustained by Western government support). Israel as a colonisation entity is the active face of colonisation. The USA for example broke similar agreements for “pauses” in colonisation with natives in North America and broke every single one of them.

Israeli military occupation on the environment.        Video: Greenpeace

4. What kind of humanitarian and environmental toll has the conflict taken on Palestinian society?
It is now well documented from UN agencies, human rights groups (like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, even the Israeli group B’Tselem). In brief it is genocide, ecocide, scholasticide, medicide,
and veriticide. (More at: ongaza.org )

5. Why do you think it took the IDF so long to rescue all the hostages?
The terrorist organisation that deceptively calls itself “IDF” (Israeli Defence Forces) was not interested in rescuing their captives (not “hostages”) and they only got people back via exchange of prisoners (not rescue).

The IGF (Israeli Genocide Forces) actually killed many of their own soldiers and civilians
on 7 October 2023 by activating the Hannibal directive to prevent their capture. The resistance was aiming to capture colonisers (living on stolen Palestinian lands) to exchange for some of the more than 11,000 political prisoners illegally held in Israeli jails. (Again see ongaza.org )

6. How significant was international involvement — particularly from the US — in reaching the final agreement?
This is the first genocide in human history that is not executed by one government. It is executed by a number of governments directly supporting and aiding (participating). This includes the USA, UK, France, Egypt, Germany, Australia etc. Many of these countries have governments dominated or highly influenced by the Zionist agenda.

Under the influence of a growing popular protest against the genocide around the world, some of those countries are trying to wiggle out from pressure in an effort to save
“Israel” from growing global isolation. Trump was blackmailed via videos/files collected by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghiseline Maxwell (Mossad agents). He is simply a narcissistic collaborator with genocide!

7. What concrete steps do you think are necessary now to turn this peace deal into a sustainable, lasting solution?
Again not a “peace deal”. What needs to be done is apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) on this rogue state that violates the international conventions (Geneva Convention, Conventions against Apartheid and Genocide). BDS was used against apartheid South Africa and needs to be applied here also. (For more: bdsmovement.net )

8. How do you see the Palestine Museum of Natural History contributing to rebuilding and healing efforts in the aftermath of war?
Our institute (PIBS, palestinenature.org) which includes museums, a botanic garden, and many other sections is focused on “sustainable human and natural communities” Our motto is respect: for ourselves (empowerment), for others (regardless of religious or other background), and for nature.

Conflict, colonisations, oppression are obviously areas we challenge and work on in JOINT struggle with all people of various background.

9. Looking ahead, what gives you optimism—or concern—about the future relationship between Palestinians and Israelis?
What gives me optimism first and foremost is the heroic resilience and resistance (together making sumud) of our Palestinian people everywhere and the millions of other people mobilising for human rights and for justice (including the right of refugees to return and also environmental justice).

What gives me concern is the depth of depravity that greedy individuals in power go to destroying our planet and our people and profiting from colonisation and genocide.

About 8.5 million Palestinians are refugees and displaced people thanks to Zionism and Western collusion with it. A collusion intent on transforming Palestine from multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multireligious, and multilingual society to a racist Jewish state (monolithic).

Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Bedouin in cyberspace; a villager at home; professor, founder and (volunteer) director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University, Occupied Palestine.

Notes:
World Court Findings on Israeli Apartheid a Wake-Up Call: International Court of Justice Makes Clear Call for Reparations

The 7 October 2023 reminded us of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

7 October 1944! Prisoner Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize as before was not given to the any of the hundreds of deserving nominees but given instead to rightwing pro-genocide María Corina Machado. She dedicated her prize to Donald Trump and had previously aligned with the worst rightwing parties throughout Latin America as well as the genocidal regime of Netanyahu (and even asked them for help to topple her own elected government).

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! As we continue our discussion of President Jimmy Carter’s legacy, we look at his policies in the Middle East and North Africa, in particular, Israel and Palestine.

On Thursday during the state funeral in Washington, President Carter’s former adviser Stuart Eizenstat praised Carter’s work on facilitating the Camp David Peace Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.

STUART EIZENSTAT: Jimmy Carter’s most lasting achievement, and the one I think he was most proud of, was to bring the first peace to the Middle East through the greatest act of personal diplomacy in American history, the Camp David Accords.

For 13 days and nights, he negotiated with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, personally drafting more than 20 peace proposals and shuttling them between the Israeli and Egyptian delegations.

And he saved the agreement at the 11th hour — and it was the 11th hour — by appealing to Begin’s love of his grandchildren.

For the past 45 years, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty has never been violated and laid the foundation for the Abraham Accords.

AMY GOODMAN: The Abraham Accords are the bilateral normalisation agreements between Israel and, as well, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel and Bahrain, signed in 2020.

In 2006, years after he left office, Jimmy Carter wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s former racist regime.

It was striking for a former US president to use the words “Palestine,” let alone “apartheid,” in referring to the Occupied Territories. I went down to The Carter Center to speak with President Jimmy Carter about the controversy around his book and what he wanted the world to understand.

JIMMY CARTER: The word “apartheid” is exactly accurate. You know, this is an area that’s occupied by two powers. They are now completely separated.

The Palestinians can’t even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory.

The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers.

So, within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of “apartheid” is, one side dominates the other.

And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t Americans know what you have seen?

JIMMY CARTER: Americans don’t want to know and many Israelis don’t want to know what is going on inside Palestine.

It’s a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine. And there are powerful political forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land.

I think it’s accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I’m familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries, or to publicise the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good-faith peace talks.

There hasn’t been a day of peace talks now in more than seven years. So this is a taboo subject. And I would say that if any member of Congress did speak out as I’ve just described, they would probably not be back in the Congress the next term.

AMY GOODMAN: President Jimmy Carter. To see that whole interview we did at The Carter Center, you can go to democracynow.org.

For more on his legacy in the Middle East during his presidency and beyond, we’re joined in London by historian Seth Anziska, professor of Jewish-Muslim relations at University College London, author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo.

What should we understand about the legacy of President Carter, Professor Anziska?

Late former US President Jimmy Carter’s opposition to Israeli apartheid. Video: Democracy Now!

SETH ANZISKA: Well, thank you, Amy.

I think, primarily, the biggest lesson is that when he came into office, he was the first US president to talk about the idea of a Palestinian homeland, alongside his commitment to Israeli security. And that was an enormous change from what had come before and what’s come since.

And I think that the way we understand Carter’s legacy should very much be oriented around the very deep commitment he had to justice and a resolution of the Palestinian question, alongside his commitment to Israel, which derived very much from his Southern Baptist faith.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the whole trajectory. Talk about the Camp David Accords, for which he was hailed throughout the various funeral services this week and has been hailed in many places around the world.

SETH ANZISKA: Well, I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about the legacy of Camp David is that this is not at all what Carter had intended or had hoped for when he came into office. He actually had a much more comprehensive vision of peace in the Middle East, that included a resolution of the Palestinian component, but also peace with Syria, with Jordan.

And he came up with some of these ideas, developed them with Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzeziński, his national security adviser. And in developing those ideas, which came out in 1977 in a very closely held memo that was not widely shared inside the administration, he actually talked about return of refugees, he talked about the status of Jerusalem, and he desired very much to think about the different components of the regional settlement as part of an overall vision.

This was in contrast to Henry Kissinger’s attitude of piecemeal diplomacy that had preceded him in the aftermath of the 1973 war. So we can understand Carter in this way very much as a departure and somebody who understood the value and the necessity of contending with these much broader regional dynamics.

Now, the reasons why this ended up with a far more limited, but very significant, bilateral peace treaty between Egypt and Israel had a lot to do both with the election of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977, as well as the position of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and also the role of the Palestinians and the PLO.

But what people don’t quite recall or understand is that Camp David and the agreement towards the peace treaty was in many ways a compromise or, in Brzeziński’s view, was a real departure from what had been the intention.

And that gap between what people had hoped for within the administration and what ended up emerging in 1979 with the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty also was tethered very much to the perpetuation of Palestinian statelessness. So, if we want to understand why and how Palestinians have been deprived of sovereignty or remain stateless to this day, we have to go back to think about the impact of Camp David itself.

AMY GOODMAN: Interesting that Sadat would be assassinated years later in Egypt when Carter was on the plane with Nixon and Ford. That’s when they say that cemented his relationship with Ford, while they hardly talked to Nixon at all.

But if you could also comment on President Carter and post-President Carter? I mean, the fact that he wrote this book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, using the word “Palestine,” using the word “apartheid,” to refer to the Occupied Territories — I remember chasing him down the hall at the Democratic convention when he was supposed to speak. This was the Obama Democratic convention. And it ended up he didn’t speak. And I chased him and Rosalynn, because . . .

SETH ANZISKA: Remember that in 1977, there was a very famous speech that he gave in Clinton, Massachusetts, talking about a Palestinian homeland. And that raised huge hackles, both in the American Jewish community among American Jewish leaders who were very uncomfortable and were already distrustful of a Southern Democrat and his views on Israel, but also Cold War conservatives, who were quite hawkish and felt that he was far too close to engaging with the Soviet Union.

And so, both of those constituencies were very, very opposed to his attitude and his approach on the Palestinian issue. And I think we can see echoes of that in how he then was treated after his presidency, when much of his activism and much of his engagement on the question of Palestine, to my view, derived from a sense of frustration and regret about what he was not able to achieve in the Camp David Accords.

And his commitment stemmed from the same values that he had been shaped by early on, a sense of viewing the Palestinian issue through the same lens as civil rights, in the same lens as what he experienced in the South, which is often, what his biographers have explained, where his views and approach towards the Palestinians came from, but also a particularly close relationship to biblical views around Israel and Zionism, that he was very much committed to Israeli security as a result.

And that was never something that he let go of, even if you look closely at his work in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Some of his views on Israel are actually quite closely aligned with positions that many in the Jewish community would feel comfortable with.

The fact that people criticised and attacked him for that, I think, speaks to the taboo of talking about what’s happening or what has happened, in the context of Israel and Palestine, in the same kind of language as disenfranchisement around race in apartheid South Africa.

And, of course, as Carter said in the interview you just ran that you had done with him when the book came out, the situation is far worse in actuality with what is happening vis-à-vis Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Seth Anziska, I want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of Jewish-Muslim relations at University College London, author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, speaking to us from London.

This transcript article was originally published by Democracy Now! and is republished here  under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Pacific state of Hawai’i’s House of Representatives has joined the state’s Senate in calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, becoming the first state to pass such a resolution, reports Hawaii News Now.

In March, the Senate passed a ceasefire resolution with a 24–1 vote, and now the House has passed it on a 48–3 vote last Friday.

However, although the lawmakers are the first to pass a ceasefire resolution, reports have quoted the state legislature’s Public Access Room as saying it “does not have the force and effect of law”.

Nor does it need a signature from the governor.

According to the resolution, the lawmakers are pushing for President Joe Biden’s administration to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

The Hawai’i lawmakers are also demanding that the administration “facilitate the de-escalation of hostilities to end the current violence, promptly send and facilitate the entry of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, including fuel, food, water, and medical supplies, and begin negotiations for lasting peace.”

President Biden has previously called for a ceasefire in Gaza, but there did not appear to be a contingency plan should negotiations seeking a ceasefire fail, according to The Washington Post.

Since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7, more than 34,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip by strikes from Israel, and 77,143 have been wounded.

US overthrew Hawai’ian kingdom
Tensions in the region go to at least the Nakba in 1948 when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land and illegal Israeli settlements began.

Given Hawai’i’s history of American businessmen overthrowing the indigenous Hawai’ian kingdom with the support of US military forces in 1893, pro-Palestinian advocates have pointed out that Hawai’i has a key connection to the conflict in Gaza.

Fatima Abed, founder of Rise for Palestine, is both Palestinian and Puerto Rican, and has a family member who is based in Gaza.

She told The Huffington Post: “People in Hawai’i, especially Native Hawai’ians, are determined on this issue because it’s very jarring to know that our tax dollars are going to fund the genocide of another colonised people while, here at home, our government budgets aren’t covering the basic needs of the people.”

Abed said that the island of Lahaina and its people had not been sufficiently cared for after the wildfires last August.

“Native Hawai’ians across the state have been underserved for decades. The people of Hawai’i see that money being sent overseas to hurt people instead of helping here, and it makes no sense.

“From the river to the sea, all of our people will be free.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz