Israel diverting attention away from Palestine: Academic
Press TV has interviewed Jamal Wakim, a professor at the Lebanese International University, in Beirut, to discuss the plight of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Following is a rough transcription.
Press TV: Give us your thoughts on the situation regarding the Palestinian hunger strikers under Israeli-administered detention and whether you think that human rights groups should do more to change the status quo?
Wakim: Definitely. Human rights groups are not doing much to support the Palestinian prisoners, whether local groups or international non-governmental organizations, especially that Israel is playing its cards, it is influencing Western countries and presenting these prisoners as terrorists.
It benefits from the ongoing situation in the region to make this prisoners appear as if they are terrorists like ISIS (Daesh) or other groups, especially for the Western audience which doesn’t know much about the Middle East. This is coupled also with the lack of support from the Palestinian authority or from Palestinian resistance groups, whether being Fatah or Hamas.
Press TV: The issue of Palestinian prisoners is part of a long list of daily rights violations that the Israelis carry out against the Palestinians. We have established that the silence of the international community has continued. But what about Arab governments and countries. Do you believe that they too have been too complacent with regards to the rights violations carried out against the Palestinians?
Wakim: Definitely! Either by consent or by acquiescence over the situation in Palestine. Since Egypt and some other Arab counties signed peace treaties with Israel, they decided not to support the Palestinian cause and they changed it from a just cause for a whole people to a partial humanitarian cause and with the tacit support of the Saudis and other (Persian) Gulf countries to Israel and their effort to crack down on the Palestinians with the lack of support by general Arab countries due to the problems that some countries are facing like Libya, for example Syria, Iraq, Yemen.
Because of their internal crisis they switched their attention from the Palestinian cause, so all these factors make the Palestinians stand alone in facing Israeli atrocities and Israeli occupation.
Well, I also blame the Palestinian leadership, whether that of the Palestinian authority Abu Mazen, the president of the Fatah faction, or even Hamas faction which switched its attention from fighting Israel to being implicated in the crises in various Arab countries, whether being Egypt, or Syria.
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