After French city honours Palestinian terrorist, Palestinian news agency pledges to encourage other cities across Europe to also recognize Palestinian "fighters"
Headline: “Let us learn from the Jews”
Op-ed by Hamadeh Farana
“The municipality of Bezons, France, expressed its solidarity with the residents of the Palestinian village of Beit Rima, who are tied by bonds of cooperation and comradeship, by publishing a decision, this past February 13 [2013], to award honorary citizenship to the fighter-prisoner in the Israeli occupation prisons, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP] member Majdi Al-Rimawi, and to hang a placard with his name in the town hall.
The municipality’s communist mayor said that the Bezons council’s decision was meant to support Beit Rima and to express solidarity with its mayor, Fathiya Barghouti, who is married to prisoner Majdi Al-Rimawi, and this reflects, as expressed by mayor Lesparre, the ‘widespread solidarity of the Bezons municipality and its municipality’s council with Palestine and its people.’
The Jewish community disagreed with this decision and spoke out against it. Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress, described the decision as ‘shameful and insufferable,’ and denounced the French municipality’s decision to declare the Palestinian fighter a ‘victim of the occupation.’
The Jewish initiative is predictable and usual, and it may have a negative affect that will push the Bezons municipality council to retract its decision. What we need [now] is for the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Christian communities to mount a counter-initiative in France to support the Bezons municipality’s decision and to encourage French and European municipalities to make similar solidary decisions with Palestinian cities and villages and with Palestinian fighters, as they are fighters for freedom and human rights who are persecuted by the colonialism and racism that constitute Israel’s headlines as well as its political, inhumane contents, when it [Israel] has dealings with the Palestinian people, expropriates its rights, steals its property and encroaches on the borders of Arab cities - and Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Iraq, the UAE and Tunisia have not been spared its evil.
The Palestinians must learn from what the world’s Jews do for Israel, so that in the diaspora’s cities and exiled communities, they may do for Palestine what the Jews do for Israel. The Palestinians must excel at pioneering and have initiative when dealing with Arabs, Muslims and Christians as well as with friendly, international, democratic unions and organizations that identify with the righteousness of their cause in face of the tyranny and racism of the Israeli colonialist expansion program.
This [is necessary] because the Palestinian communities’ pioneering and initiating role in the world is the engine that drives the solidarity of the Arab, Muslim and Christian nations and the forces of progress, peace and democracy, through the righteousness of the Palestinian cause and the legitimacy of its people’s struggle against the occupation and Zionism.”
MajdiAl-Rimawi - serving a life sentence plus 80 years for his participation in the planning and carrying out of the murder of Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavam Ze'evi in 2001.