Two reports appeared in a local newspaper a few days ago proving that some steps in the direction toward solving our problems have been taken. The first report was about an attempt to impart some missing human rights to the Arab political front while the second dealt with a woman’s attempts to get her financial rights after her husband took them away.
The first report told of 21 Palestinians who filed a lawsuit against high-ranking officials and large weapons manufacturers in the United States and Israel. The charges relate to waging a war of extermination and unceasing war crimes against Palestinians as well as the assassination, torture and kidnapping of Palestinian leaders and civilians.
When the suit was filed in Washington at the end of June, the attorney, Stanley Cohen, representing the Palestinians, accused world leaders of criminal indifference to the horrendous crimes committed by Israel.
We should salute the attorney who expressed his deep concern over gross violations of Palestinians’ human rights. In the US and Britain, there are people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause though their numbers are relatively few. Several young people recently demonstrated in front of Marks & Spencer and other Western businesses which support the building and expansion of settlements in occupied Palestine. Some of the American activists supporting the Palestinians also expressed their disappointment at those Arabs and Muslims who are still shopping at Marks & Spencer.
I have written earlier about the Arab media’s failure to influence American public opinion in support of our just cause. The Arabs simply will not even take the first step toward competing with the Jewish-controlled American media. Our Arab problem is not that we lack the resources to draw media attention to our issues nor have we failed to realize that the media is a vital weapon in modern battles. The Arabs do not lack fair-minded supporters in the media world either: British journalist Robert Fisk and the former Israeli Knesset member Uri Avnery are two of them. Avnery, a founding member of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom, often focuses on the Israeli government’s massacres of Palestinian civilians. His articles have been published in several of our local papers, including Arab News. I urge all our local newspapers to regularly publish Arabic translations of these articles instead of giving undeserved publicity to such anti-Arab writers as Thomas Friedman; however, I do feel strongly that we should know what our critics are saying so that we can reply intelligently to them. Our supporters, at the same time, deserve more attention and coverage in our media than our detractors.
Well-off Palestinians living outside their country should support their brothers in the occupied lands financially and by bringing their issues to the attention of the public in the countries where they live. They should also fight against the occupation and its supporters through all available legal channels. Losing a case in one try or in one country should not discourage them. They should appeal to higher courts or file new suits in another country. Repeated attempts to see justice done will undoubtedly create positive impressions in international public opinion and cause people with consciences to investigate the facts which will, in many cases, lead to support.
The Arabs are generally unfamiliar with legal avenues for suing high-ranking government officials in the West. They should make use of these avenues in order to embarrass and discredit Israel and its supporters and force them, at the very least, to reinstate some Palestinian rights — if not all of them. Continued discussions of the issue will surely attract international attention which is too often ignorant of the enormity of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.
It is a good move that Saudi banks, establishments and individuals who have been affected by arbitrary freezing of accounts and false charges of terrorist links, plan to sue the US. Some well-known attorneys are willing to take on, at no charge, the cases against ordinary people who were wrongly implicated in the Sept. 11 attacks. The charges against some of these people were made in such a careless manner that some of the accused were in fact dead before 9/11! The latest FBI charge against a Saudi being involved in the terrorist attacks appears to be another instance of a baseless accusation. While the FBI sounds a global alarm that Saud Al-Rasheed, 21, is a dangerous terrorist, the fact remains, according to local newspapers, that he has never visited the US. Once Saud’s innocence is officially confirmed, his father intends to file a damage suit against the FBI for the harm done to him and his son. The case will be handled by leading attorneys in the Kingdom and the US. We should of course give our support to all unfairly accused individuals and establishments.
The second bit of news I referred to at the beginning of the article is about a woman’s successful attempt to establish her financial rights. The tale is of a teacher who taught her husband a lesson; he believed that a wife was merely a tool for exploitation and abuse. He withdrew SR100,000 from her bank account without her knowledge while she was away visiting her parents. When she demanded the money back, her husband refused because, according to his brazen statement, he needed it in order to arrange a second marriage! Instead of surrendering to his unfair and humiliating demand, she called in her brothers, who shut him up in a room and went to the bank to reclaim their sister’s SR100,000 from his account. The woman then expelled him from the house as it was hers. I happily celebrate the wisdom and cleverness of this woman.