Whose heart could stay unmoved when with your lips trembling you would speak of Peace and say that "the Peace we seek is Peace is for all of us, not just the Palestinian people, but Peace for christians and moslems, Peace for the Arab people and for the Jewish people, Peace for Israel and for Palestine. "

You said this while bombs were falling all around you, under seige, in a basement drenched in the stench and filth of rotting blood, broken toilets, unwashed bodies trapped in war. At an age when you should have been resting in comfort reflecting on the long decades of your life dedicated to serving the community, you were forced to sit with a pistol by your side, separated from your loved ones and family for years, surrounded by tanks and men hellbent on extermination and death aimed not only at you personally, but against the entire Palestinian people.

You stood in the face of genocide, old, ailing, without a single comfort to lean on, and gave insiration to all of us sharing this simple lesson: it's always possible, no matter what the circumstances, to stay true to the Cause. You remained true to the Cause until the last moment of your life.

You were wrong when you sided against the Socialist wing of the liberation movement and in favor of local capital, both during the civil wars that ripped apart Palestinian society and its broader community of allied populations, and also in later years. But you served patriotism well: honoring peoples' love for the motherland and never underestimating it, while at the same time not giving it too much emphasis as a social force, relying on basic principles which are even more universal than patriotism, such as the quest for basic human rights for all people.

Most importantly, you never gave in to the national, ethnic, or religious chauvinists who are embroiled in the struggle, and you did not allow them to define the campaigns you were involved in. You contributed to building Unity in many different ways, and you created almost single-handedly, a path of honorable resistance to the oppressor which we hope will guide the liberation movement - not only the Palestinian resistance, but the global Liberation Movement - for a long time.

You generated and maintained a constant, life-affirming position on how to conduct ourselves in the struggle: you spoke very often against armed actions targeting civilians and you said that there is no place for atrocities or terrorism against the innocents within a war of liberation. Your words were distorted, and most of the time were censored by the powerful of the earth, because that simple message …changes everything!

You also explained clearly over and over, that as long as the oppressor targets innocent populations with acts of genocide, people will fight back by whatever means available, as naturally as day follows the night. The conflicts embedded within our societal structures in the Middle East will never be undone unless those who now wield power become guided by this truth and reverse their policies.

Two more aspects of your path have been true gems, gifts for the rest of us who were left behind to carry on:

Unity among religious communities,
and,
Unity of religious faiths.

Nothing can be more impressive than your personal love life and your family life: they reflected your politics of Unity as examples of how to bridge the terrible and artificial divisions that have been placed between us by the earth's most powerful Corporate and authoritarian State forces to separate christian and moslem communities, filling our hearts with poison against each other, making us unable to love across the barriers, dividing us into "crusaders" and "ragheads", "faithful" and "infidels". In a world full of hatred you dared to love, and to risk exposure of your personal and family life to the full hatred of those chauvinist social elements who seek "to purify" our religious and ethnic communities from "others".

And you often spoke of God. It was clear when you spoke, that the God you referred to is the same one - All is One - whose awareness exists as a seed within each and every single person. It doesn't matter if you were aware or not of the theological reality that hebrew, islamic, and christian prayers are all the same, root to crown: All is One, Alla's Won, Alleluia Hosanna. Somehow, almost instinctually, you extended the islamic Fitrah, the belief that all human beings from the moment of birth are bearers of Gods' consciousness and applied it to embrace people from all communities, not only in our region, but in the whole world. And you conducted your politics that way.

Now, you are back within the fold of the All, one with the hebrew Ein Soph, one with the christian Sophia. All'is Light.

Cyprus IndyMedia Collective
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Relevant Items

An excellent and thorough Political Obituary written by The Electronic Intifada Team:
"Yasser Arafat, 1929-2004"
published 10 November 2004
"…his steadfastness in maintaining dignity and decorum as the Palestinian president in the rubble of al-Muqata'a (tr. "[Ramallah] District Headquarters") showed much of his true nature: tough, patient, cheerful, and uninterested in comfort, luxuries, and ostentation. Arafat departs the Palestinian and Middle Eastern political stage as a wraith of his former self, with no political heir apparent.":
electronicintifada.net/v2/article3288.shtml

The article above titled "Eternal Peace and Victory" was originally published as a Feature article by
Cyprus.IndyMedia.org
on the day Yasser Arafat was buried. It was at this page, on a server which is no longer in service:
cyprus-imc-english.nysindy.org/feature/display/736/index.php

It was censored and rejected by the global IndyMedia editorial group when it was proposed as a Feature article for the global indymedia page.

At first, the reason given was that the proposed article is "quite different from the kind of features we put up on the global indymedia site which usually sumarize and link to events taking place":
lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/www-features/2004-November/1113-f2.html

When it was pointed out that there's a need to give political reasoning for these editorial decisions we were told that it was rejected for religious reasons, which are explained here:
lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/www-features/2004-November/1114-0m.html

The political gap between indymedia members who are active in the US and Europe and those who are active in the Middle East, the "global south", "Third World", "developing world" (please use whatever description applies), has been in place from the beginning of IndyMedia, but it consistently comes up around Middle Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean issues.

That political gap is still very painful. We keep working at it.
Petros Evdokas
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