I have written about Bassem Eid before – he is not afraid to tell it like it is. And tell it like it is is exactly what he did to an audience in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
A Palestinian human rights activist turned commentator blamed a lot of people Monday evening for the failure of Muslims and Jews to make peace in Israel.
Bassem Eid offered his Fort Wayne audience a list of groups he said are doing nothing to try to resolve the decades-old conflict: Palestinian leaders, the Egyptian government and other Arab countries, the United Nations, President Barack Obama’s administration and the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
But Eid spared Israel itself during his remarks at the History Center. His appearance was sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Fort Wayne and the Harry W. Salon Foundation.
“Imagine that Israel is interested in the reconstruction of Gaza while we, the Palestinians, are much more interested in the destruction of Gaza,” Eid said about Palestinian territory in Israel.
Pointing to wars in the region, Eid said Israel is “probably the most safe place in the Middle East. “As an Arab, as a Muslim, I don’t want to be Syria, I don’t want to be Libya, I don’t want to be Iraq, I don’t want to be Yemen. It’s much safer for myself and for my children to keep ourselves” in Israel.
Arab leaders want the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to continue because it is “the only way the Arab leaders can keep on corrupting their own people,” he said.
Eid, 58, a resident of Jerusalem, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group and a regular commenter on Palestinian-Israeli relations, said that Palestinians living outside Israel “have no idea what is really going on” inside the country.
He said most Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are focused on work, school and health care and don’t even know about the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement, which he called a “prelude to the genocide of the Palestinian economy.”