pay no attention to the oppression that is personally inconvenient to me

So Jeff Goldberg does as Jeff Goldberg does and somehow manages to make the recent rebellions in the Arab world a reason to undermine protests of the occupation of Palestine. What's interesting is that Goldberg is doing what he accuses the repressive Syrian regime of doing: he is using another set of protests as a distraction from the moral valence of the protests that are inconvenient to him. Whatever the machinations of the corrupt and dictatorial Assad regime, it does nothing to undermine the fact that people are protesting at the border because the treatment of the Palestinians is a travesty.

Incredibly, Goldberg calls the nakba "largely self-inflicted" because "the Arabs rejected the U.N. partition plan for Palestine, attacked the just-born Jewish state and then managed to lose on the battlefield." I'm sure that if the UN decided to partition and repopulate Texas with no meaningful democratic mechanism for resistance and then helped enforce that decision militarily, Goldberg would say that Texans brought it upon themselves.

Goldberg ends his post with a video of some of the atrocities carried about by the Assad regime against protesters, which is interesting, given his distaste for the use of similar images of Palestinians killed by the IDF. I'll resist the urge.

Incidentally, Palestinian activist Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, an acquaintance of mine from my antiwar activism days, has (again) been arrested, as part of a protest march towards Al Walaja, with three other Palestinians and seven internationals. The last I heard, he was being taken to Atarot, near Ramallah. For Palestinian activists who live and work in the United States like Dr. Qumsiyeh, there's always a particular fear of returning to Palestine to protest; it is not unheard of for the Israeli government to prevent them from returning back to their homes in the US.