User:Wissaml
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My first name is Wissam, I'm a citizen of an Arab country. I consider my self a Palestinian, though I neither live in Palestine nor I have a Palestinian nationality. I live in France where I'm preparing a PhD thesis in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry.
I've been recently registered as a user in Wikipedia. In the near future, I wish I could participate with many new articles and expand some other already existing ones. I respect all POVs. I don't agree with all kinds of discrimination (national, racial/ethnic, religious, linguistic, social class, gender, sexual, or any other kind). In all my contributions I'll try to be, hopefully, as objective as I could, even for the most sensitive issues.
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[edit] Reading and other interests
My reading interests include, among others: history, philosophy, history of ideas, history of philosophy, history of science, history of literature, literary theory, modern and contemporary English literature, mythology (mythology of the Levant and Mesopotamia in particular), Ancient history of the Levant, history of art, history of religions, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics, international relations, international conflicts, theory of international relations, post-colonial studies, contemporary middle east studies (politics, society and culture), and the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflict.
Some of my preferred writers are: Edward Said, Naom Chomsky, Arthur Marwick, Abdel Wahab El Messiri, and others.
I'm a big big lover of music, all styles of music, I enjoy listning to: classical, contemporary, jazz (all jazz streams and other fusions), blues, rock, Latino, African, oriental, ragtime, bluegrass, etc. I believe that music is the Universal language (it is more powerful than the Esperanto anyway); not only can music communicates between people of the same culture and people of different cultures, but it could also communicates between people from different time periods.
I sometimes play guitar, I am not a professional guitarist and I don't play all the above mentioned styles, but I enjoy playing blues, jazz and rock (of the 60's and the 70's) on an acoustic guitar. I also enjoy playing with other guitarists.
[edit] A story: Some point of views concerning the contemporary history of Palestine and the Palstinian issue
Please note that some sub-sections in this section are, for the moment, not complete and are under construction.
[edit] A short story
"My father was born in Palestine. after he went to another country to pursue his higher education, he tried to return back to his small village to live and work there, but he was not allowed to enter Palestine. He was obliged to be far from his parents and family, friends, home, and country". If this very short story was told to a Palestinian, he won't be shoked at all. In Palestine, and for Palestinians, this case is not "unique" or "bizare". Too many Palestinians share, more or less, the same problem. Most of the them, and latter including their descendants, were not allowed to enter Palestine after they went outside their native country for different reasons.
[edit] A longe story
However, the above story does not represent the general case. Many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes, either to some other neighboring countries, which was the case for the majority; or, for many tens of thousands of them, to other places within Palestine. In both cases, all of these people became refugees and lived, since that time, in refugee camps. Till this day, most of them (now, their second, third and even forth generation descendants) still live far from their homes and country, in the same old camps, in extremely difficult living conditions, and with no hope to return to their natal places, or even anywhere in Palestine. Despite the political national, regional, and international efforts, to end this grave situation, the Palestinian refugees know very well that they could never get back, not only because of the very weak momentum of these efforts, but because of the very high barrier of the counter-efforts.
The Palestinians who managed to stay in their homes, and who were thought to be lucky, are turned to be a killing target of the most powerful military state in the region, and the subject of one of the most brutal oppressions in modern and contemporary history.
[edit] A very long story
As far as I know, all historians, without any single exception, agree on the fact that: "the Palestinian people were living Palestine for many thousands of years. Just as any other society, the Palestinian people, through these long years, were the subject of many inside and outside migrations and exiles, cultural and religious societal shifts, ethnical mixing, and wars and colonizations."
Apart from the different historical names given by the people that lived in this land and by latter historians to this particular geographical region, and apart from the academic disagreemint on the history of the political entities founded in this region, their exact location, boarders, and the dates of their rise and fall, no one can deny that the geographical region in question was, and still, inhabited by a group of people. Whatever the name of those people my be, the presence of those people in this land is, indeed, a historical fact.
There are few paparazzi-like mass media journalists and columnists and business men politicians (all of them are outside Academia) who denies the above mentioned historical fact. I believe that those exceptions can't make a distinction between an essay article that is based on personal point of views which is written in a couple of hours to be published the next day in the New York Times, and a research work culminated through years of scientific methodological research based on primary and secondary sources and published through a complicated and a long process in a specialized peer review journal. In brief, they don't accept science.
All the available historical, written and non-written, primary sources indicate that the geographical region known as "Palestine" were inhabited, since the end of the forth millennium BC, by a group of people with a distinctive socio-cultural boundaries (mythology, religious rituals and beliefs, language, urban organization and political structure, and techniques of agriculture, commerce, and "industry"). These people are known to all historians as the Cannanites. Since that time, there were a great number people migrated to, and from, Palestine. Those new comers were, sometimes, very close in culture and language and in some other times very distant. Through assimilation and conquest, contact and interference in commercial and cultural activities, and other "grand" intra-national and inter-regional social reactions, the native Cannanites evolved and changed with respect to their, language, religion, social and economic structure, political system, etc. For instance, the dominant religions in this region during the fourth and the third millennia was a form of semitic polytheism; through the second and first millennia BC, there was, in certain regions in Palestine, a mass shift towards monotheism, in particular towards Judaism, a "revolutionary" system of beliefs that was developed in Palestine with a large influence from Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian religions, but in other regions of Palestine Judaism was not appropriate for certain socio-economical contexts and was, thus, fiercely fought; while during the first millennium AD monotheistic Christianity was the dominant, though not the only, religion due to the crises of Judaism that couldn't cope with the new political context with the Roman colonization of Palestine; and starting from the end of the first millennia AD till the mid of the 20th century Islam was the dominant religion but too many Christians and Jews keep their faith since that time and managed to adapt the new condition.
The name "Palestine" was officially introduced by the British mandate regime in Palestine after World War I to designate this region. The name was used by the European writers and politicians for centuries before. This particular name was used by the those people who ...........
[edit] A sad story: But Why?
This problem was, and still, a direct consequence of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" which started, in 1947 and 1948, by a systematic full-scale Israeli military massacres against the Palestinian civilians. At this point, the following remarks should be considered:
- The term "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" is an international term used in most (but not all) diplomatic, academic and media discourse to designate, following the academic definition of a "conflict", the series of military (battles, wars, military operations, military campagnes, military occupations,..., etc.) and political conflicts between "Israel" and "Palestine". I belive, for many reasons to be shortly explained, that this term is an Israeli-biased one. The more proper term, in my openion, that could be used to designate this general case (phenomena) is the Palestinian issue, a strict translation of the "classical" Arabic term "القضية الفلسطينية" that corresponds to the case (phenomenon) in question. The inadequacy of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" term, in comparison with the "Palestinian issue" term, is explained in the following:
- Though the general case (phenomenon) between the Palestinians and the state of Israel is better described by a condition of "conflict", the term conflictThe term conflict is seldom used
- b
- The Palestinian issue did not started, indeed, in 1947/1948, but had been formed about a half century before
- The term "Israeli military"
- Palestinian massacres against Israeli civilians
With the Israeli military massacres and the subsequent declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, Israeli military occupation of more than 80 % of the land of, at the time, British Mandate of Palestine in 1948, following the, both full or partial, destruction and depopulation of hundreds of Palestinian villages. This was accompanied by the Israeli nationalization of land and property originally owned by the displaced Palestinians, a case with no worldwide analogue in the 20th century, and even much before (maybe the last examples in Europe and the middle east were in the high middle ages and the Roman/Byzantine periods respectively).
The rest of Palestine (the remaining 20% of the land, including the sacred city of Jerusalem) were occupied by Israel in 1967, it was accompanied by some other Israeli military massacres again, causing another hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave their country, and join their , in miserable refugee camps without any hope of return. The number of Palestinian diaspora is estimated at between 5 to 5.5 million people, though not all of them have the official status of a refugee. As at 31 march 2005, the number of Palestinian refugees is 4.25 million people. However, many (around one million) of the refugees do not hold any citizenship.
I believe that the results of the creation of Israel in Palestine and its consequences on the Palestinian people during the entire course of the 2nd half of the 20th century, together with other bloody conflicts in the world that resulted in the killing of milloins of innocent people (Rwandan Genocide, the Second Congo War, the Armenian genocide and the American campagnes against Iraq and Vietnam, just to name a few examples), are a big shame and a black chapter in the history of humanity. Every effort should be made in order to not allow these human global scale catastrophes to be repeated again. This responsibility should be shared by everyone of us.
