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Revolutionary Middle East Change - by Stephen Lendman
Democratic Middle East birth pangs may have legs enough to spread regionally, including in Occupied Palestine.
Officially launched in Cairo in 1959, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) offers hope, driven by a commitment for Palestinian liberation. With more than 100 chapters and over 100,000 members, it's organized rallies, political debates, cultural programs, and other initiatives to spread truths about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Perhaps inspired by events across the region, on January 27, its press release headlined, "Palestinian students claim right to participate in shaping our destiny," saying:
"....(I)n order to reassert our inalienable rights, (we) claim our right to democratically participate in the shaping of our destiny. We begin a national initiative to campaign for direct elections to the Palestinian National Council (the PLO's legislative body) on the clear understanding that only a reformed national representative institution, that includes all Palestinians, those struggling in the homeland and those struggling in exile, can create a representative Palestinian platform, and restore the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people."
If popular uprisings offer democratic hope in Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt, why not Palestine freed from occupation!
Currently, Egypt is the epicenter of regional change, and since the 1978 Camp David Accords, the linchpin of US Middle East imperial policy. However, under Mubarak's brutal dictatorship, perhaps its day of reckoning has arrived, Robert Fisk saying:
What's wrong is visible and clear. "The filth and the slums, the open sewers and the corruption of every government official, the bulging prisons, the laughable elections, the whole vast, sclerotic edifice of power has at last brought Egyptians on to the streets....This is not an Islamic uprising - though it could become one - (it) is just one mass of Egyptians stifled by decades of failure and humiliation."
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