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A strong wave of sympathy with Palestine began to increase in the Arab popular circles, coinciding with the announcement of more governments to normalize their relations with Israel.
I am writing this article the morning after US President Donald Trump announced the normalization of relations between the Kingdom of Morocco and Israel, making Rabat the fourth Arab capital after Abu Dhabi, Manama and Khartoum, to normalize its relations with Tel Aviv since last August.
An Israeli news site quoted political sources as saying that other Arab and Islamic countries are on the way to conclude normalization agreements with Israel, in exchange for benefits and promises distributed by the American president before the end of his term on January 20.
According to political sources, Israel expects to sign normalization agreements with these countries soon. The list includes: Sultanate of Oman, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited in the past, as well as Pakistan and Indonesia, in addition to Niger, Mali, Djibouti, Mauritania, Comoros, Brunei, Bangladesh and the Republic of the Maldives.
With regard to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Israeli news site considered that it may not be included in the list of countries that currently establish relations with Israel, because it cannot publicly show this, as it is the protector of the Islamic holy sites on the one hand, and pending the term of the US President-elect, Joe Biden.
The site indicated that Jared Kushner, an advisor and son-in-law to President Trump, said: "Normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia is inevitable sooner or later."
Riyadh had denied news about the secret meeting of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the city of Neom, northeast of the Kingdom, with Benjamin Netanyahu in the presence of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last November, and the Israeli Prime Minister's office refused to comment on this news.
At the same time, the former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, launched a strong attack against Israel in one of the Manama Dialogue sessions, indicating that Israel presents itself as a small country suffering from an existential threat surrounded by bloodthirsty killers who wish to eliminate it and speaks of its desire to establish Friendly relations with Riyadh.
Al-Faisal, who views his previous position as reflecting the position of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, affirmed that Israel kills whomever it wants, has built the apartheid wall, refuses to grant equal rights to its citizens and non-Jews, and arrests thousands of residents of the Palestinian lands it colonizes and imprisons them in concentration camps Under the most basic security charges, young and old, women and men have no rights or implementation of justice.
The Saudi prince described Israel as a bloodthirsty country as long as it trampled on all international norms and standards, and peace will remain elusive until the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967.
The same Arab sentiments, sympathetic to the Palestinians, anti-Israel, and opposing the steps to normalize an increasing number of governments for their relations with Israel, have appeared clear in Egypt in recent weeks, after the publication of a picture that combines a famous Egyptian actor with an Israeli singer in Dubai.
In an article he wrote for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, professor of political science at Cairo University, Ahmed Youssef Ahmed, says: "The solidarity of the Egyptian people with the Palestinian people is more than self-evident.
If our brothers are in South Africa, other Africans, many parliaments of European countries, countries of Asia and Latin America, and the international boycott of Israel movement.
Indeed, the new generation within the American Democratic Party sympathizes with the tragedy of Palestine.
Should we abound for the Egyptian people, who offered thousands of martyrs for their sake, to sympathize with the Palestinians in the face of excessive oppression and the illegal seizure of their lands for the purposes of settlement and much more?
In Lebanon, the President of the Socialist Party, Walid Jumblatt, warned that Israel would invade every corner and area in the Arab world for further fragmentation and destruction.
He said in a tweet on his Twitter account: The current ruler of America Trump herald's future generations in the Arab world, from west to east, with a black future, dominated by the features of wars, tribal, ethnic and political conflicts everywhere.
In Morocco, Ahmed Wehman, head of the Moroccan Observatory Against Normalization with Israel, described the Moroccan move to normalize its relations with Israel as a resounding fall that no one had expected after the official steadfastness that extended for years.
Wehman said that Morocco fell in front of American blackmail on the issue of Western Sahara, believing that whoever has allowed himself to abandon Palestine cannot be trusted at all in the Sahara issue.
In Russia, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov confirmed that Moscow welcomes the process of normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries, but Moscow considers that this step should not be at the expense of the Palestinian people, and it is not directed against anyone, because some believe that this process is directed against Iran.
On the occasion of mentioning Iran, fears began to reverberate strongly in the Arab countries of the benefit that would accrue to the peoples of the region from the United States 'endeavor to establish a Sunni alliance against Shiite Iran, preceded by tendentious unified front projects against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Fears as well as the transformation of Israel's dream of establishing its Zionist state on a land from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq, to an empire extending from the Arab Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean!!
It remains to refer to the Israeli colonial practices in the Palestinian territories.
As Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem indicated that the normalization of additional Arab countries with Israel encouraged the occupation army to continue expanding its colonies in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The number of settlement units that the Israeli government agreed to build as of January, has reached more than 12,000, which is the largest indicator since 2012.
At the same time, Israeli settlers cut down 15 olive trees between 50 and 60 years old in the occupied West Bank.
A report issued by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) stated that the economic cost of the Israeli occupation in Gaza amounted to about $ 17 billion in the past decade, indicating that the long-term closure and massive Israeli military attacks are pushing the economic collapse in Gaza.
According to the report, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres affirmed that he would continue to strive for the establishment of an independent, democratic, connected and viable Palestinian state living side by side with Israel.
Kamal Gaballa is a Cairo-based journalist and ex-Managing Editor of Al-Ahram
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