Thursday, March 13, 2008
The plight of my people, by Nadia
In a land far far away, monsters roam the earth. Life is worthless and humanity is plagued with hunger. The living conditions are not suitable for animals, let alone the poor citizens of this land. But what should be expected from a land that has been taken over by monsters. The horror that this terrain has been consumed by has caused some people to flee their homes. Still, others stay steadfast, vowing never to be bullied out of their abodes, as humble as they may be. Those who left will be ever ridiculed for having abandoned their homes in a time of crisis. But the woes of their counterparts are unfathomable. The monstrosities that have flooded into the area have forced the remaining dwellers into hiding. Yet, even in hiding they are not safe.In the calm of the evenings, doors are smashed open and children are ripped from the bosoms of comfort. They are beaten and humiliated, after which they are kept in isolation. What do you ask is the crime they have committed; this is an easy one, they chose to stay home rather than run.
Stay, Stay. Do not desert what will one day belong to you again. Once you leave there is no turning back. It is too great and vast outside your home. When you leave you allow the demise of divinity to take place. Lost are those who left. But to you who stay, fear not creation, fear the creator. For those who are pious know your place in his text.
Released from captivity, these young men make their way back home. The reality of it is that their homes have been destroyed during the time spent in detainment. There is no comfort in future occupations, for that to has been taken away as well. All their property has been ruined. Life is grim. Mothers weeping for lost husbands and sons. Children crying, longing to put back together their broken homes. Young ladies refusing to produce offspring for fear of this world.
Nevertheless, as shattered as spirits have become, they rise again and again.
These monsters are frightening, with their mighty armor and unparalleled weaponry. The wickedness of their vengeful plight to wipe out the remainder of these persons puts them in a sphere of their own. Lack of sympathy for mankind has set such characters apart from all civilizations. Fear not, ye whom be oppressed. History has taught that all things high above the rest shall come crashing down eventually.
Mothers withhold those tears, for they shall never be enough to salvage all that has been lost in the precious land of PALESTINE
By Nadia Posted on Palestinian Mothers
Labels: moral fable, Palestine, right of return, somoud
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Seeking Palestinians and activists for a Video Quilt to mark the Nakba anniversary
Help Contribute to First-Ever Video Quilt to Mark 60 Years of Palestinian Nakba"I am a Palestinian. We still hold the key and deed to our home in Lyd. WE WILL return!" "I am a supporter of human rights and I want to see the Palestinian refugees return home" "I am from Tabaria. Its my right! I want to go home!"; "My home is in Haifa and I want to return"; "I am not Palestinian, but 60 years of forced exile is wrong. Palestinians must be allowed to return home!"
For 60 years the Palestinian refugees' right to return to their land and homes of origin has been under attack from various forces that wish to rewrite the past and dictate the present and future of Palestine and its people. Despite these attacks, for 60 years Palestinians and their supporters around the world have remained steadfast in not just supporting this right, but demanding and asserting that it is a right that must be implemented if justice and real peace are to be achieved. These voices unfortunately have all too often been deliberately muffled and fragmented ... It's time to collect these voices -- literally.
On this the 60th year of the Nakba we are collectively creating a Video Quilt demonstrating that among Palestinian refugees and their many supporters there remains a strong united voice for the Right to Return. This Video Quilt stitches together the voices of refugees and supporters around the world and will be premiered at the 6th Annual Al-Awda Convention on the 60th year of Al-Nakba. It will be shown online and at various exhibits and venues afterwards. Al-Awda's 6/60 Convention will be held May 16-18, 2008 in Anaheim California.
Help Needed With Video Quilt!
If you or someone you know has a video camera and is interested in helping film for the Video Quilt Project, please let us know. We are looking for individuals across the globe to act as liaisons and videographers. There are many interested individuals and groups who would like to contribute their messages in support of the Right to Return but don't have access to a video camera. Their voices must be heard! If you are interested in assisting with this project please contact: media@al-awda.org
To download an informational flyer visit: http://al-awda.org/until-return/vidqlt1.pdf
To upload and send your own video to us, please use one of the following services:
http://www.yousendit.com (up to 100mb limit, free account)
http://www.sendthisfile.com (unlimited file size upload with free registration, but slow for large files)
Be sure to send all files to: ahasan@ucla.edu
In any format, please mail to:
Al-Awda PRRCPO Box 131352Carlsbad CA 92013, USA
Just as a reminder, these video messages are as simple as
1. Facing the camera2. Stating your name and where you live3. State where you are from (in Palestine or elsewhere)4. State a brief message in support of the Right to Return.
For further information, please see our earlier announcement at:http://www.al-awda.org/alert-video_quilt.html
Until return,
Al-Awda Media Center
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-685-3243
Fax: 360-933-3568E-mail: info@al-awda.org
WWW: http://al-awda.org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible. http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html
Save the Date!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible. http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html
Save the Date!
Sixth Annual International Al Awda Convention
On The Sixtieth Year of Al Nakba
Anaheim, California
May 16-18, 2008http://al-awda.org
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Become an Al-Awda Sustainer:
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Become an Al-Awda Sustainer:
Monthly: http://al-awda.org/sustainers.html
Annually: http://al-awda.org/sustainers2.html
Labels: activism, call to action, journalism, Nakba, Palestine, refugees, right of return, somoud
Monday, December 3, 2007
Khalid Amayreh - Our Great Palestinian Negotiators
Ramallah, 2 December, 2007
Defending the farcical Annapolis conference, Palestinian negotiator Sa’eb Erekat (in the photo) has been indulging in a lot of verbal theatrics lately.
In a succession of interviews with the indisputably pliant Palestinian media, the “devil of Jericho,” as the late Yasser Arafat used to refer to him, has argued that the Palestinian negotiators are actually fighting a real battle with Israel for the purpose of restoring Palestinian rights.
Other Palestinian negotiators, mostly veterans of the ill-reputed Oslo era, have been making similar statements, aimed at duping the Palestinian masses into giving the Annapolis malarkey the benefit of the doubt.
Well, if battle it is, then it is amply clear that Palestinian negotiators are marching to it almost totally unprepared despite the existence of a Negotiations Affairs Department (NAD), which is answerable to the PLO, as well as a well-oiled Negotiations Support Unit (NSU) at which corruption, nepotism and cronyism reign supreme.
The NSU is funded and effectively controlled by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a pro-Israeli right-wing Think-Tank based in London. ASI runs the NSU through a man named Andrew Kuhn, who has the official title of “Senior Policy Advisor”.
ASI defines itself as the UK's leading innovator of practical market-economic policies. For over 25 years it has been a pioneer in the worldwide movement towards free markets, public-sector reform, and free trade.
The Institute's main focus is on reforming governments and state enterprises in order to promote choice, competition, enterprise, and user-focus. It works through research, reports, conferences, advice, and media debate.
As to how this institute can be entrusted with formulating recommendations on how Palestinian negotiators ought to deal with final status issues remains a mystery, at least to this writer.
Since 1999, the NSU has received tens of millions of dollars from European donors, including UK, which pays the lion’s share, Norway, The Netherlands and Denmark.
However, there is a shroud of secrecy surrounding NSU activities and especially with regard to its financial transparency and undeclared international connections. Inside sources have intimated that some of the NSU executives receive hefty salaries reaching $15,000 per month, in addition to other unspecified perks.
According to the sources, the NSU, which is closely monitored by ASI, is instructed to have no contacts with Palestinians who reject the Oslo Accords or are affiliated with organizations such as Hamas. NSU is also advised by the donors to shun Palestinians and others who “hold maximalist attitudes toward Israel and on core issues such as ‘the right of return’ and Jerusalem.
The NSU is also instructed to refrain from giving legal advice to the NAD and Palestinian negotiators if such an advice is incompatible with the letter and spirit of the Oslo Accords and subsequent bilateral agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
For example, the NSU recommended that the opening negotiating position adopted by the PA start with the demand that Israel should withdraw to the fourth of June, 1967, with the possibility of a land swap not exceeding 5% of the total area of the West Bank.
I really don’t understand why the PA allows a foreign-funded body to have an influence on a matter so paramount as the negotiations with Israel. Aren’t there competent Palestinian experts to do the job? Can’t the PA itself have an independent Palestinian “negotiations support unit”?
I recently spoke with Prof. Ali Jerbawi, Political Science Professor at Beir Zeit University and asked him why Palestinian negotiators had decided to make the Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the resolution of the refugee plight pursuant UN resolution 194, the maximum ceiling of their demands?
Jerbawi laughed and then said the following: “Because they are stupid, because they are ignorant, because they don’t understand the basics of negotiations. Even my grandmother understood that in order to have a reasonable price for one’s commodity, one had to demand first the highest possible price in order to finally get the wanted price.”
“They should have made the 1947- partition resolution, not UN resolutions 242 and 33. Their opening negotiating position. After all, if negotiations are to be conducted pursuant international law, then Palestinian negotiators should remind Israel and the world that the 1967 borders were actually and still are military armistice lines, not de jure borders.”
Jerbawi is right and to the point. The Armistice agreements of 1949 allowed Israel to gain 77% of the total land of mandatory Palestine. These agreements gave Israel the right to occupy 22% of Palestine more than the area allotted to the Jewish state by the Partition Resolution no. 181 of 1947.
More to the point, it was clear that the armistice agreements were dictated exclusively by military, not political, considerations. This means that Israel had no legal right to possess the territories occupied during the 1948 hostilities beyond the lines specified in the Partition Resolution.
In other words, the only de jure and legal boundaries Israel has ever had are those which were specified in the Partition Resolution, and that Israel’s pre-1967 borders are no more than de facto boundaries.
Hence, the armistice line of 1949 in no way created a new de jure borders to which one could attribute prerogatives of sovereignty.
Interestingly, this view was unambiguously stipulated in the Armistice Agreement itself in Article II, par. 2, which states: It is also recognized that no provision of this agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either party hereto.
Similarly, Article VI, par. 9 states: "The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in Articles V and VI of this agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either party relating thereto.”
In light of the above-mentioned, it wouldn’t be unacceptable for Palestinian negotiators to demand or indeed insist that Israel withdraw to the partition lines of 1947. Indeed, the opposite is true, as such an insistence, or at least an opening negotiating position, is perfectly compatible with the letter and spirit of pertinent UN resolutions.
There is no doubt that the current Palestinian negotiating strategy is a gigantic disaster in every conceivable aspect.
The reason for that is clear. The PA, if it continues the present course, will eventually come under intense pressure to be flexible, by retreating from the starting negotiating stand, e.g. accepting less than a total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and especially East Jerusalem.
In so doing, the PA wouldn’t only compromise the Palestinian national constants it routinely but mendaciously claims to uphold, but would effectively succumb to the Israeli view that the territories occupied in 1967 are actually disputed rather than occupied territories.
This is a real disaster that should have been rectified a long time ago. However, because of the rampant corruption permeating throughout the PA, the same scandalous flaws characterizing the failed Oslo process have basically remained unchanged, and in some cases even exacerbated.
I know that military commanders shouldn’t be dismissed in the midst of ‘battle.’ However, in the Palestinian case, it is absolutely certain that entrusting strategic negotiations with a covetous Israel to the same old failed faces will lead to even a greater disaster.
The barren Oslo years should have taught us many lessons in how to handle Israeli prevarications and deceitfulness. However, the dismal performance of PA negotiators shows that they have learned next to nothing.
Defending the farcical Annapolis conference, Palestinian negotiator Sa’eb Erekat (in the photo) has been indulging in a lot of verbal theatrics lately.
In a succession of interviews with the indisputably pliant Palestinian media, the “devil of Jericho,” as the late Yasser Arafat used to refer to him, has argued that the Palestinian negotiators are actually fighting a real battle with Israel for the purpose of restoring Palestinian rights.
Other Palestinian negotiators, mostly veterans of the ill-reputed Oslo era, have been making similar statements, aimed at duping the Palestinian masses into giving the Annapolis malarkey the benefit of the doubt.
Well, if battle it is, then it is amply clear that Palestinian negotiators are marching to it almost totally unprepared despite the existence of a Negotiations Affairs Department (NAD), which is answerable to the PLO, as well as a well-oiled Negotiations Support Unit (NSU) at which corruption, nepotism and cronyism reign supreme.
The NSU is funded and effectively controlled by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a pro-Israeli right-wing Think-Tank based in London. ASI runs the NSU through a man named Andrew Kuhn, who has the official title of “Senior Policy Advisor”.
ASI defines itself as the UK's leading innovator of practical market-economic policies. For over 25 years it has been a pioneer in the worldwide movement towards free markets, public-sector reform, and free trade.
The Institute's main focus is on reforming governments and state enterprises in order to promote choice, competition, enterprise, and user-focus. It works through research, reports, conferences, advice, and media debate.
As to how this institute can be entrusted with formulating recommendations on how Palestinian negotiators ought to deal with final status issues remains a mystery, at least to this writer.
Since 1999, the NSU has received tens of millions of dollars from European donors, including UK, which pays the lion’s share, Norway, The Netherlands and Denmark.
However, there is a shroud of secrecy surrounding NSU activities and especially with regard to its financial transparency and undeclared international connections. Inside sources have intimated that some of the NSU executives receive hefty salaries reaching $15,000 per month, in addition to other unspecified perks.
According to the sources, the NSU, which is closely monitored by ASI, is instructed to have no contacts with Palestinians who reject the Oslo Accords or are affiliated with organizations such as Hamas. NSU is also advised by the donors to shun Palestinians and others who “hold maximalist attitudes toward Israel and on core issues such as ‘the right of return’ and Jerusalem.
The NSU is also instructed to refrain from giving legal advice to the NAD and Palestinian negotiators if such an advice is incompatible with the letter and spirit of the Oslo Accords and subsequent bilateral agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
For example, the NSU recommended that the opening negotiating position adopted by the PA start with the demand that Israel should withdraw to the fourth of June, 1967, with the possibility of a land swap not exceeding 5% of the total area of the West Bank.
I really don’t understand why the PA allows a foreign-funded body to have an influence on a matter so paramount as the negotiations with Israel. Aren’t there competent Palestinian experts to do the job? Can’t the PA itself have an independent Palestinian “negotiations support unit”?
I recently spoke with Prof. Ali Jerbawi, Political Science Professor at Beir Zeit University and asked him why Palestinian negotiators had decided to make the Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the resolution of the refugee plight pursuant UN resolution 194, the maximum ceiling of their demands?
Jerbawi laughed and then said the following: “Because they are stupid, because they are ignorant, because they don’t understand the basics of negotiations. Even my grandmother understood that in order to have a reasonable price for one’s commodity, one had to demand first the highest possible price in order to finally get the wanted price.”
“They should have made the 1947- partition resolution, not UN resolutions 242 and 33. Their opening negotiating position. After all, if negotiations are to be conducted pursuant international law, then Palestinian negotiators should remind Israel and the world that the 1967 borders were actually and still are military armistice lines, not de jure borders.”
Jerbawi is right and to the point. The Armistice agreements of 1949 allowed Israel to gain 77% of the total land of mandatory Palestine. These agreements gave Israel the right to occupy 22% of Palestine more than the area allotted to the Jewish state by the Partition Resolution no. 181 of 1947.
More to the point, it was clear that the armistice agreements were dictated exclusively by military, not political, considerations. This means that Israel had no legal right to possess the territories occupied during the 1948 hostilities beyond the lines specified in the Partition Resolution.
In other words, the only de jure and legal boundaries Israel has ever had are those which were specified in the Partition Resolution, and that Israel’s pre-1967 borders are no more than de facto boundaries.
Hence, the armistice line of 1949 in no way created a new de jure borders to which one could attribute prerogatives of sovereignty.
Interestingly, this view was unambiguously stipulated in the Armistice Agreement itself in Article II, par. 2, which states: It is also recognized that no provision of this agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either party hereto.
Similarly, Article VI, par. 9 states: "The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in Articles V and VI of this agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either party relating thereto.”
In light of the above-mentioned, it wouldn’t be unacceptable for Palestinian negotiators to demand or indeed insist that Israel withdraw to the partition lines of 1947. Indeed, the opposite is true, as such an insistence, or at least an opening negotiating position, is perfectly compatible with the letter and spirit of pertinent UN resolutions.
There is no doubt that the current Palestinian negotiating strategy is a gigantic disaster in every conceivable aspect.
The reason for that is clear. The PA, if it continues the present course, will eventually come under intense pressure to be flexible, by retreating from the starting negotiating stand, e.g. accepting less than a total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and especially East Jerusalem.
In so doing, the PA wouldn’t only compromise the Palestinian national constants it routinely but mendaciously claims to uphold, but would effectively succumb to the Israeli view that the territories occupied in 1967 are actually disputed rather than occupied territories.
This is a real disaster that should have been rectified a long time ago. However, because of the rampant corruption permeating throughout the PA, the same scandalous flaws characterizing the failed Oslo process have basically remained unchanged, and in some cases even exacerbated.
I know that military commanders shouldn’t be dismissed in the midst of ‘battle.’ However, in the Palestinian case, it is absolutely certain that entrusting strategic negotiations with a covetous Israel to the same old failed faces will lead to even a greater disaster.
The barren Oslo years should have taught us many lessons in how to handle Israeli prevarications and deceitfulness. However, the dismal performance of PA negotiators shows that they have learned next to nothing.
Labels: Israel, Palestine, Palestinian politicians, right of return
Friday, November 30, 2007
Sixty years after 'Al-Nakba' in Palestine - ROR is still a fundamental issue
from Uruknet
by: Richard Becker
The struggle in Palestine can be complex and confusing even for the closest of observers.Like all great struggles, it has had many twists and turns, and will have many more. But the root cause of the conflict— the forcible expulsion of a people from their homeland—is neither ambiguous nor confusing. Sixty years ago, this is precisely what happened to the Palestinians in "The Catastrophe," known as "Al-Nakba" in Arabic.
Al-Nakba, one of the key events in modern Middle Eastern history, began on Nov. 29, 1947. That day, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 to partition the British Mandate (colony) of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The United Nations made this decisive step without consulting the Palestinian Arabs, who at the time comprised two-thirds of the population.
Most of the Jewish population was made up of settlers who had arrived in the previous three decades, mainly from Europe. More than 100,000 were survivors of the Nazi genocide.
While the U.S. and British imperialists had done little before or during World War II to aid the Jewish victims of fascism, they used the horrors of Hitler’s death camps to rally support for the establishment of the state of Israel after the war.
The Palestinians—who had had nothing to do with European anti-Semitism or genocide—were not consulted before the U.N. vote. There was no plebiscite or vote of the people. If there had been, the outcome would not have been in doubt: One unitary state would have been the overwhelming choice. The U.N. vote was an illegitimate act and a violation of the Palestinians’ right of self-determination.
The two-thirds majority required to pass Resolution 181 was only achieved through intense U.S. pressure. The vote ended up 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions. The Truman administration leaned heavily on its neocolonies and client states, particularly the Philippines, Liberia, Haiti and Thailand, all of which initially opposed the resolution.
Without those four votes, the resolution would have failed. For narrow and short-term interests, the Soviet Union voted for the resolution. This represented a betrayal of the Arab anti-colonial struggle and one that did great harm to the socialist cause in the region. Later, the Soviet Union would become a major ally of the Arab national liberation movement.
The forced displacement of a people
The U.N. vote led to celebration among the Zionists, the settler movement working to create an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine. Despite owning just six percent of the land, Resolution 181 awarded them 56 percent of Palestine. On the Palestinian side, there was anger and rebellion. As all parties knew ahead of time, partition meant war.
Fighting broke out immediately.
In January 1948, the better-armed Zionist military forces began to carry out "Plan Dalet." The point of the plan was to terrorize and drive out the Palestinian population. Before Plan Dalet, Palestinian villagers left their homes during battles, but typically went only as far as the next village.
On April 9, 1948, a Zionist paramilitary organization, the Irgun, massacred the entire village of Deir Yassin, raising "Plan Dalet" to a new level of brutality. When the dust had cleared, more than 200 Palestinian children, women and men lay dead. The massacre was meant as a warning to all Palestinians.
While the Jewish Agency formally "condemned" the Deir Yassin massacre, on the same day it incorporated the Irgun paramilitary into the official military Joint Command.
Twelve days after Deir Yassin, Zionist forces launched a lethal attack on the Palestinian areas of the mixed city of Haifa. They rolled barrel bombs filled with gasoline and dynamite down narrow alleys in the heavily populated city while mortar shells pounded the Arab neighborhoods from overhead. Nearly the entire Arab population fled.
Within a week, similar tactics led 77,000 of 80,000 Palestinians to flee the port city of Jaffa.
By May 15, 1948, when Israel’s independence was proclaimed, 300,000 Palestinians were living and dying in abominable conditions of exile in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and the Jordan Valley. By the end of that year, the number of dispossessed Palestinians had grown to 750,000.
In the 1948 war, Israel, with its superior economic and military resources and support from the Western powers, conquered 78 percent of Palestine. The Israeli military strategy was to not only conquer land, but also to drive out as much of the Palestinian population as possible from that land.
Nearly 80 percent of the Arab population was forcibly "transferred" to make way for the new Israeli state. Their farms, workplaces and homes were stolen, forming an indispensable foundation for the new Israeli economy and state.
In the 1967 "Six-Day War," Israel seized the remainder of historic Palestine: the West Bank and Gaza. This created 300,000 more refugees, many of whom were second-time exiles, having already fled the Israelis 19 years earlier.
None of those driven out in 1948 and 1967, nor their descendants, now numbering more than six million, have ever been allowed to come back or been compensated for their loss. This injustice remains despite U.N. Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, stating unequivocally that all refugees must be allowed to return and have their homes, lands and other property restored to them. The U.S. and Israeli governments have ignored the U.N. resolution for more than half a century.
While forcibly preventing the return of any exiled Palestinians, the new Israeli state proclaimed that any person living anywhere in the world who had proof of one Jewish grandparent, regardless of whether they or their family ever stepped foot in the Middle East, had the "right of return" to Israel. Those "returning" would be granted immediately citizenship in the new exclusivist state.
Right of return remains key demand
Six decades after Al-Nakba, the right of return remains a key issue despite the Israeli and U.S. leaders’ constant efforts to dismiss it.
It is obvious why the cause remains so vital for Palestinians. If a people are deprived of their land, their very existence as a people is threatened. Defending the right of return is a key element in the struggle to maintain the unity of the Palestinian people between those who remain inside historic Palestine and those families that have been illegally expelled.
Israeli opposition to Palestinian return is not really because there is "no room" for the Palestinians in Palestine, as Zionist ideologues often claim. That argument is blatantly racist. Palestinian demographer Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta has pointed out that most of the more than 500 demolished Palestinian towns and villages remain unoccupied today. They were destroyed and their residents driven away for mainly political purposes—the creation of an exclusivist state.
Nor is this some long-resolved issue buried in the sands of time. Hundreds of thousands of people forcibly exiled in 1948 and 1967 are alive today. Many hold among their dearest possessions the keys to their homes in Palestine. Some of those houses, particularly in the demolished villages, were bulldozed into the ground. Many others, however, especially in cities like Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and elsewhere were expropriated and turned over to Israeli settlers, who live in them to this day.
Today, 46 percent of the six million Palestinian refugees reside inside historic Palestine, the 1948 borders of Israel, or the West Bank and Gaza. Another 42 percent live within 100 miles of its borders, in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. (Roane Carey, ed., The New Intifada, Versa, 2001)Put another way, nearly nine out of 10 Palestinian refugees could be home in the time in takes many people in this country to commute to work.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families live in extreme poverty in 59 refugee camps, with no prospect of a better future. For them, the right of return is not abstract or academic, but an issue that speaks to their very survival. The situation is especially dire in the camps of Lebanon and Gaza, which are home to more than one million people.
The return of the exiled Palestinians would not mean, as is commonly claimed by the supporters of Israel, that the Jewish population would be forced to leave.
But it would mean that Israel could not continue as an apartheid-style state, with special rights for one group, serving the interests of imperialism in a key strategic region of the world.
This goes to the heart of why Israeli and U.S. ruling circles so adamantly oppose the Palestinian right of return. It also speaks to the need for all people who stand for justice and self-determination to defend the right of return as a fundamental democratic right.
Al-Nakba, one of the key events in modern Middle Eastern history, began on Nov. 29, 1947. That day, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 to partition the British Mandate (colony) of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The United Nations made this decisive step without consulting the Palestinian Arabs, who at the time comprised two-thirds of the population.
Most of the Jewish population was made up of settlers who had arrived in the previous three decades, mainly from Europe. More than 100,000 were survivors of the Nazi genocide.
While the U.S. and British imperialists had done little before or during World War II to aid the Jewish victims of fascism, they used the horrors of Hitler’s death camps to rally support for the establishment of the state of Israel after the war.
The Palestinians—who had had nothing to do with European anti-Semitism or genocide—were not consulted before the U.N. vote. There was no plebiscite or vote of the people. If there had been, the outcome would not have been in doubt: One unitary state would have been the overwhelming choice. The U.N. vote was an illegitimate act and a violation of the Palestinians’ right of self-determination.
The two-thirds majority required to pass Resolution 181 was only achieved through intense U.S. pressure. The vote ended up 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions. The Truman administration leaned heavily on its neocolonies and client states, particularly the Philippines, Liberia, Haiti and Thailand, all of which initially opposed the resolution.
Without those four votes, the resolution would have failed. For narrow and short-term interests, the Soviet Union voted for the resolution. This represented a betrayal of the Arab anti-colonial struggle and one that did great harm to the socialist cause in the region. Later, the Soviet Union would become a major ally of the Arab national liberation movement.
The forced displacement of a people
The U.N. vote led to celebration among the Zionists, the settler movement working to create an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine. Despite owning just six percent of the land, Resolution 181 awarded them 56 percent of Palestine. On the Palestinian side, there was anger and rebellion. As all parties knew ahead of time, partition meant war.
Fighting broke out immediately.
In January 1948, the better-armed Zionist military forces began to carry out "Plan Dalet." The point of the plan was to terrorize and drive out the Palestinian population. Before Plan Dalet, Palestinian villagers left their homes during battles, but typically went only as far as the next village.
On April 9, 1948, a Zionist paramilitary organization, the Irgun, massacred the entire village of Deir Yassin, raising "Plan Dalet" to a new level of brutality. When the dust had cleared, more than 200 Palestinian children, women and men lay dead. The massacre was meant as a warning to all Palestinians.
While the Jewish Agency formally "condemned" the Deir Yassin massacre, on the same day it incorporated the Irgun paramilitary into the official military Joint Command.
Twelve days after Deir Yassin, Zionist forces launched a lethal attack on the Palestinian areas of the mixed city of Haifa. They rolled barrel bombs filled with gasoline and dynamite down narrow alleys in the heavily populated city while mortar shells pounded the Arab neighborhoods from overhead. Nearly the entire Arab population fled.
Within a week, similar tactics led 77,000 of 80,000 Palestinians to flee the port city of Jaffa.
By May 15, 1948, when Israel’s independence was proclaimed, 300,000 Palestinians were living and dying in abominable conditions of exile in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and the Jordan Valley. By the end of that year, the number of dispossessed Palestinians had grown to 750,000.
In the 1948 war, Israel, with its superior economic and military resources and support from the Western powers, conquered 78 percent of Palestine. The Israeli military strategy was to not only conquer land, but also to drive out as much of the Palestinian population as possible from that land.
Nearly 80 percent of the Arab population was forcibly "transferred" to make way for the new Israeli state. Their farms, workplaces and homes were stolen, forming an indispensable foundation for the new Israeli economy and state.
In the 1967 "Six-Day War," Israel seized the remainder of historic Palestine: the West Bank and Gaza. This created 300,000 more refugees, many of whom were second-time exiles, having already fled the Israelis 19 years earlier.
None of those driven out in 1948 and 1967, nor their descendants, now numbering more than six million, have ever been allowed to come back or been compensated for their loss. This injustice remains despite U.N. Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, stating unequivocally that all refugees must be allowed to return and have their homes, lands and other property restored to them. The U.S. and Israeli governments have ignored the U.N. resolution for more than half a century.
While forcibly preventing the return of any exiled Palestinians, the new Israeli state proclaimed that any person living anywhere in the world who had proof of one Jewish grandparent, regardless of whether they or their family ever stepped foot in the Middle East, had the "right of return" to Israel. Those "returning" would be granted immediately citizenship in the new exclusivist state.
Right of return remains key demand
Six decades after Al-Nakba, the right of return remains a key issue despite the Israeli and U.S. leaders’ constant efforts to dismiss it.
It is obvious why the cause remains so vital for Palestinians. If a people are deprived of their land, their very existence as a people is threatened. Defending the right of return is a key element in the struggle to maintain the unity of the Palestinian people between those who remain inside historic Palestine and those families that have been illegally expelled.
Israeli opposition to Palestinian return is not really because there is "no room" for the Palestinians in Palestine, as Zionist ideologues often claim. That argument is blatantly racist. Palestinian demographer Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta has pointed out that most of the more than 500 demolished Palestinian towns and villages remain unoccupied today. They were destroyed and their residents driven away for mainly political purposes—the creation of an exclusivist state.
Nor is this some long-resolved issue buried in the sands of time. Hundreds of thousands of people forcibly exiled in 1948 and 1967 are alive today. Many hold among their dearest possessions the keys to their homes in Palestine. Some of those houses, particularly in the demolished villages, were bulldozed into the ground. Many others, however, especially in cities like Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and elsewhere were expropriated and turned over to Israeli settlers, who live in them to this day.
Today, 46 percent of the six million Palestinian refugees reside inside historic Palestine, the 1948 borders of Israel, or the West Bank and Gaza. Another 42 percent live within 100 miles of its borders, in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. (Roane Carey, ed., The New Intifada, Versa, 2001)Put another way, nearly nine out of 10 Palestinian refugees could be home in the time in takes many people in this country to commute to work.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families live in extreme poverty in 59 refugee camps, with no prospect of a better future. For them, the right of return is not abstract or academic, but an issue that speaks to their very survival. The situation is especially dire in the camps of Lebanon and Gaza, which are home to more than one million people.
The return of the exiled Palestinians would not mean, as is commonly claimed by the supporters of Israel, that the Jewish population would be forced to leave.
But it would mean that Israel could not continue as an apartheid-style state, with special rights for one group, serving the interests of imperialism in a key strategic region of the world.
This goes to the heart of why Israeli and U.S. ruling circles so adamantly oppose the Palestinian right of return. It also speaks to the need for all people who stand for justice and self-determination to defend the right of return as a fundamental democratic right.
Labels: Israel, Palestine, refugees, right of return
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Coming to terms with the right of return - Tom Pessah
Damn it, those neighbors!
It’s a hot and humid August in Tel Aviv, and I have no wish to leave my old room in my parents’ house. During two years of studying in the States I had forgotten just how unpleasant August was here. Crossing the road would be an expedition that would require an extensive shower when I got back.
But I can’t stay, either. There is a horrible clanging going on upstairs, people are drilling into walls and making the whole house shake.
Over breakfast my dad wonders if this isn’t the third time that apartment has been renovated in the past couple of years. What for? Why did they buy the place if they didn’t like the way it looks? Is there nothing we can do? He supposes not, it is their apartment, after all.
The apartment is, but not the house, my mom explains. We all lease the land on which the house was built.
Who do we lease it from?
From the Jewish National Fund. Everyone does – either from them or from the State. Almost no one in Israel owns the land their houses are built on.
“And where did the Jewish National Fund get it from?” I ask myself. My parents have moved on to more comfortable topics. But I can guess the answer: I know the houses of a Palestinian village, Sumeil, were just a few blocks south of my parents’ house, until 1948. And while I always liked to tell myself that “that’s where the village was”, in fact that’s just were the houses were. The villagers had land. All the land in the country was divided, none of it was empty. And this land, that my parents’ house is built on, must have belonged to them.
I grew up in Israel thinking I was left-wing. I went to all the right demonstrations against the occupation. The Ministry of Defense is located conveniently in the middle of Tel Aviv, just a few stops away on the bus. You can just go and demonstrate, and then go out to a café. So we turned out and chanted all the right slogans: “ahat, shtaim, shalosh, arba’, teforak Kiryat Arba’ “ – “One, two, three, four, dismantle Kiryat Arba” (one of the most famous settlements, near Hebron/al-Khalil).
Settling on other people’s land is wrong, I thought, so all we need to do is move the settlers back into Israel and then we’ll have peace. And we went on chanting these slogans at the same place, through the first intifada, during the Oslo years, after the shock of Rabin’s murder and the ascent of Netanyahu, until the second intifada.
It was around then I met with some students from Nablus. The meeting between Israeli and Palestinian college students was organized by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, a community that tries to promote coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Unlike other groups, their idea wasn’t to help us find friends, to realize the “Other” wasn’t so bad, to create a shared belief in some kind of vague peace, tame and apolitical. It was quite the opposite: they tried to push us to confront some of the hardest issues, without guaranteeing any agreement would be found.
I had been getting along quite well with the Palestinian students, showing off my well-rehearsed tolerance, distancing myself from settlers, from the other Israelis in the group, from Israelis in general--I thought I was simply too open to be like them. And I understood some spoken Arabic, so I could listen a little to the Palestinians’ stories, about the checkpoints they avoided and the beatings they took just in order to come and meet us.
The organizers asked us to split into groups to discuss some of the biggest issues. I wanted to be on the group discussing the right of return. We Israelis came up with an especially tolerant proposal: we would allow a hundred thousand Palestinians to return! This was much to the left of the Israeli consensus and we felt very generous.
To our surprise, the Palestinians weren’t taken aback by our liberality. They even seemed offended by our discussing the issue in terms of allowing them to enter our country! But how else could it be discussed, I wondered? What is their solution? Could they really want to live among us? But how is that possible? Israel is a Jewish state, after all. What would happen to us Jews? Would we become a minority?
Five years have passed since then. I learned a lot, and I was lucky enough to study at UC Berkeley. As a famous Israeli song goes, things that you see from here, you don’t see from there. It seems much simpler to me now: Palestine/Israel isn’t mine to give; Palestinians have as much of a right to it as I do. The former inhabitants of Sumeil don’t need my big-hearted generosity: they need my recognition of the injustice committed towards them when they were expelled from their homes in 1948. They need me to remind people that most of Israel is built upon land that belonged to Palestinians. They need me to invite them and their children to come and live with us.
In Berkeley, I live a couple of blocks from some of my closest Palestinian friends. That could happen in Tel Aviv too. Inshallah.
Tom Pessah is a graduate student of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
It’s a hot and humid August in Tel Aviv, and I have no wish to leave my old room in my parents’ house. During two years of studying in the States I had forgotten just how unpleasant August was here. Crossing the road would be an expedition that would require an extensive shower when I got back.
But I can’t stay, either. There is a horrible clanging going on upstairs, people are drilling into walls and making the whole house shake.
Over breakfast my dad wonders if this isn’t the third time that apartment has been renovated in the past couple of years. What for? Why did they buy the place if they didn’t like the way it looks? Is there nothing we can do? He supposes not, it is their apartment, after all.
The apartment is, but not the house, my mom explains. We all lease the land on which the house was built.
Who do we lease it from?
From the Jewish National Fund. Everyone does – either from them or from the State. Almost no one in Israel owns the land their houses are built on.
“And where did the Jewish National Fund get it from?” I ask myself. My parents have moved on to more comfortable topics. But I can guess the answer: I know the houses of a Palestinian village, Sumeil, were just a few blocks south of my parents’ house, until 1948. And while I always liked to tell myself that “that’s where the village was”, in fact that’s just were the houses were. The villagers had land. All the land in the country was divided, none of it was empty. And this land, that my parents’ house is built on, must have belonged to them.
I grew up in Israel thinking I was left-wing. I went to all the right demonstrations against the occupation. The Ministry of Defense is located conveniently in the middle of Tel Aviv, just a few stops away on the bus. You can just go and demonstrate, and then go out to a café. So we turned out and chanted all the right slogans: “ahat, shtaim, shalosh, arba’, teforak Kiryat Arba’ “ – “One, two, three, four, dismantle Kiryat Arba” (one of the most famous settlements, near Hebron/al-Khalil).
Settling on other people’s land is wrong, I thought, so all we need to do is move the settlers back into Israel and then we’ll have peace. And we went on chanting these slogans at the same place, through the first intifada, during the Oslo years, after the shock of Rabin’s murder and the ascent of Netanyahu, until the second intifada.
It was around then I met with some students from Nablus. The meeting between Israeli and Palestinian college students was organized by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, a community that tries to promote coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Unlike other groups, their idea wasn’t to help us find friends, to realize the “Other” wasn’t so bad, to create a shared belief in some kind of vague peace, tame and apolitical. It was quite the opposite: they tried to push us to confront some of the hardest issues, without guaranteeing any agreement would be found.
I had been getting along quite well with the Palestinian students, showing off my well-rehearsed tolerance, distancing myself from settlers, from the other Israelis in the group, from Israelis in general--I thought I was simply too open to be like them. And I understood some spoken Arabic, so I could listen a little to the Palestinians’ stories, about the checkpoints they avoided and the beatings they took just in order to come and meet us.
The organizers asked us to split into groups to discuss some of the biggest issues. I wanted to be on the group discussing the right of return. We Israelis came up with an especially tolerant proposal: we would allow a hundred thousand Palestinians to return! This was much to the left of the Israeli consensus and we felt very generous.
To our surprise, the Palestinians weren’t taken aback by our liberality. They even seemed offended by our discussing the issue in terms of allowing them to enter our country! But how else could it be discussed, I wondered? What is their solution? Could they really want to live among us? But how is that possible? Israel is a Jewish state, after all. What would happen to us Jews? Would we become a minority?
Five years have passed since then. I learned a lot, and I was lucky enough to study at UC Berkeley. As a famous Israeli song goes, things that you see from here, you don’t see from there. It seems much simpler to me now: Palestine/Israel isn’t mine to give; Palestinians have as much of a right to it as I do. The former inhabitants of Sumeil don’t need my big-hearted generosity: they need my recognition of the injustice committed towards them when they were expelled from their homes in 1948. They need me to remind people that most of Israel is built upon land that belonged to Palestinians. They need me to invite them and their children to come and live with us.
In Berkeley, I live a couple of blocks from some of my closest Palestinian friends. That could happen in Tel Aviv too. Inshallah.
Tom Pessah is a graduate student of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
Labels: activism, right of return
Monday, October 29, 2007
Khalid Amayreh - Palestine is not a piece of real estate for Mahmoud Abbas
28 October, 2007There have been real fears of late that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas may compromise fundamental Palestinian national rights for the sake of “reaching peace with Israel.”
According to insiders within Abbas’ immediate circles, “the President!” may be willing and ready to offer far-reaching concessions to the Israeli apartheid state on three major issues:
The first is the paramount right of return for nearly five million refugees, uprooted from their homes and villages by the terrorist Israeli entity back in 1948, and subsequently expelled and dispersed all over the globe.
Abbas reportedly may be willing to accept the Israeli-American view, and, now, the French view, that there is no way the refugees can return to their original homes, now mostly destroyed and obliterated, or occupied by Jewish immigrants imported from around the world to fulfill Zionism.
According to Israeli media, Abbas on several occasions intimated to Israeli leaders that he would never insist on the return of the refugees to Israel proper and that only a symbolic return of tens of thousands, or even less, would suffice.
On 28 October, Sari Nusseiba, a protégé of Abbas, was quoted by the Jewish settler paper, the Jerusalem Post, as saying that the “Palestinians” would be willing to trade the right of return for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967.
The second major concession to Israel Abbas is contemplating will take the form of ceding large parts of East Jerusalem, particularly the Jewish colonies built after 1967. These include major settlements such as Ma’ali Adomim, Har Homa, and other colonies.
The PLO chairman, who has been acting and behaving like an absolute dictator and “ruling” by decrees, is reportedly willing to barter these settlements for Palestinian territories occupied in 1948, possibly in the Negev desert. Needless to say, this would be like giving up a piece of pearl for a piece of coal.
The third and equally scandalous concession, which Abbas reportedly views as “innocuous” and “foregone conclusion” is recognizing Israel as a country “of the Jews, for the Jews and by the Jews.”
If true, and Abbas can’t be given the benefit of the doubt, then the PA Chairman would be committing the greatest of all follies and the grandest of all treason.
First of all, Abbas has no right whatsoever to tamper with this most paramount issue which touches a sensitive nerve in each and every Palestinian man, woman and child.
Abbas and his flamboyant but gullible spokespersons may argue that as an elected president, he has the right to negotiate with Israel and even reach a peace settlement with it.
But this is a spurious and easily refutable argument. Abbas never said in his election campaign in 2005 that he would scrap the right of return. Had he said something like this, not only he wouldn’t have been elected, but actually he might have been killed, even by his own Fatah party.
More to the point, Abbas was elected by a small percentage of the estimated 10 million Palestinians. Indeed, the total number of voters who elected him didn’t exceed five per cent of Palestinians.
Hence, the claim that he has a mandate by the Palestinian people to sacrifice Palestinian rights for the sake of a peace that would effectively spell outright surrender to Zionist hegemony is laughable and silly.
Indeed, the right of return is sanctioned by international law and by the International Declaration of Human Rights which states that every person who had left his or her home for whatever reasons has an inherent right to return home.
Besides, if the refugees have no right to return to territories occupied in 1948, e.g. Israel proper, then, using the same logic, they will have no right to return to the territories occupied in 1967, for in both cases, repatriation is sanctioned by relevant UN resolutions.
As to Jerusalem, one would wonder what would become of the capital of Palestine when the bulk of it will be usurped by the deformed children of rape, the Jewish settlements.
And what kind of peace would that be if ethnic cleansing and settlement expansion were to be allowed to win? That wouldn’t be peace, that would be a “legitimization” and perpetuation of an act of rape; and if Abbas would accept it to prove his good will to George Bush and Ehud Olmert, the Palestinian masses certainly wouldn’t.
Thirdly, Israeli leaders have already indicated that Abbas is ready and willing to recognize Israel as “a Jewish state.”
This is probably the most scandalous and stupidest political blunder any Palestinian politician would make. The reason is very simple: Recognizing Israel as a Jewish state implies that Israel, possibly at one point in the future, would have the “right” to expel its Palestinian citizens on the ground that Israel is a Jewish state and they are not Jewish. In fact, the Israeli parliament or Knesset is already discussing racist bills that would strip non-Jews of Israeli citizenship if they refuse to recognize Jewish supremacy vis-à-vis non-Jewish citizens of the state.
Mahmoud Abbas and his aides and hangers-on may well parrot the silly Israeli mantra that Israel is both democratic and Jewish, not realizing…or perhaps realizing, which would be even more appalling, that whenever there is any modicum of incompatibility between the Jewish aspect and the democratic aspect of the mendacious formula, the former would override the latter. Isn’t that happening already?
Besides, one might really wonder what political or moral right Abbas thinks he has to speak on behalf of the nearly 1.5 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. Are they orphans or minors or leaderless that Abbas should speak for them in a matter of life or death such as this?
This is a paramount strategic matter for all Palestinians, especially across the Green Line, which really makes it imperative for Arab leaders in Israel, people like Sheikh Ra’ed Salah, Ahmed Teibi, Muhammed Barake, Taleb Sani’ and others to speak up and warn Abbas to shut his mouth up and stop jeopardizing their future and national survival.
Finally, a word to Israeli leaders and their American subordinates. You should realize that the Palestinian people are different from other Arabs. We simply don’t sheepishly follow our leaders; our leaders must follow us, and if they don’t, we will dispose of them.
SEE THIS VIDEO!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygJaz12DzcA
Labels: Israel, occupation, Palestine, Palestinian politicians, refugees, right of return
