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Roots
Salman Abu Sitta
Al-Awda’s 4th International Convention
San Francisco, 14th - 16th July 2006
Thank you, Jess (Ghannam), for your kind introduction. I have
just landed after a 10 hour flight from London, crossing an 8
hour time zone. I had plenty of time to reflect on our
situation. Today, terrible news from Gaza and Lebanon,
describing the death and destruction sown by Israel, gives us an
eerie sense of dejas-vu. Al Nakba is re-enacted everyday of our
lives.
Over half a century ago, it would have been inconceivable, that
I, a Palestinian boy living peacefully in his home thousands of
miles away, would be speaking to you here today, nor that many
of you, third generation refugees from Palestine, would be here
in such numbers, away from the homes of your fathers and
grandfathers. But such is the working of al Nakba
I became a refugee at the age of 10, when strange European
Zionist settlers invaded my country, destroyed my home and made
me a refugee. I spent all my adult life wondering why this enemy
destroyed my life. I tried to put a face to this invisible enemy
– for I have never seen one before. Like millions of
Palestinians, I started, then in 1948, on the long trek to
return home, The trajectory of expulsion propelled us to the
four corners of the earth but our compass was always directed
towards our home. In unison and in unbelievable resilience, we
vowed: We shall never rest until we return home.
This is the ninetieth year in our struggle for freedom and
peaceful life in our homeland. In 1916, two European colonial
diplomats, the British Mark Sykes and the French Georges Picot
conspired to enslave the Arab people after winning the war in
alliance with the Arabs against the Ottoman rule. While the
Allies’ planes were dropping leaflets expressing devotion to the
Arab quest for freedom and democracy, Sykes and Picot charted on
a map lines dividing of the territorial spoils of war.
A latent European colonial enterprise came into the fray. The
Zionist leader, Weizmann extracted a fateful letter from the
British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, in November 1917
addressed to a Jewish millionaire, Lord Rothschild. None of the
three conspiring Europeans lived in Palestine or had a
legitimate presence in Palestine. The British army then had
barely crossed the border of Palestine.
Balfour declaration was a false promise of those who did not own
to those who had no title behind the back of the rightful owner.
Thus began a relentless Western war against the Palestinian
people, now in its ninetieth year.
Balfour was fully aware of what he was doing. True to his
colonial heritage, he said in 1918,
For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form
of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the
country…..[Zionism is] of far profounder impact than the desires
and prejudices [not the rights] of the Arabs who inhabit this
ancient land..
He said the Arabs are “wholly barbarous, undeveloped and
unorganized black tribes”.
The British Mandate ruled Palestine from 1920 to 1948 with the
irreconcilable objectives of preparing the Palestinians for free
democratic government and building a ‘national home’ for Jews in
Palestine.
Nine decades before George Bush came up with his campaign for
democracy for the whole world, the Palestinians started their
campaign for democracy. When they petitioned, agitated and
revolted for their cause, Churchill, the Colonial Secretary,
told them in 1921,
Step by step we shall develop representative institutions
leading to full self-government but our children’s children will
have passed away before that is accomplished…..
They are still waiting. They have not given up.
In his five-year tenure (1920-1925), the Zionist first British
High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, laid the
foundations for the state of Israel.
Hebrew was introduced as an official language, separate Jewish
institutions for banking, education, labour, water and energy
were formed. A pseudo government and an embryonic army were
established. What was left was to import citizens for the new
state, hence the drive for Jewish immigration.
By 1948, with the collusion of the British Mandate, The Zionists
failed to acquire, even by money, Zionist-inspired laws and
economic pressure, more than 5.5% of the land of Palestine. But
they succeeded in increasing the Jewish population from 9% to
30% of the total population and they trained an army of 120,000,
or 20% of the Jewish immigrant population. (Compare this with a
normal country, where the army makes up 1 - 2% of the
population). This Zionist army was ready to bounce on Palestine.
It is often said in the standard Israeli narrative that, at the
end of the Mandate, the Palestinians refused to accept the
Partition Plan of Palestine, while the Jews accepted it. This
narrative deliberately omits and distorts key facts.
How can the Palestinians accept to give away sovereignty over
54% of their country to Jewish European immigrants who
controlled only 5.5% of Palestine, many of whom had just waded
into their shores under the cover of darkness from a smuggler’s
ship?
In the would-be Jewish state, 457 Palestinian towns and villages
suddenly found themselves under the rule of foreign immigrants.
The Palestinians comprised about half of the total population of
this new state.
They did not like it. Neither did Ben Gurion, for different
reasons. In 1948, Ben Gurion proceeded to expel his Palestinian
citizens even before Israel was declared and he went on, not
only to conquer 54%, but 78% of Palestine and expel its
population. Al Nakba was born.
Zionists, now called Israelis, conquered 774 Palestinian towns
and villages, depopulated totally 675 of them, while 99 remained
under brutal military rule for 16 years to be replaced by second
class citizen status.
It was the largest planned and foreign-supported ethnic cleaning
in modern history.
Never before in modern history has a foreign minority descended
upon the national majority of a country as in Palestine,
depopulated its inhabitants, confiscated its land, property and
records in the largest land robbery since WW II, destroyed its
historical and religious landscape and obliterated its identity
and history and called this crime as a victory for civilization
and a divine intervention.
These who missed al Nakba of 1948 can see it re-enacted every
day on their TV screens, albeit in different forms and under
different pretexts.
Today the Palestinian population is about 10 million (9.650).
Two thirds are refugees, the largest ratio among any people in
the world. If you add those displaced in 1967, fully three
quarters of the Palestinians are deprived of the normal human
right to live at home. The remainder live under Israeli
occupation, the longest and most brutal occupation in modern
times.
You are the children and grandchildren of those refugees. You
are fighting for the same cause: The right to return home. You
have not sailed to Poland and Russia. Your adversaries sailed to
your shores. You did not conquer, plunder and expel. Others did
it to you.
Israel has waged 5 major wars, hundreds of raids by air, land
and sea against the Palestinian people for exactly 21,412 days
today. But Palestinians are still standing tall. They never
surrendered.
In the last 6 years since the second intifada, 3500 Palestinians
were killed, over 9000 are prisoners at present, but 40% of all
adult male population have been imprisoned at one time by the
Israeli occupation forces.
In what the author and film director, John Pilger, calls ‘a war
on children’, seven hundred children were killed by Israeli
occupation forces since 2000. This is not to mention Mohamed al
Durra killed in his father’s lap or Huda Ghalia, the child who
lost all her family on a Gaza beach.
Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity according the sixth
principle of the Nuremberg Charter and the 1998 Statute of Rome.
Collective punishment is contrary to Geneva Conventions. The
International Court of Justice, the highest legal body in the
world, in a landmark Advisory Opinion of July 2004, decreed that
the Apartheid wall is illegal and Israel’s brutal occupation is
illegal.
The famous UN resolution 194, calling for the refugees’ return
has been affirmed by the UN over 130 times. It has been
supported by all Human Rights Conventions. The majority of the
people in the world support the Palestinian rights. Why then are
they not implemented? Why do Palestinians continue to suffer?
I submit to you that a campaign of genocide has been waged
against the Palestinian people, a genocide of killing, a
genocide of elimination, a genocide of exile and banishment, a
genocide of decapitating people by assassinating their leaders,
a genocide of starvation, a genocide of slow death by cutting
sources of food, water and medicine, a genocide of civilized
life by destroying schools, universities and hospitals, a
genocide of oblivion by destroying the national identity and
denying the right for citizenship and nationality.
Israel has done that and more. It is the raison d’etre of
Israel. Ben Gurion said that the destruction of Palestine is a
pre-condition for the foundation of Israel.
We know all that. We also know that Israel could not have done
that without the massive military, financial and political
support of the US Administration. You live here and you know
this better than me. You only need to read the report by Stephen
Walt and John Mearsheimer, well-known scholars, not particularly
pro-Arab, on the influence of Israel Lobby on US foreign policy
and the damage it does to US interests.
While US foreign policy is openly and unashamedly biased in
favour of Israel, Europe, The original colonial power, continues
to play the same role it did in 1916. Europe gives conditional
aid to Palestinians. It tells them: if you accept Israeli
occupation and drop your rights, we will give enough aid to keep
you alive. If you do not, we will let your starve. We will also
not let anybody else help you. Deliberate starvation of a people
is a crime against humanity. Yes this is what the hypocritical
European politicians publicly declare.
The conditional aid they give to Palestinians is in effect
financing the occupation. Israel, the Occupying Power, is
obliged under the 4th Geneva Convention and generally
Humanitarian Law to pay for all services needed for the occupied
people. Europe relieves Israel from this burden and let it free
to conduct its brutal occupation
I once said to some European diplomats : Do you not have the
courage at least to recover the cost of hospitals you built and
Israel destroyed? He could not answer.
The monumental verdict by the International Court of Justice of
9th July 2004 and its subsequent endorsement by the UN did not
cause any western power to move Nato forces, apply sanctions or
economic blockade, not even make a strong protest, against
Israel’s violation of international law, as they have done with
ferocity in innumerable other cases.
Outside the UN resolutions, western powers have proposed over
two dozen schemes for the so called “peace in the Middle East”
since Israel was conditionally admitted to the UN in 1949.
As an exercise, I went through all those schemes. Not one of
them, not one, forces Israel to implement International Law.
They all require Palestinians to drop all or most of their
rights, under the rubric of “realism” and ask them to legitimize
Israel’s violation of International Law.
Take the Right of Return. It is enshrined in International Law
and affirmed repeatedly, particularly for the Palestinian
refugees. It has been implemented in Kosova, Bosnia, East Timor,
Ruwanda, Guatemala, Abkhazia, Afghanistan and Iraq. But not in
Palestine. Why?
The response we here from sympathetic Europeans: it is not
realistic, it is not feasible, there is no room, villages are
destroyed, no where to return to…..etc.
What if this is true? This is like saying: If you intend to kill
or steal, you will be punished. But if you successfully kill and
steal, you are forgiven for the crime and what you steal is
yours. There is no moral, legal or even political logic behind
that.
But it is not true. Such Zionist myths have been demystified
long ago. We have shown that:
- The land of the refugees, which is 93% of Israel, is inhabited
by 1.5% of Israeli Jews, largely in the Kibbutz, which is
financially and politically bankrupt. The Kibbutz share the
refugees’ land with the army for its expansionist and occupation
campaigns.
- 90% of the village sites are still vacant, 7% are partially
built-over, and only 3% are totally built over in Tel Aviv and
West Jerusalem.
- The total number of Russian immigrants is equal to all
registered refugees in Lebanon and Gaza. If Israel wanted peace,
refugees could have returned. Instead, new conflict is created
and the racist Sharansky and Lieberman became new Israel’s
leaders.
- 97% of refugees are located within 100 km from their homes and
50% are within 40 km, a mere bus ride. Many can see their houses
but they cannot get there.
- Gaza population density is 6000 persons/km2 while their land,
a few kilometers away, is empty, at 6 rural Jews/km2. All the
rural Jews in half of Israel, from Ramleh to Um Rashrash (Eilat)
are less in number than a single refugee camp in Gaza.
We could go on and on. This was published in books and atlases.
The facts were never disputed by Israelis, only the motives
behind them.
That is about Palestine enemies. But what about the Palestinian
position?
PLO was formed in 1964 as the representative of the Palestinian
people with the sole aim of restoring their rights. In 1974, the
UN passed several resolutions to affirm that these rights are
inalienable. In 1988, The Palestine National Council made a
major concession. It split its national objectives into two: (1)
establishing a Palestine state on only one fifth of its
territory and ( 2 ) pursuing the Right of Return of the refugees
to their homes wherever they may be, precisely in the meaning of
resolution 194.
Oslo Accords of 1993 were a watershed. Palestinian leadership,
at its lowest ebb, accepted these Accords which had two major
flows: (1) they ignored the massive body of International Law
that supported Palestinian rights, and (2) The Palestinian
people were neither consulted nor have they agreed to Oslo
Accords in any fully representative way through referendum or a
freshly elected PNC. The major victim was the refugees rights.
Hence, the Rights of Return Movement was born. Committees,
groups and associations were formed in every place in the world
where there were concentration of refugees. By 1998, the
fiftieth year of al Nakba, this movement became a formidable
voice. Dedicated activists, academics, writers and community
leaders worked tirelessly and joined forces with liberal and
human rights groups. Today no one can deny their presence. But
they lacked a unified consolidated political entity. This
situation is becoming detrimental to our cause and cannot
continue.
The reason is simple. The internal conflict between Hamas, the
elected PA government and Fatah, the old largely corrupt
faction, stifled any progress towards the essential Palestinian
issues.
Last month, I met many Palestinian leaders, including Abu Mazen.
It is my considered opinion, supported by many others, that
Fatah clings to PLO structure, which it previously marginalized,
as the only remaining vehicle for power.
Israel and Western powers support Abu Mazen more or less and act
to destroy Hamas government because it is the elected
representative that would not forefeit Palestinian inalienable
rights. Israel does not consider Palestinians or Arabs a
military threat. But Palestinians have a coveted valuable prize
that Israel desperately seeks: that is legitimacy, that is for
Palestinians to say: there is no Palestine, no Palestinians, no
rights big or small. They want Abu Mazen, the nominal head of
outdated PLO, to sign on behalf of all Palestinians on the
required concessions, in what would be called a historic
settlement. Then he and PLO will be dumped in the bin.
Organized members of Fatah, Hamas and other factions do not
count for more than 5% of all Palestinians. Where is the voice
of 95% of Palestinians? Who represents them now? Who defends
their rights? It is, and should be, the Palestine National
Council, the source of ultimate power and the arbiter of the
destiny of the Palestinian people.
As you know, the old PNC is now defunct, its members have been
gathered arbitrarily and it has grown to 600 or 700 unknown
people. Many have died or lost touch with the people. There must
be a new PNC, clean, lean and truly representative council
through elections everywhere. It is our only safety net.
We have a large database to know who the Palestinians are, where
they come from, where they are today. Elections could be held in
many parts of the world and, where not possible, other
representative means may be devised.
The PNC membership should not exceed 250, at the rate of one
member for 40,000 or 4 village units. Only 33% of Palestinians
now live in Occupied Palestine of 1967, under PA. All
Palestinians, including those in 1948, should be represented.
These simple and necessary principles are rejected or obstructed
by current leadership. They wish to allocate half the seats to
the one-third of the people under PA. They underestimate the
weight of Palestinians abroad. One leader, who appears on TV
frequently, told me, “we are in the fire. We represent you. That
is enough”. He did not mention the secret agreements by his ilk
to drop the Right of Return, nor the corruption as his
credentials.
This old tired leadership gives lame excuses for not holding PNC
elections. They delay endlessly convening the meeting of the
Preparatory Committee which should be entrusted with holding the
elections.
They ignore the major fact, plain to all, that western powers
court the present leadership for the single reason that they
sign concessions in the name of PLO on behalf of the Palestinian
people. Then they and PLO will be wiped out. The two thirds of
Palestinians will be left to their own devices or forcibly
settled somewhere.
We must prevent this happening. PLO and PNC are our major,
probably only, achievement in the past half a century as the
representative of the Palestinian people. A new PNC must be
elected soon.
To do that, we have to forge a union of all groups to speak with
one voice. We then must hold a popular conference of 1000-2000
people for Palestinians of all walks of life. A venue is already
available. We must form a single unified people’s voice very
soon. We must participate in the Preparatory Committee of PNC
and prevent it being high-jacked by old cronies.
As we have forced our presence in the media and human rights
activism, we must now have a real, strong voice in shaping our
destiny.
Our resilience and determination has carried us through 58
years. We should carry this message forward, a message of
freedom and justice.
And as we always say:
Ma dha’a huqqon wara’hu mutalib.
(No right is lost if pursued vigorously).
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