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Again in Johannesburg: THE RIGHT OF RETURN IS STILL THE ISSUE

Dr Salman Abu Sitta, May 21, 2025, 2.00pm Johannesburg, South Africa.

INTRODUCTION

Good afternoon

Thank you for inviting me. South Africa people and government are dear to our hearts in Palestine. You and we know the meaning of loss of freedom at the hands of the colonial West.

Palestine is a 4500 old country. It saw many invaders come and leave. Now we have the full force of the colonial West with its nuclear weapons, its fleet, bombs, media, money and UN vetoes, all ganged up against Palestinians in 1% of Palestine , that is Gaza Strip.

For over 550 days, the Israel- West alliance killed and injured one third of a million people and destroyed homes, schools, hospitals, water supplies and all means of life. They starved people and killed children by bombs, starvation and lack of medicine.

The world has never seen such barbarity. All this is well documented and seen by the whole world. These crimes are contrary to every article in international law.

But South Africa stood up for justice and presented the case against the war criminals to ICC and ICJ. Thank you again south Africa.

Hence, we remember today, as a symbol of Israel’s barbarity, Shireen Abu Akleh, the Aljazeera journalist who was murdered on May 11, 2022, three years ago, by an Israeli soldier, now named Alon Scagio. He was killed later by the defenders of Jenin refugee camp.

SECTION 1: WHAT IS NAKBA

Now this brings us to the root of all evil. Al Nakba.

I have witnessed al Nakba. That was 28,094 days ago.

Not one day passed without feeling the impact of this tragedy on our life, our psyche, on our growing children, on their education and future, on facing new wars of different types, waged by the same enemy, killing, destroying, vilifying. silencing, making victims of the murderers. making terrorists of the victims.

There is absolutely nothing like it in recorded history.

Yet in 28,000 days, neither the enemy ceased its murder, nor did we cease our resistance.

But there is a big difference. You, and the whole world today, witness the crimes, recorded daily and condemned by the world conscience, but supported and financed by the very same states which made us refugees in 1948.

Here is the trajectory of 28,000 days.

Al-Nakba

In Al-Nakba of 1948, the Haganah, the forerunner of the Israeli army, invaded and conquered 20,500 km2.

This occupied territory is 78% of Palestine. In the course of ten months, 120,000 Israeli soldiers in 9 brigades carried out 31 military operations, attacked and depopulated 530 cities and villages. The depopulated population, now 9 million people, are refugees living in exile since then.

Their landscape: houses, buildings, and historical monuments were largely destroyed. Their mention in history is erased. You see in this slide how this happened. It is a clear foreign invasion. It has no legality under any law, then or now.

I have a personal experience of this. On May 14, 1948, Israeli soldiers attacked and destroyed my village Al Ma’in and expelled my family. On this day I became a refugee.

The irony is: on the very same day, David Ben-Gurion, the chief of the Ashkenazi European Jews, declared the settlers’ state of Israel in Tel Aviv. He proclaimed devotion to peace and equality with the Arabs.

This is al Nakba, summarized in these three maps.

Section 2: WHO ARE THE REAL HOSTAGES

Al Nakba continues, no more clearly than in Gaza Strip.

Today, the Genocide in Gaza and the scale of destruction are unprecedented in history, even compared with WWII. The Gaza Strip where 2.3 million refugees live in 365 km2 (1.3% of Palestine) has become literally a pile of rubble. The human loss of life is unprecedented. An estimated 310,000 (14%) have been killed and injured. This would equate to 45 million Americans on a U.S. scale.

After October 7, 2023, Israel and its Western supporters justified the Genocide in Gaza in response to the rescue of 250 “hostages”, or settlers, from captivity in Gaza.

But who are the REAL Hostages?

They are the 2.3 million Palestinians crammed in Gaza’s ten refugee camps. They were expelled from their homes in 247 towns and villages in 1948.

They are held in captivity in Gaza for 28,000 days.

They are incarcerated in a huge concentration camp called GAZA Strip, a new name not known in Palestine’s geography before.

Gaza Strip is bounded by the Armistice line of Feb 1949 (red line). Its area was 550 km2.

In 1950, Israel chopped off 200 km2 of the area of Gaza Strip to the present 365 km2. This fact is hardly noticed. Israel now plans to cut it down by further 10%.

The Gaza hostages want to be set free and return home. You see their size in the big black T as compared to the tiny black T of the Israeli settlers on their land. Two million refugees demand to return home. 150,000 settlers occupy their land.

Their demand was and will always be the Right to Return Home.

Section 3: Right of Return Sacred Legal and Feasible The Right of Return is Still the Issue.

The resilience of the Palestinians, the innocent lives they have lost and their daily suffering beyond description are the price they paid and are paying for a singular aim they maintained for 77 years,

The Right to Return Home.

Today there are 9 million Palestinian refugees. Their homes are occupied by Israeli settlers.

Not a single Israeli occupant of their homes has a legal title deed of the property he sits on.

We must remember that 94% of the land in Israel is Palestinian property.

The world has confirmed their right. On the tenth of December 1948, the UN voted on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On the next day, 11 December, the UN passed the famous resolution 194, affirming the Right of Return.

This resolution has three elements: 1. the right to return, 2. providing welfare until this happens, which is UNRWA, and 3. creating a mechanism for their return, which UNCCP.

This resolution has been affirmed by the UN more than 130 times, the longest in UN history. International law and a myriad of UN conventions support the Right of Return.

Here are some of these.

Fourth Geneva Convention art 4. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights art 8 and 13. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, art 7 and 8. The International Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, art 5 and 6. … and many more.

Israel itself was admitted to the UN membership as “a peace loving” state on 11 May 1949.The most significant element is that Israel’s UN membership is conditional upon the implementation of Resolution 194. The condition is indispensable, condicio sine qua non.(British Sign Kuwa NONE).

Israel’s non-compliance is a valid reason for expelling Israel from the UN.

All these are the legal foundations for the Right of Return.

We can make this come true by exposing this unknown fact..

SECTION 4: WHERE ARE THE REFUGEES AND WHO LIVES IN THEIR HOMES

First, we ask where are the refugees

We know everything about them. We have data who they are, where they come from and where they are now.

Next, we see who occupies their land in Israel.

We made a detailed study, village by village, city by city, to find how many Jews live in Palestinian lands and where.

We found a startling result.

There are 246 Palestinian village lands have no Jews today. There are 272 village lands have few Jews less than 5000 Jews.

These village lands are shown in green. Beer Sheba district is practically empty except for Palestinian cities repopulated by Jews..

Jewish land during the Mandate is shown in blue and is today fully populated. Cities (whether Palestinian, mixed or not) are shown in brown. Unlike villages, Israel destruction of cities was limited to old quarters.

The Palestinian village lands which have more than 30,000 Jews are shown dotted. That is where the Jews are majority over the returnees. It is a tiny area.

So, if we now repopulate Palestinian villages by the return of the refugees, we do not find any appreciable problem of Jewish displacement.

In Galilee, the Little Triangle and Beer Sheba, there is already a sizable Palestinian population, ready to welcome their kith and kin.

Then, where are the Jews in Israel?
Generally, Jews live in 927 listed localities with a total population of 5,509,778 (year 2020) within the armistice line of 1949. But this large number may be misleading. Only 15 of them have a population of over 100,000; 62 have a population between 10,000 and 100,000.

That means that 90% of Jews live in 77 localities, out of 927 listed localities, or eight percent of the total number of localities. The area they occupy is 1,400 km2 or 6% of Israel’s area.

The final result is here. The majority of Jews live in three cantons, Tel Aviv, West Jerusalem and Haifa cantons. Jews can continue to live in these cantons freely and can exercise their cultural and religious freedom. They can live in harmony with Palestinians whose original homes are in these areas. But we must remember: There is no place here for Zionism, Apartheid or war crimes.

SECTION 5 EVACUATION PLAN---NORTH/ SOUTH TRANSPORT

Now we shall make a bold assumption, that UN resolutions of the refugees’ return are implemented and enforced. We shall assume that we convince kibbutz settlers to voluntarily leave our land and property and go live in Tel Aviv or Haifa. We may need the help of Trump. He likes voluntary transfers.

How could this happen.

First we must remember basic facts,

This slide shows the population categories in Israel. There are three categories:

1. 15 Cities over 100,000, many of them were originally Palestinian, like Jaffa, Haifa, Lydda, Ramle, Nazareth, Safad, Tiberias, Beisan, Beer Sheba, Isdud.

2. 62 towns of population between 10 to 100 thousand. Many of these have grown from concentration of small communities or growth of villages.

These two are 77 localities where 90% of Israeli Jews and Palestinians live.

Israeli Survey official map lists 927 localities. Of this number, 92% or 850 of this number are kibbutz, Moshav and the like. That is where only 10% of Israelis live. The average kibbutz have 500 members. The kibbutz are planted in refugee land to prevent the return of the refugees. Originally, the kibbutz members were 30 armed men with machine guns in fortified trenches to shoot the returning Palestinians, they called them infiltrators.

Shows another population distribution. Israel is divided into 6 Natural Regions. These Natural Regions reflect the concentration of population. NR no 6, the southern district has the largest area with the least population.

NR no 5, Tel Aviv area, is the opposite, with the largest population in the smallest area.

These facts help us to understand the validity of the Return Plan.

This generated by data analysis. It is a clear graphic illustration of the population distribution. The red hot spots shows the location of the three cantons. The rest is largely uninhabited.

We are now in a position to plan the voluntary evacuation of the kibbutz. Here we show the shortest routes for the kibbutz in the north region to reach Haifa, based on the real road system in Israel. Also we show the shortest route for the kibbutz in the center to reach Tel Aviv. The journey is not long, two hours is the farthest down to 15 minutes, the nearest. The whole evacuation takes less than 10 days.

The southern district is much much easier. We will come back to it in a minute.

Here we come to the required result: Release of the refugees’ land from its present occupiers. Clearly, the land released in Phase 1 (the Kibbutz) covers almost all refugees land of 530 villages, depopulated in 1948.

This is the land of 9 million refugees. It can be freed at the cost of moving half a million settlers to Tel Aviv ……or preferably abroad to Poland , Ukraine, Romania, Russia and elsewhere. 9 million rights recovered against half a million wrong deeds.

Add to this the southern district, 12,500 km2, it is clear and free, largely empty.

What a small price to pay for justice restored and for the end of Genocide, massacres, war crimes, Apartheid, and exile.

What a simple price to pay, to remove such a dark stain on human history, brought upon us by Zionism and its Western supporters,

Now we should be entitled to plan for the actual return home. This entitlement is sacred for Palestinians, legal by every line in international law and quite feasible as you can see.

Let us now return home.

We have maps and documents, but first, can we find the village location on the ground?
Yes we can.

These two satellite photos guide us to the village location. Here you can see the different texture of the ground as different from nearby fields, The traces of the rubble are still there, the stones, the bricks, the mosque and cemetery remains. They ploughed the nearby fields clean but the village site remained conspicuous. Here is another village.

Let us now rebuild our destroyed villages.

SECTION 6: SUHMATA

Now we shall rebuild Suhmata.Why Suhmata?

We recognize a native of Suhmata, a fighter for the Right of Return. He lived all his life after Nakba in Lebanon, in Rashidieh camp. He is Abu Maher Al Yamani.

SECTION 7: GAZA RETURNS

Gaza, Gaza, the defiant, the Stalingrad of Palestine. The largest Concentration Camp on earth, the home of defiant resistance. Its land is soaked with the blood of children.

This 2014 picture tells you who they are.

These young people were determined to return home. They wish to break free from the concentration camp. It has a density of 8000 persons/km2. Their homes are occupied by settlers at only 7 person/km2.

That is why some of them penetrated the fence on October 7.

Their land is still empty.

Who is occupying their land?

Those settlers live in 212 tiny settlements. Their total population is 150,000 in all southern district, 12,500km2. the land where Gaza refugees came from.

Here you have it.150,000 settlers in the land of two million Palestinians, crammed in Gaza strip. The number of all these settlers is comparable to one refugee camp in Rafah (133k).

They could move to Tel Aviv.

We grouped them in 9 convoys. They could travel north in buses or in their cars. The journey will take 45 minutes to one hour. In one day or two, they will be gone. And two million Palestinians from 247 villages can return home.

At last. After waiting 77 years.

Justice will be made at last.

But all this needs the implementation of one cardinal principle. This principle is essential, just, non-negotiable and inevitable. That is the abolishment of Zionism and all its components: war crimes, dispossession, occupation, Apartheid, racism, discrimination AND GENOCIDE.

Finally, Do not be deceived by the generous calls to rebuild Gaza by various people who have unsavoury interests.. The answer is NOT to prepare Gaza for a new Genocide. The answer is always the same: remedy, reparations AND the Right of Return,

SECTION 8: OUR DUTY

Here we come to our duty. Our duty in academia or among the general public is to make the Right of Return our cardinal principle, in activism, in education, in upbringing of our children, in dealing with the outside world.

Here at Johannesburg university and at any academic institution, you can create new plans and position papers for a future liberated Palestine.

There are 38 projects on the table at PLS waiting for action. I hope we can make this happen, by recruiting geographers and demographers at the center, They have a huge data ready to work on. See A call to professionals.

SECTION 9: CONCLUSIONS

Reflections

Finally, let me reflect on our homeland here, on the eastern board of the Mediterranean Sea or Bilad ash Sham and The Holy Land.

Let me reflect on its continuous geography and its 5000 year history.

I see this past year, throngs of Western leaders, from the United States, Britain, Germany and France paying homage to their agent in Tel Aviv, offering more bombs, money, media bias and UN vetoes. They urge him to accelerate the blood flow of our murdered women and children,

Back a hundred years ago, I recall the meeting of the British Mark Sykes and the French Francois Picot, sitting with a map at a table, devouring our homeland between them. We became tribes with flags as they called us, while they remained the masters.

Back one thousand years ago I read the account of William of Tyre about the Frank franji invaders. I read the contrary accounts of Usama ibn Munqith, describing how these barbarians entered Jerusalem with the blood of its people up to their knees.

I reflect again with little surprise, they are the very same people who attacked us 1000 years ago, 100 years ago and now.

But we survived and will survive again. Just as those in Gaza concentration camp, surviving at a heavy price of loss of life and unimaginable suffering.

They never raised a flag of surrender.

Our people never ceased to resist. They rose from the ashes to resist.

Why? Because this is our land. This is our geography. This is our history.

The Right of Return is Sacred, Legal, Feasible and Inevitable.

Palestine is free from the river to the sea.

Let this child return home.

Thank you.