Al-Awda Statement On Annapolis Conference

November 26, 2007

With the upcoming US-sponsored international conference in Annapolis MD, Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, reiterates once again that a just and lasting peace can only be achieved with the return of all Palestinians to their original homes, towns, and villages, with full restitution of all of their confiscated and destroyed property, and compensation. The Palestinian Arab people, regardless of their religious affiliation, are indigenous to Palestine. Therefore, they are entitled to live anywhere in their homeland Palestine which encompasses present-day "Israel", the West Bank and Gaza Strip. No agreement, negotiations or parties which purport to trade away these rights or any other inalienable rights can have any legal basis and cannot bind or compel the Palestinian people to end the struggle for the fulfillment of all of their rights.

The definition of Israel as a "Jewish state", granting exclusive rights to citizenship and land to any Jew from anywhere in the world, while denying the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine their fundamental rights, is part and parcel of the racism inherent in the colonialist Zionist ideology which underlies the policies and laws of the settler state of "Israel". Any sacrifice of any part of our land and culture will represent a blow to the entire Arab peoples and the lands of West Asia and Africa.

The US government subsidizes Israel's injustices with billions of dollars annually. Any Palestinian and other Arab participating in accommodation with the Zionist and US regimes in order to promote normalization and put an end to the Palestinian liberation struggle, stand exposed naked before the world as traitors to our people.

Until all Palestinians exercise their right to return and self determination, Al-Awda calls on all its members and supporters to redouble their efforts, working for and demanding:

1. An end to all US political, military and economic aid to "Israel"
2. The divestment of all public and private entities from all Zionist corporations, American corporations with subsidiaries operating within "Israel"
3. An end to the investment of Labor Union members' pension funds in "Israel"
4. The boycott of all "Israeli" products

The 60 year commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba will take place in May 2008. Al-Awda's 6th Annual International Convention will take place in Anaheim, California, May 16-18, 2008. The convention will be dedicated to renewing our struggle to return and to reclaim our land no matter what deals are made in Annapolis.

Until Return

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition

PO Box 131352

Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-685-3243

Fax: 360-933-3568
E-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. To make a donation, please go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html

1967 War: An Unfinished Chapter

By Ismail Haniyeh

WHEN the Israeli leaders launched their expansionist war in June 1967 they never envisaged that 40 years later they would still be haunted by the consequences. At the time, they were driven by one strategic objective: to end the conflict by seizing all that remained of Palestine and complete the process of ethnic cleansing that started in 1948.

They did not realise the resolution of this conflict would take much more than military superiority. The occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai peninsula was portrayed as the victory of David over Goliath. For the next two decades the Palestinian experience was drowned out by the clamour of Israeli hubris. The world paid little attention to the expropriation of Palestinian land, the apartheid regime established by the occupation and the systematic destruction of Palestinian livelihoods.

It was only in 1987 that the world awoke to the reality of a popular Palestinian uprising –– intifada. A new generation had come of age, thirsty for freedom and peace with dignity in its own land. The two decades since have confirmed that my people will not repeat the mistakes of 1948. They will remain rooted in their land, whatever the price, and pursue their legitimate right to resist the occupation.

That right is supported by, for example, UN Resolutions 2955 and 3034, which affirm the "inalienable" right of all peoples to self-determination and the legitimacy of their struggle against foreign domination and subjugation "by all available means".

Israel's fateful error was to underestimate the resolve of the Palestinians. Tens of thousands have been killed or wounded by the Israeli army since 1967. During 2006, the number of Palestinians killed reached 650. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel –– about 40 per cent of the male population. Today three-quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced: there are five million Palestinian refugees throughout the world.

With the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, we were told that things would get better. But life became more hellish as Israel accelerated settlement building and seizures of our land. Meanwhile, the world was fed the fallacy that Israel was defending its "threatened existence". In reality, it is Israel, through the prosecution of colonial war, that has threatened the Palestinians' right to live in their land. And when they were most needed, the world's most powerful states refused to ensure respect for the international law that "the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible".

In contempt of the will of the international community, Israel continues to build its annexationist apartheid wall across the West Bank. Which western state\n would, in the 21st century, accept that its citizens be literally caged and locked into cantons? Undaunted by repression, my people have embraced democracy as a means of struggle and governance. Yet in response the world's most powerful democracies have imposed an economic blockade against my people, while Israel continues to kill, expropriate and destroy with impunity. The humanitarian catastrophe in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is clearly designed to subvert the elected government and create a client authority that concedes every wish of the occupier. There can be no exit from the impasse without sanctions being lifted and Israel's release of the hundreds of millions of dollars of our money it has seized.

In the 1967 war, Israel conquered the land of Palestine but it did not conquer the people. And in its attempt to debase and dehumanise my people, Israel has debased and degraded itself before the family of nations. The 1967 war has over 40 years engendered\n successive wars and destabilisation of the Middle East. The increasing mistrust between the Arab-Muslim peoples and the western world is rooted in the conflict in Palestine.

The first step to change this catastrophic climate is for the West to engage with the Palestinian National Unity government, which envisages the establishment of an independent state on all the Palestinian land occupied by Israel in 1967, the dismantling of all the settlements in the West Bank, the release of all 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the recognition of the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes."

With the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, we were told that things would get better. But life became more hellish as Israel accelerated settlement building and seizures of our land. Meanwhile, the world was fed the fallacy that Israel was defending its "threatened existence". In reality, it is Israel, through the prosecution of colonial war, that has threatened the Palestinians' right to live in their land. And when they were most needed, the world's most powerful states refused to ensure respect for the international law that "the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible".

In contempt of the will of the international community, Israel continues to build its annexationist apartheid wall across the West Bank. Which western state would, in the 21st century, accept that its citizens be literally caged and locked into cantons? Undaunted by repression, my people have embraced democracy as a means of struggle and governance. Yet in response the world's most powerful democracies have imposed an economic blockade against my people, while Israel continues to kill, expropriate and destroy with impunity. The humanitarian catastrophe in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is clearly designed to subvert the elected government and create a client authority that concedes every wish of the occupier. There can be no exit from the impasse without sanctions being lifted and Israel's release of the hundreds of millions of dollars of our money it has seized.

In the 1967 war, Israel conquered the land of Palestine but it did not conquer the people. And in its attempt to debase and dehumanise my people, Israel has debased and degraded itself before the family of nations. The 1967 war has over 40 years engendered successive wars and destabilisation of the Middle East. The increasing mistrust between the Arab-Muslim peoples and the western world is rooted in the conflict in Palestine.The first step to change this catastrophic climate is for the West to engage with the Palestinian National Unity government, which envisages the establishment of an independent state on all the Palestinian land occupied by Israel in 1967, the dismantling of all the settlements in the West Bank, the release of all 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the recognition of the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

If Israel is serious about peace, it has to recognise these basic rights of our people. The 1967 war remains an unfinished chapter. Nothing will stop our struggle for freedom and to have all our children reunited in a fully sovereign state of Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital. ––The Guardian, London

The writer is the Palestinian prime minister.

A Sacred Right of Return

A sacred right

Salman Abu-Sitta

Why should I, a Jew from north London, be permitted to take up Israeli citizenship, when that right is denied to a Palestinian who languishes in a refugee camp in Lebanon? Especially when I acknowledge that a large majority of those that left in 1948 were ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces.

Those are the words of Alex Stein, writing for Comment is free last week. A commendable admission of injustice to Palestinians, you would say. But then he derives conclusions that are contrary to this premise; that the right of a Palestinian to return to his home is neither sacred, legal nor possible.

This split-personality theme has been infamously adopted by Benny Morris who pored over hundreds of declassified Israeli files. Morris confirmed in minute detail that, in 1948, Israeli invasion forces committed massacres, expelled Palestinians, destroyed their villages, looted their property, burnt their crops, poisoned their wells and shot on the spot any Palestinian who tried to return to his home. Referring to the remaining minority, Morris then solemnly declared that he was sorry that Ben Gurion "did not finish the job".

Both Alex Stein and Menny Morris escape from the fact, slowly seeping into the western conscience, that Palestinians were - and are today - subject to the most massive, comprehensive, meticulously planned and executed and continuous ethnic cleansing operation in modern history. This has long been denied by Israeli historians. A notable exception is a brave and honest Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe.

The sensation created by Benny Morris's revelation about al-Nakba, grudgingly accepted by some Jews, is a stark measure of how the west was taken in by the Zionist propaganda for several decades. The Palestinians do not know whether to laugh or cry, for the "revelations" are only some of what they have been saying all along since 1948. Hundreds of thousands of refugees gave graphic details of their plight but these were dismissed by the Zionist Europeans as "a figment of oriental imagination" until an Israeli historian found damning evidence in Israeli files.

Facts have a way of surfacing. The facts, documented on maps and records, show that in 1948 Israelis depopulated the Palestinian inhabitants of 675 towns and villages, that their land represents 93% of Israel's area; that half of all the refugees have been expelled in the last six weeks of the British Mandate, before the state of Israel was declared and before any Arab regular soldier set foot on Palestine to save its people from the invasion of Jewish European immigrants who had just waded into their shores to build Israel on the ruins of Palestine.

What is more natural than a person returning to their home? If Stein does not believe this is "sacred", he has to ask 6 million Palestinian refugees (two-thirds of all Palestinians) why are they still determined to fight for their right to return over a period of six decades and through three generations and many wars. That the right of return for Palestinians has been affirmed by the UN more than 130 times is enough to put this matter to rest. No need to spill more ink on that score.

If defeated on both counts, Zionists usually resort to their last defence: that the right of return is not possible to implement.

In a civilised society, if a crime is committed, its consequences must be reversed. The criminal should not be rewarded, and his crime should not be forgiven or even legitimised. The stolen property must be returned. Rights must be reinstated and reparation paid for material losses.

This is what the international community insisted upon, sometimes using military force, in implementing the return of refugees to Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, Cambodia, East Timor, Georgia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Ruwanda, South Africa, Tajikistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.

This is also what the European Jews rightly got when they returned to their former homes (if they so wished), recovered their property in Europe and received massive amounts of compensation for their suffering during the second world war, without the benefit of a single UN resolution.

The pretext that return is not possible because of the influx of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to replace the expelled Palestinians is not a valid one, morally, legally or politically. But we are spared the argument on this point. Here we have yet another one of the misconceptions designed to mislead and misinform the western public. It is not true that it is physically impossible to implement the right of return.

Palestine is the most documented among conflict-torn countries, certainly much more than Bosnia and Kosovo. We have complete UN-documented ownership records of every acre of land. Not a single Israeli Jew has an equivalent title deed after al-Nakba. We have detailed maps of what every acre was, what it is today and can visualise what it could/should be in the future.

We have a huge database of millions of Palestinians - where they come from in Palestine, and where they are residing today, their family structure and their ages. Today, 90% of them reside within 100 km of their homes, 50% within 40km and many can actually see their home on the opposite hill.

That is not all. The refugees' land is still sparsely populated. Eighty per cent of Israeli Jews still live in the same area they acquired during the Mandate and a little more, but 15% of Israel in total. About 18% of the remaining 20% of the Jews live mostly in half a dozen originally Palestinian or mixed cities, considerably enlarged. This leaves 2% of Israeli Jews who are the members of Qibbutz and Moshav.

This small number of population, in addition to the army, use and control 85%-88% of Israel's area, which is the patrimony of 6 million Palestinian refugees. To take an example, all the rural Jews in the southern district from Ashdod (Isdud) to Eilat (Umm Rashrash) are less in number that one refugee camp in Gaza. Their density is six persons per square kilometre while that of Gaza population - the owners of this very land - is 6,000 per square kilometre. These owners of the land are held captive by the occupier in a concentration camp called Gaza.

UN: Implement Right of Return

another call from the UN demanding the right of return of the 5 million plus refugees forcibly expelled from their lands, but it will fall on deaf ears because "Israel" is above international law...this will unfortunately pass just like the numerous resolutions before it...


UN committee: Israel should let Palestinians return to their land
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent

A United Nations committee has called on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their property and land in Israel and to ensure that the bodies responsible for distributing property, such as the Jewish National Fund, not discriminate against the Arab population.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination made the recommendation in its concluding observations released Friday, in response to a report Israel submitted on the matter. Representatives of a number of human rights groups appeared before the committee, including Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which presented objections to the official Israeli position.

The report recommends that Israel scrutinize its policy in a number of areas. Among them, it recommends that "the state party ensure that the definition of Israel as a Jewish nation state does not result in any systematic distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin." The committee also said it "would welcome receiving more information on how [Israel] envisions the development of the national identity of all its citizens."

The committee's deliberations were made in the framework of overseeing the implementation by various countries of the provisions of the UN's International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. Israel has been a signatory to the convention since the late 1970s, and should submit a report every two years. However, it has not done so for nine years.

The appearence before the committee of the human rights organizations, which also included B'Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) and Ittijah (the Union of Arab Community Based Organizations in Israel), is part of an increasing
trend to fight Israeli policies in international forums. Adalah said some of the information provided to the committee came from its international advocacy department assigned to UN committees.

The committee also noted a number of positive developments, among them the ministerial appointment of Raleb Majadele and the High Court decision on the petition of the Ka'adans, an Israeli Arab couple, to buy land in the community of Katzir.

Calling for Israel’s Destruction Not Anti-Semitic

Superb article in the New University, the UCI campus newspaper, after Daniel Pipes visited the campus...

Calling for Israel’s Destruction Not Anti-Semitic

Controversy has surrounded the protest of Daniel Pipes’ recent speech at UC Irvine. On Feb. 6, FOX 11 News interviewed Daniel Pipes about the event and subsequent protest by members of the Muslim Student Union. The most controversial topic to arise resulted from words expressed by someone addressing the protesters outside: “It’s just a matter of time before the state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth.” Gasp!

At this point everyone watching FOX 11 News is supposed to be thinking about how wrong and cruel these words are, and how barbaric and “anti-Semitic” the people listening and agreeing to them are. As the FOX anchorperson put it, “That is a threat to all of us. … Wouldn’t that be someone that the FBI would maybe want to talk to?”

Let’s spend a minute examining these words and what they mean.

“The state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth.”

Is this statement anti-Semitic? Let’s forget for a moment that the term itself has been grossly redefined by Zionists to mean “anti-Jewish”—does the statement imply that all the Jews living in Israel need to be exterminated? Or even that all Jews must forcibly be ousted from the Holy Land? Of course not.

The words used are “The state of Israel,” not “Jews” or even “Israelis.” The statement is a less-than-diplomatic way of saying that the state of Israel will cease to exist on the map. That’s all.

What must happen for the state of Israel to cease to exist on the map is really quite simple: The right of return must be granted to the Palestinians, a people who were forcibly removed from their land, a people whose properties were seized at gunpoint so that the state of Israel—ironically founded as a Jewish state to provide refuge to Jews in light of a history of persecutions, starting, perhaps, with the Assyrians and continuing on to the Third Reich—could be born in 1948.

To rightfully allow all 9.5 million Palestinian-Arab refugees and their descendants to return home would mean that Israel, with a population of roughly 6.2 million Jews, would cease to exist as a Jewish state, giving way to a new system under which people can form a government that guarantees basic human rights and dignity to all humans, regardless of race, ethnicity or creed. Think of it: a state as democratic – at the very, very least – as Israel, but one where neither apartheid nor injustice is force-fed to the local populace with their daily butter and bread.

Still “wrong”? Still “cruel”? Barbaric? Maybe “anti-Semitic”? Hold that thought—let’s examine a different set of words, this time Daniel Pipes’, verbatim.

He laid out the conditions for the continued existence of Israel: “The Palestinians must have their will crushed. … [This] requires that they go through the bitter crucible of war, of loss, of despair.” No FOX 11-inspired controversy surrounding these words, no spin. Nobody dares to accuse Pipes of anti-Semitism (remember what we said about definitions? Palestinians happen to be a Semitic people, but you’re not supposed to know that).

Somehow nobody is even slightly disturbed by how such inhumane suggestions could be thought up, let alone proclaimed in public before a happily agreeing audience. Nobody is questioning the incitement of violence against a people who are standing up for simple human rights, which they do now after 50 years of loss and suffering. I leave it up to the reader to determine why and how such a double standard could possibly have manifested itself in the minds of the American people.

I have to admit though, to a certain degree, I agree with Daniel Pipes’ statement. The continued existence of the state of Israel clearly promises the suffering, poverty and destruction of the Palestinians. The continued existence of Israel means that Palestinian refugee camps will continue to be shelled with munitions only a madman could have thought up: bombs, missiles, tanks, helicopter gunships, not to mention depleted uranium and white phosphorus. So long as Israel draws breath, Palestinians’ homes will continue to be demolished and Palestinians will continue to have their lands unjustly seized. Palestinian men and women will continue to face discrimination and criminal violence paralleling that of apartheid South Africa, if not Germany’s Third Reich itself—all of this at the hands of Israeli soldiers.

In this light, I firmly believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong, and nothing to be ashamed of, from denouncing a racist state whose policies and practices have forever been – and in the foreseeable future will continue to be – terror, death and destruction. To have this system removed from our midst would only be doing humanity a favor and, thus, I have no qualms at all about calling for an end to the so-called State of Israel.

Sulaiman Arain

fifth-year civil engineering major