Aletho News

‘The wall ruined my life, separated my family’

Ma’an – 24/06/2010

Bethlehem – The demolition of a Palestinian man’s home on Monday was his final lost battle in a string of defeats going back to the 1990s, the Beit Jala man told Ma’an.

In 1992, Israel confiscated several hundred dunums of land belonging to the family, where the tunnels system was created to connect the illegal Israeli settlements of Gilo and Bettar Illit with Jerusalem. What was left undeveloped on the far side of the tunnel road was confiscated, and the farming family was left to find a different source of livelihood.

In 1997, Anton married a Jerusalemite woman, and the two decided to settle in the holy city, where Anton could work. After some effort, they successfully registered him as a Jerusalem resident, and they had two daughters who were also accorded Jerusalem residency status. Anton was able to find work and the family started anew.

In 2004, however, as the final route of the separation wall was set, his family was handed a home demolition targeting ancestral buildings in Wadi Ahmed, on the lands that remained in their possession.

Worried that more of his family land and property would be confiscated, Anton moved back to the home, in an attempt to protect the area from further Israeli encroachment. He said he was worried that the land would be declared abandoned, and his family would lose all that remained.

On the property were two homes, one ancient and one modern. The older building was said to have been several hundred years old, and was used by his family as a Qasr, or an agricultural building where relatives would stay during the harvest season. The building traditionally stored tools and food for the family for the summer and early fall.

“They began asking me questions in 2006,” Anton told Ma’an, “they found that my ‘center of life’ was no longer Jerusalem so in 2007 they stripped me of my Jerusalem residency card.”

Without the card, Anton, like all other West Bank Palestinians was no longer permitted to enter Jerusalem. “I could no longer see my wife, my daughters,” he said.

Anton remained in his Beit Jala home, and his wife and daughter would visit him on weekends and evenings when they could. Then on 25 May 2010, Anton was handed an demolition order for his home and the agricultural building nearby.

The demolitions were carried out on Monday, as the path of Israel’s separation wall continued to wind southward.

June 24, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Palestinian Jerusalemites go work abroad and get residency revoked upon return

Amira Hass | Haaretz | 20 June 2010

Palestinians who choose to study and work abroad are finding out – too late – that they have imperiled their right to return to their hometown.

Last Wednesday afternoon a “shabah,” an illegal sojourner, sat in the small conference room of Jerusalem District Court Judge Noam Solberg. That’s how he was described by Solberg and a representative of the Interior Ministry, attorney Gur Rosenblatt. The illegal resident reads and writes Hebrew, but in the small room he had difficulty following the learned claims of the judge to the effect that a person born in Jerusalem’s neighborhood of Sur Baher 43 years ago, whose parents and grandparents and great-great grandparents are from there, who went to elementary school and high school in Jerusalem, who recently paid NIS 120,000 for a construction permit from the Jerusalem municipality, is an illegal sojourner. In other words, a criminal.

Meet the criminal: Dr. Imad Hammada. He’s a father of three, with a fourth on the way. Married to a nurse who works for the Leumit HMO in Jerusalem. This biography includes other elements that could sound very Israeli: studied electrical engineering in the United States and worked in Silicon Valley to pay for his doctoral studies and to get experience. Speciality: nanotechnology. Frequent visits to his family at home, in Jerusalem.

True, his stay abroad lasted longer than expected, from 1989 to 2007. That’s familiar to us, too. Now, three months after receiving his doctorate, in August 2007, he and his family packed their suitcases and returned home, a year after he received American citizenship. An Israeli company and an American company with a branch in Israel wanted to employ him and changed their minds. The Interior Ministry informed them that he was a tourist.

Tourist? How come? That is how he discovered that the Interior Ministry had revoked his residency status. Through attorney Leah Tsemel he petitioned the Jerusalem District Court sitting as a Court for Administrative Matters, against the revocation of his permanent residency permit. For the past three years he has been living in his homeland, in his city, in his parents’ home – without health insurance for the children, without rights, in constant danger of arrest and expulsion.

“The prolonged illegal stay in the country is to the detriment of the petitioner,” said Judge Solberg in a stern voice. He said that it could be a reason for rejecting the petition out of hand. In the corridors of the District Court on Salah al-Din Street it was said that as opposed to liberal judges David Cheshin and Yehudit Tzur, who have left, Solberg is known for summarily rejecting similar petitions. It turns out that this time Solberg had inner conflicts, as he put it.

It’s natural to go abroad

On the one hand, he said, the illegal stay causes us “to say that this is a reason for rejecting the petition out of hand.” On the other hand, the judge said: “It’s natural that people go [abroad] to study and stay for a while. There’s room for a certain amount of forgiveness when you read that the man works in Herzliya (for a Taiwanese company with a branch in Ramallah ) and his wife works…. My initial feeling is that his connection with Israel is sincere.”

Attorney Rosenblatt mentioned the “illegal stay” of the petitioner several times. Tsemel objected: This argument has not come up until now. My client entered legally and was born here and you know that it’s his right to be here. In principle, said Rosenblatt, “he can leave the court and be arrested by a policeman because he’s an illegal sojourner.” And Tsemel: “In principle he can leave the court and be arrested because he’s an Arab.”

Solberg tried to calm things down. He said he was actually seeking a compromise. Let the petition be erased, he suggested, and let Dr. Hammada ask to begin a proceeding for “family reunification” (with his wife ). The parties had to reply by today. Afterward, next to the stairs, Rosenblatt would explain to Tsemel that it was nothing personal, but that he was operating according to the law.

The 1952 Law of Entry into Israel determines that anyone who is not an Israeli citizen or the holder of an immigrant’s permit or immigrant’s certificate does not have the right to live in Israel, and his residency in Israel is conditional on a residency permit that has been granted to him according to this law.” The Law of Entry was imposed on Palestinians living in that part of the West Bank – East Jerusalem and the surrounding villages – that was annexed to Israel in 1967. “Israel entered us,” bitterly say the people to whom the Law of Entry applies, “It wasn’t we who entered it.” Solberg mentioned that there is logic to the statement that the case of a (non-Jewish ) Frenchman who immigrated to Israel is not the same as the case of a Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem. But it wouldn’t be right, he said, to discuss the matter of principle in connection with the present petition.

In addition to the Law of Entry there are regulations for entry into Israel which stipulate that the expiration of the permanent residency permit: A person will be considered to have settled abroad if one of the following conditions exists: he lived outside Israel for a period of at least seven years; he received a permanent residency permit in that country; he received citizenship of that country. One of the three conditions is sufficient to revoke the resident status of a Palestinian in East Jerusalem.

Until the end of 1995, the authorities were flexible and made do with visits by those living abroad at intervals shorter than “seven years of absence” in order to maintain residency. But in December 1995, during the term of Haim Ramon as interior minister in the short-lived government of Shimon Peres, the policy changed. Without previous warning, people who lived abroad but came for frequent visits discovered that their resident status had been revoked. A prolonged public battle – which involved Palestinian, Israeli and international organizations – created pressure that produced results early in 2000, when the interior minister was Natan Sharansky. In a declaration to the Supreme Court, he promised that the policy would revert to the pre-1995 practice. For those living abroad for any reason, their periodic visits would once again maintain their residency, whereas those who had lived abroad in the past (or who were living, for lack of housing, in a part of the West Bank that had not been annexed to Israel ) would get back their residency status if they proved that the center of their lives was in Jerusalem. With the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, the Interior Ministry resumed mass revocation of the permanent residency status of East Jerusalem Palestinians.

Imad Hammada is one of 289 Jerusalemites whose residency was revoked in 2007. In 2008, the residency of Murad Abu-Khalaf, 33, a native of Ras al-Amud, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering, was revoked. His family lived in the Baka neighborhood in West Jerusalem, from which it was expelled in 1948. The eight pages of his resume include a series of scientific publications, areas of expertise, fields of research, lectures, awards and prestigious places of work. In 2007, he completed his post-doctorate (with a stipend from the research division of the U.S. Army ). He also visited his family periodically. He knew that upon his return it was likely that he would not be hired for work in Israeli firms, and that he would teach at university. “I wanted to get some experience in the professional world outside the university,” he said two days ago in a phone conversation from his Boston home.

An engineer in Boston

Since 2007, he has been working as a software engineer in an American firm in Massachusetts, The MathWorks, whose clients are the aircraft industry and security firms, including Israeli ones such as Rafael. The U.S. requires those employed in its security industry to receive a green card. This is not permanent residency for family reasons, or that of an asylum seeker – but for purposes of work only, emphasized Abu-Khalaf in the conversation. “Had I known that a green card would lead to the revocation of my right as a resident of Jerusalem, I would have returned after the post-doctorate. But what could I have done then, without practical experience? Sold falafel?”

Deliberations on Abu-Khalaf’s petition will take place in his absence before Solberg next Thursday. Since January 2009, Abu-Khalaf has been seeking legal redress, also with the help of attorney Tsemel. His frequent but short visits (because of job commitments ) in 2009 did not satisfy the authorities. The validity of his travel document expired in January 2010. Since then, he hasn’t seen his parents and his brother. His entire family lives in Jerusalem. His father is a family doctor, his brother is a doctor who works at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. He lives in Boston and he misses his friends and the streets of his childhood.

Attorney Achva Berman, an assistant to the Jerusalem District Prosecutor’s Office, explained her opposition to permitting his return to Israel: “The policy of the Interior Ministry is a consequence of the sovereignty of the state and its exclusive authority to decide who can remain in its territory. For that purpose stringent criteria were determined, based on weighty humanitarian considerations… The acquisition of the status of a permanent resident in another place in the world… is what leads to the expiration of residency… In recent years (the petitioner ) has even been working in the U.S. By doing so the petitioner severed his connection with Israel.”

Abu-Khalaf is one of 4,577 Jerusalemites whose residency was revoked in 2008, according to the data provided by the Interior Ministry to the Center for the Defense of the Individual. That is the highest number of residency revocations since the policy began in 1995. The previous record was in 2006 – 1,363 people whose residency status expired. In 1995, the number was 91. In 1996, the number 739. In 1997, there were 1,067 cases. In 1991, the number was 20.

It’s believed that the vast majority of cases are people like them – Jerusalemites who went abroad for reasons of higher education and work experience, with the aim of returning after acquiring that experience and funding – intending to ameliorate the quality of their society. Expelling them from their country and from their hometown is the other side of the statistics of poverty and misery that typify Palestinian Jerusalem, which is under Israeli control.

Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989, and has been in her current position since 1993. As the correspondent for the territories, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served of the basis for her widely acclaimed book, “Drinking the Sea at Gaza.” She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997. Hass is also the author of two other books, both of which are compilations of her articles.

June 24, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israel threatens deportation for Jerusalem protesters

Ma’an – 21/06/2010

Jerusalem – Israel is set to take action against the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, sources told Ma’an, as media reports claim municipal officials will soon begin mass demolitions of Al-Bustan homes.

Hebrew media quoted Israeli security circles in Monday morning reports, recommending the municipal and federal government give directives to the interior ministry and National Insurance Institute to use their weight to impose sanctions on Jerusalemite families whose children partake in protests against Israel.

Punishments, the sources said, will include the revocation of Jerusalem residency rights, re-evaluation of taxes owed and reduction in welfare benefits to the tax-paying residents of Palestinian neighborhoods.

The Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights said in a statement released the same morning, that several complaints from Jerusalemites had already been received, as families were threatened with deportation. At least two teenagers known to have been involved in protests against Israeli settlers, home evictions and planned demolitions, received unofficial warning from Israeli intelligence officers.

The two were told they would be deported if they continue to “incite” against the state of Israel.

Four Palestinian lawmakers affiliated with Hamas’ Change and Reform bloc were given notice that their Jerusalem residency was being revoked, while Director of the Palestinian prisoner’s society in Jerusalem Nasser Qaws and senior Fatah official Hatim Abdul Qader were also put on alert by Israeli forces.

In 2008, Israel revoked 466 Jerusalem residency cards, with the number expected to skyrocket for 2010.

Silwan demolitions

A news conference for Israel’s Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barakat is set to announce the construction of a national park on what will be the ruins of at least 88 homes in the Al-Bustan area of Silwan, in East Jerusalem, as plans to start demolitions will be authorized on Monday, Israeli media reported.

Palestinian residents of the neighborhood plan to hold a news conference of their own, and continue to push the municipality to accept an alternative city planning initiative, that would see the area “greened” and involve zero forced home demolitions.

Under the Israeli plan, families in the western half of Silwan must move into the homes of families from the eastern half as theirs were set for demolition under the city planning guide. Residents of the eastern section who refuse to accommodate families, alternative planner Youssef Jabareen told Ma’an, will also face home demolitions.

June 21, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Reclaiming Self-Determination

Will a Palestinian state, no matter how sovereign, fulfill the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Ali Abunimah | 20 May 2010

Ali Abunimah reviews the evolution of the concept of self-determination, its applicability to the Palestinian people, and its gradual erosion since 1991. He argues not only that self-determination must return to the center of the Palestinian struggle; he also shows how the Palestinian exercise of this right can be compatible with eventual coexistence with Israeli Jews.

How the “peace process” eroded self-determination

In his 1974 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasir Arafat addressed “the roots of the Palestine question,” declaring, “Its causes do not stem from any conflict between two religions or two nationalisms. Neither is it a border conflict between neighboring States. It is the cause of a people deprived of its homeland, dispersed and uprooted, and living mostly in exile and in refugee camps.”

How ironic then that the “peace process” has re-conceived the Palestine question precisely as little more than a border dispute between Israel and a putative Palestinian state. The “roots” were first reduced to a laconic list of “final status issues”: borders, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees and then gradually buried. Lost has been any commitment to self-determination in principle or in practice.

Although they have rarely been formally discussed, it has long been conventional wisdom in peace process circles that the “final status” issues have already effectively been settled, largely according to Israel’s requirements (we have heard ad nauseam the refrain “everyone knows what a final settlement will look like”). The United States and its hand-picked Palestinian leaders have accepted that large Israeli “settlement blocs” housing most of the settlers, will remain where they are in the West Bank.

The same formula has been adopted for Jerusalem, as per the so-called Clinton parameters: Israel would get “Jewish neighborhoods” and the Palestinian state would get “Arab neighborhoods.” What this means in practice is that Israel would keep everything it illegally annexed and colonized since 1967, and Palestinians might get some form of self-rule in whatever is left – which is shrinking daily as Israel aggressively escalates its Judaization of eastern Jerusalem. While everything east of the 1967 line is divisible and “disputed,” the same does not apply to the west. Palestinians would not be entitled, for example, to seek the return of their West Jerusalem neighborhoods ethnically cleansed and colonized by Israel in 1948. The “peace process” has actually created an incentive for Israel to accelerate its colonization of eastern Jerusalem because Israel knows that whatever is left uncolonized would become the new maximum ceiling of what the United States and other peace process sponsors would support as Palestinian demands.

Similarly, the refugee question has been virtually “settled” as well. Palestinian Authority-appointed chief negotiator Saeb Erekat revealed in a paper he circulated last December that Fatah leader and acting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had proposed to Israel that no more than 15,000 Palestinian refugees per year for ten years return to their original lands in what is now Israel.1 According to Erekat, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had countered with an offer of 1,000 refugees per year for a period of five years. In other words, the parties had already agreed to abrogate the fundamental rights of millions of Palestinian refugees, and were haggling only over the difference between 5,000 and 150,000, or less than three percent of the Palestinian refugees registered to receive services from UNRWA (the United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).

So what is left to negotiate? Camille Mansour’s policy brief accurately summarizes the outstanding issues – as seen from within the peace process – the final borders and attributes of sovereignty of the Palestinian state. Mansour doubts that negotiations in present circumstances would lead to a peace treaty in which “Palestinian sovereignty requirements could be attained.”

Let us assume for the sake of argument that Israel were to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that satisfies official Palestinian positions and provides for a state no more or less sovereign than any other. The question that then arises is: Does this sovereign state provide for the self-determination of the Palestinian people? Does it restore and guarantee their fundamental rights? As argued, below, the answer is a clear no. And this underscores the need to distinguish the limited goal of sovereignty from that of self-determination.

Sovereignty is exercised by a state through the fulfillment of commonly agreed functions: effective control of territory, borders and resources, and maintenance of political independence among others. Self-determination is exercised by a people legitimately inhabiting a given territory. Self-determination may result in a sovereign state, but it may not. It is fundamental to understand this difference and to recognize that self-determination remains at the heart of the Palestinian struggle.

Understanding the principle of self-determination

The principle of self-determination as it is understood today was enunciated by US President Woodrow Wilson toward the end of World War I. In Wilson’s words, “the settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship” is to be made “upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not on the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.”2

Put simply, territories and people could no longer be shifted around between empires and sovereigns like pieces on a chessboard. Any political arrangements ­– particularly in territories undergoing decolonization – had to enjoy the freely given consent of those who would have to live under them. The principle was no sooner enunciated than effectively violated in many cases after World War I, particularly in Palestine. However, it gained ground and was later enshrined in Article 1 of the United Nations Charter and other instruments, assuming particular importance in post-World War II decolonization.

Tomis Kapitan, a professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, who has also previously taught at Birzeit University, provides an excellent summary of the history of the principle and its application. He argues persuasively that as conceived and practiced, the right belongs not to national groups qua national groups, but to the legitimate residents of any region whose status is unsettled (e.g. because it was previously colonized or under no sovereignty) or which is endangered because the current sovereign has persistently failed to protect, or has itself consistently violated the fundamental rights of the legitimate residents. The residents of regions meeting these criteria “have a right to determine their political future either by constituting themselves as an autonomous political unit, or by merging with another state, or by dissolving into smaller states.”3

Palestine, as Kapitan observes, “is the only territory placed under a League of Nations Mandate in which the established inhabitants were not granted this privilege.”4 Instead, Great Britain, the mandatory power, agreed to partition the country over the unified opposition of the overwhelming indigenous Arab majority, and aided and abetted the build up of settler-colonial Zionist forces arriving from other parts of the world and which eventually carried out a violent takeover of much of the country. By endorsing partition with Resolution 181 of 1947, Arafat noted in his 1974 speech, “the [UN] General Assembly partitioned what it had no right to divide – an indivisible homeland” and thus contributed to the denial of the right of self-determination. No form of consultation through referendum or plebiscite or other democratic process was ever contemplated.

Today, Kapitan argues, the legitimate residents of historic Palestine include at least all Palestinians living in any part of the country, and all refugees outside the country. “Because expulsion does not remove one’s right of residency, then these Palestinians also retain residency rights in those territories from which they were expelled.”5 Thus, the Palestinian people collectively retain “an entitlement to being self-determining in that region [historic Palestine]… not qua Palestinians, but qua legitimate residents. That force was used against them has not erased the fact that they are, and are recognized as being, a legitimate unit entitled to participate in their own self determination.”6

The peace process that began with the 1991 Madrid Conference has gradually excluded the majority of Palestinians from having any role in determining the future of their country. In the eyes of peace process sponsors, the “Palestinian people” constitutes at most residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, though even Gaza now finds itself as marginalized as the Diaspora. It is this exclusion that has allowed a cause of decolonization and self-determination to be reduced to little more than a “border dispute.”

Palestinian self-determination and the rights of Israeli Jews

How, and on what terms, could a Palestinian exercise of the right to self-determination throughout historic Palestine be compatible with eventual coexistence between Palestinians and Israeli Jews?

The concept that a settler-colonial community is entitled, under specific conditions, to participate in self-determination, not as a distinct national group, but as legitimate residents, accords fully with international law and with precedents in other decolonizing countries including South Africa, Namibia, Northern Ireland and Mozambique.

Omar Barghouti, a leader in the Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel, has argued strongly against recognizing Israeli Jews as forming a national community in Palestine. Barghouti warns that “[r]ecognizing national rights of Jewish settlers in Palestine cannot but imply accepting their right to self-determination.”7 This would, he argues, contradict “the very letter, spirit and purpose of the universal principle of self-determination primarily as a means for ‘peoples under colonial or alien domination or foreign occupation,’ to realize their rights.” Such recognition, he warns, “may, at one extreme, lead to claims for secession or Jewish ‘national’ sovereignty on part of the land of Palestine.”

There can, Barghouti argues, be no “inherent or acquired Jewish right to self determination in Palestine that is equivalent, even morally symmetric, to the Palestinian right to self determination” as this would blur “the essential differences between the inalienable rights of the indigenous population and the acquired rights of the colonial-settler population.”

Yet under Kapitan’s formulation, Israeli Jews would be entitled to participate in self-determination not as a distinct national group, but to the extent that they are or become legitimate residents of the region. Barghouti spells out conditions under which colonial settlers can be accepted by the indigenous population as equal citizens living in a society “free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination.” It would require the settler-colonial community, in this case Israeli Jews, to relinquish their colonial character and settler privileges, and accept “unmitigated equality,” including the right of return and reparations for Palestinian refugees.

Inspired by the South African Freedom Charter and the 1998 Belfast Agreement, a group of intellectuals including Palestinians and Israelis set out similar principles in the 2007 One State Declaration:

The historic land of Palestine belongs to all who live in it and to those who were expelled or exiled from it since 1948, regardless of religion, ethnicity, national origin or current citizenship status;

Any system of government must be founded on the principle of equality in civil, political, social and cultural rights for all citizens. Power must be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all people in the diversity of their identities.8

Finally, the notion that Israeli Jews are legitimate residents, provided they shed their colonial character and privileges, derives directly from the traditional conception of Palestinian self-determination. As Arafat put it in his 1974 UN speech, “when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination.”

Focusing on self-determination

Placing self-determination back at the center of the Palestine question compels us to formulate a strategy that addresses the rights of all segments of the Palestinian community inside and outside historic Palestine, and which ensures their right to participate in the struggle for, and enjoy the fruits of, self-determination.

It requires setting out an agenda that addresses the three historic and current sources of injustice, the “roots” of the conflict. Such an agenda, as stated in the widely-endorsed 2005 Palestinian call for BDS, demands that Israel recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and uphold international law by:

(1) Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the [West Bank separation] Wall;

(2) Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and,

(3) Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.9

It is clear that the limited goal of sovereignty that a West Bank-Gaza state would achieve addresses at best only the first point and cannot possibly meet the minimum requirements of Palestinian self-determination. Therefore, the formula “everyone knows” is the answer – a state on a fraction of Palestine for a fraction of the Palestinian people – would only perpetuate the denial of self-determination for the vast majority of Palestinians no matter how “sovereign” that state.

It is of course possible in principle for all three demands to be met within the context of a two-state solution, but this would still require Israel to forgo its Zionist character and become a state of all its citizens in which Jews enjoy all the same individual rights and rights to community life and cultural expression as everyone else but no more.

The 1998 Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland is an example of such a “two-state solution.” It maintained two separate jurisdictions on the island of Ireland: Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but each is bound constitutionally, by treaty and under European law to be a state of all its citizens. Northern Ireland ceased to be, as it long was, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people.” Indeed, the core of the peace process has been to dismantle state institutions, symbols, laws and practices that enshrined second-class citizenship for Irish nationalist Catholics and to replace them with strong mechanisms to redress the historic imbalance in terms of political and cultural power, access to jobs, housing and other resources.

At the same time, Northern Ireland has no inherent “right to exist” as a separate jurisdiction. If a simple majority of the people who live in it vote for a united Ireland, the Belfast Agreement binds the United Kingdom and Irish governments to give effect to this wish. Protestant unionists – descended from settlers who arrived from England and Scotland in the 17th Century – thus established no right to self-determination as a separate national group even after more than three hundred years.

After 62 years, Israel is no closer to establishing its legitimacy. Neither passage of time, nor declarations cajoled, bullied or bought out of successive leaders of the Palestinian national movement, have settled the questions of Israel’s creation, or its demand to be recognized as a “Jewish state” with the right to discriminate against Palestinians. Palestinian claims for self-determination have not been extinguished, nor have Palestinians generally pursued them with any less vigor.

Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians must accept Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state,” is nothing if not an implicit recognition that without the active consent of the Palestinian people, the Zionist project can never enjoy legitimacy or stability. Palestinians have steadfastly resisted granting such recognition because to do so would negate their rights and indeed threaten their very existence.

Conclusion There has never been a more opportune moment for Palestinians to put forward their demands for equality and justice in clear, principled and visionary terms fully rooted in international law, numerous precedents and accepted principles. The tenacious resistance on the ground – in all its legitimate forms – and the growing global BDS solidarity movement need to be complemented by a program worthy of such efforts and sacrifices. Our energy should be invested in developing support for such a program rather than worrying about the minutiae of moribund negotiations, which cannot result in the restoration of Palestinian rights.

Once the equality principle at the heart of the Palestinian struggle is recognized, it becomes easier and more logical to conceive of a solution involving a single, democratic state encompassing Israeli Jews and Palestinians as equal citizens, albeit with necessary mechanisms to protect collective cultural rights and other interests, and explicit, vigorous and appropriate mechanisms for decolonization, restitution and correcting entrenched social and economic injustices.

Whether in one or more states, the focus of Palestinian efforts should be on the fulfillment of the rights of all Palestinians and achieving equality rather than perpetual negotiations, which serve to undermine both.

Footnotes

1. 1Ali Abunimah, “PLO paper reveals leadership bereft of strategy, legitimacy,” The Electronic Intifada, 11 March 2010 (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11126.shtml)
2. 2As quoted in Tomis Kapitan, “Self-Determination,” in Tomis Kapitan and Raja Halwani, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism and the One-State Solution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 13-71.
3. 3Ibid., 27
4. 4Ibid., 58
5. 5Ibid., 59
6. 6Ibid., 58
7. 7Omar Barghouti, “Re-imagining Palestine: self-determination, ethical decolonization and equality,” Znet, 29 July 2009 (http://www.zcommunications.org/re-imagining-palestine-by-omar-barghouti)
8. 8“The One State Declaration,” The Electronic Intifada, 29 November 2007 (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9134.shtml)
9. 9“Palestinian Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS),” PACBI, 9 July 2005 (http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=66)

Ali Abunimah is a Policy Advisor for Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network

June 20, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

UN: 70 percent of the refugees around the world are Muslim

10,792,095 displaced around the world originate from Muslim countries

Islamic Human Rights Commission – 17 June 2009

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 2009 annual report revealed shocking figures about the world refuge community. According to the figures revealed on 16 June 2010, the total refugee population around the world reached 15.2 million which is the highest since the mid 1990s. Around 70 percent of all refugees, which amounts to 10,792,095, around the world originated from Muslim countries.

The recent figures revealed by the UNHCR have reminded the international community that the overwhelming majority of oppressed people in the world are Muslim. According to the latest report of the UNHCR, there were 15.2 million refugees worldwide and around 70 percent of them, which amounts to 10,462,095, originated from Muslim countries. With their long-lived plight, 4.8 million Palestinians were the largest refugee community in the world. Since the Palestinian refugees are under the responsibility of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) their statistic were not included in the report.

There UNHCR listed 2.9 million Afghani refugees scattered around the world with the majority fleeing to Pakistan. Iraqis also made up a substantial amount of the total refugee population with 1.8 million, predominantly based in the Middle East. Somalis made up the third largest refugee group with 678,000 persons and finally 368,200 Sudanese refugees, the vast majority of them from the Darfur region.

The figures show the US and its allies have turned the Muslim territories into a massive conflict zone and Muslims have become the largest single religious refugee group. Muslim refugees have been deprived of their basic rights and are going through immeasurable difficulties.

IHRC is an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

Islamic Human Rights Commission
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June 18, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment