ZGram - 8/30/2001 - "Pleading words out of South Africa for the Palestinians"

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

August 30, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Israel stands morally indicted before the eyes of the world!  Here are the
moving words from the World Conference Against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances - sent to us from
Mohamed S. Kamel -  sherif@unforgettable.com

=====

Address by Hanan Ashrawi

Durban, South Africa

August 28, 2001

 Sisters and Brothers,

 From Jerusalem, from the heart of Palestine, a land besieged, and
repeatedly violated by a most brutal Israeli military occupation, I have
come to join you today.  From the midst of the people of Palestine, a
tortured nation, guilty only of an unwavering commitment to freedom,
dignity, and independence, I have come to join you today.  From the depths
of unredeemed history, I have come to join you today.  I represent a
narrative of exclusion, denial, racism, and national victimization, but I
also come with a message of hope, redemption, and historical vindication
embodied in the spirit and the will of a people that has refused to succumb
to all forces of oppression, violence, cruelty, and injustice.

 In convening this conference, you are the authentic embodiment of courage
in withstanding the forces of domination, subjugation, and enslavement.  We
stand together today to launch a truly global mission of empowerment and
solidarity, to give voice to the silenced, to give a reality to the
invisible, to give recognition to the denied, and to give credence to the
victimized.

 In times of adversity, and during the darkest nights of the soul, we look
to you for affirmation and action as an antidote to the failure of
established power systems, including governments - a failure characterized
by self-interest, power politics, absence of will, and impotence.  I take
this opportunity to recognize before you those valiant men and women who
had left the comfort of their homes in Europe and the US and joined us in
Palestine to provide popular protection, a human shield in the face of
Israeli abuses, violence, and violations against the Palestinian people.

 I come to you today with a heavy heart leaving behind a nation in
captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba [catastrophe], as the most
intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid,
racism, and victimization.

 More than half a century ago [53 years], the Palestinians as a people were
slated for national obliteration, cast outside the course of history, their
identity denied, and their very human cultural and historical reality
suppressed.  We became victims of the myth of a land without a people for
people without a land whereby the West sought to assuage its guilt over its
horrendous anti-Semitism by the total victimization of a whole nation.
Zionism sought to implement its agenda of exclusivity by usurping not only
the lands and rights of the Palestinians, but also by confiscating their
utterance and distorting their historical narrative.

 In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested in a
dual victimization:  on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession,
dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population that has come to
be known as the refugee question that currently encompasses more than 5
million Palestinians.  On the other hand, those that remained were subject
to the systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that
robbed them of all their rights and liberties including their national
identity on their own land.

 The creation of the state of Israel was no heroic and legendary
accomplishment as depicted by the version of history propagated by the
conquerors.  It is time to lift the veil, to examine the facts themselves,
and to come to grips with the horrific price paid by an innocent nation for
the mere fact of its existence as well as for the greed and moral blindness
of others.  The days of denial must come to an end.  The Palestinian people
deserve their day in the sun as an equal among nations, and as a tribute to
the human will that cannot be broken.  As a Palestinian, as a woman, and on
behalf of my people, I stand before you today to lay claim to my/to our
humanity.  From the "non-existent Palestinians - 'there is not such thing
as Palestinians; they never existed' (Golda Meir, 1969) - we have undergone
a metamorphosis willfully inflicted upon us by Israeli-imposed diction and
policies that have variously depicted us as two-legged vermin, cockroaches,
beasts walking on two legs, a people that have to be exterminated unless
they are resigned to live as slaves, grasshoppers to be crushed,
crocodiles, and vipers.  [A comprehensive list with representative samples
is available]

 Such a systematic and racist dehumanization was also accompanied by
policies of violent expulsion.

 _____  'There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to
neighboring countries, not one village, not one tribe should be left'
(Joseph Weitz, 1940).

 _____  'There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz
Yisrael.  If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also
possible to move the Palestinian Arabs' (Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1939).

 _____  'Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried out
against the wishes of the native population. It is important to speak
Hebrew, but it is even more important to be able to shoot  or else I am
through at playing with colonizing' (Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1939).

 _____  'We must do everything to insure they never return.  The old will
die and the young will forget.'  (However, for those that remained in spite
of all of Israels military coercion and attempts at forced expulsion, other
(and equally sinister) plans were in the making):  'We shall reduce the
Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.'  (David Ben
Gurion).

 To the rest of the world, we were reduced to the Aristotelian dualism of
pity and fear  - the pitiful refugees, of the fearful terrorists.  But
never were we perceived or addressed in the fullness of our humanity.

 The Palestinians today continue to be subject to multiple forms and
expressions of racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid, and
national denial. Our right to self-determination, hence sovereignty and
statehood, has been withheld by force and made subject to the approval of
our oppressor. The refugee populations, mostly stateless people, are bereft
of the rudimentary civil, human, political, and national rights, left at
the mercy of host countries that view them either as a demographic threat,
or as unwelcome guests.  While Israel has legislated a law of return to
bring in Jews from all over the world into historical Palestine, it
persists in rejecting the Palestinian refugees Right of Return and in
refusing to abide by UN res. 194, a legal commitment which the
international community was supposed to guarantee and implement.

 The Palestinians who remained in what has become Israel are experiencing
in their historical homeland the worst system of apartheid, exclusion, and
racial discrimination--their towns and cities either taken over entirely,
or turned into ghettos and enclaves as the non-Jewish population of Israel.
Many continue to be displaced persons in their own land, witnesses to the
destruction of their villages.  Over 500 villages were razed in the
original ethnic cleansing campaign that accompanied the creation of the
state of Israel.  Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967
have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip under a
unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and
systematic oppression.

 Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive
means of wholesale brutalization and persecution.  Since 1967, Palestinian
land has been expropriated at an increasing pace, while whole Jewish
populations have been brought in, in a calculated scheme of settler
colonization.  Throughout the land, an artificial and colonial grid of
infrastructure was superimposed on our authentic reality to create a
spurious settler superstructure as a means of Israeli demographic,
geographic, and extraterritorial incursions into Palestine.  So-called
bypass roads for the exclusive use of the illegal Jewish settler
population, tear through the heart of Palestinian land, to bypass
Palestinian realities and create a unique form of racism. In the meantime,
settler vigilantes habitually unleash the full force of their extremism and
violence,  carrying out campaigns of terror against defenseless Palestinian
families and villages. Israels state terrorism is implemented by both
military and settler perpetrators with political duplicity and legal
impunity.

 Another unique manifestation of Israeli racism is the blatant and sinister
policy of demographic engineering.  To maintain the Jewish character, or
the purity of the state of Israel, the Palestinians have been depicted and
dealt with as a demographic threat.  Proposed remedies included calls for
forced birth control and population management, to transfer and expulsion
of whole communities, to the racist and punitive unilateral separation
scheme currently being advocated.

 In Jerusalem, land expropriation, ID confiscations, home demolitions,
withholding of building permits, and the importation of settler colonies
within and around the city have become constant elements of Israels
demographic engineering through ethnic cleansing.

 Jerusalem is also under siege in an attempt to isolate it from its
Palestinian context and environment, and to extricate it from the heart of
Palestine, as the center of political, cultural, economic, social, and
educational activity and as the future capital of our state.  Such Israeli
unilateral measures seek to consolidate Israels illegal annexation of
occupied Jerusalem, and to impose a Jewish exclusivity on a Palestinian
city that has always been pluralistic and tolerant.  Onslaughts on
Christian and Islamic holy sites and activities while banning Palestinian
worshipers from reaching their holy places of worship betray a willful
policy of intolerance and a violation of the right and freedom to worship.

 A state of siege has been imposed not only on the West Bank and Gaza, but
also within these territories, to transform each village, town, and city
into an isolated prison thereby destroying every aspect of human life,
including economic, educational, health, and social cohesiveness in an
attempt to sever every fiber of the fabric of normal life.  Israeli
occupation troops using tanks, helicopter gunships, F-16s, military barges,
and checkpoints not only render a whole Palestinian population captive in
64 isolated bantustans, they also use the full force of their military
power against a vulnerable and defenseless people.  Daily, they shell
Palestinian homes, assassinate Palestinian activists and leaders, destroy
crops and fields, indulge in cold-blooded murder of children and other
innocents while implementing a policy of deliberate humiliation and
suffocation at every checkpoint.

 The Israeli occupation has also hijacked the concept of security rendering
it applicable only to Israelis while depriving the Palestinians of every
aspect of personal, political, legal, territorial, historical, cultural,
economic, and even human security. As a blanket cover for its systematic
abuses, Israel has also abused the essence of the concept, exploiting it
for the sake of eradicating any mention of the occupation, and claiming the
illogical right to have a secure or even a safe and pleasant military
occupation that is in itself the very antithesis of peace, security, and
human rights.

 As the world watches, Israel has succeeded in evolving and imposing
another grand deception in the form of an official spin that not only
dehumanizes and demonizes the Palestinians, but also as an attempt at
blaming the victim and resuscitating labels that represent us as subhuman
species, and genetically violent terrorists, hence undeserving of any human
treatment.  At best, a false symmetry is manufactured between occupier and
occupied, oppressor and oppressed, (as in the call on both sides to stop
the violence) serving to eradicate the full horror of the occupation while
depriving the victims of their right to resist.  Given the disequilibrium
of power, the American insistence on a bilateral solution only serves to
give Israel license to exploit the asymmetry of power and to pursue its
policies of subjugating a whole nation and imposing a unilateral and unjust
solution.

 The Israeli solution is firmly imbedded in the tainted mentality of
occupation as license to dictate by force of arms illegal and punitive
realities that would further exacerbate the conflict and the suffering of
the Palestinian people.  Refusal to intervene by the US and the
international community as a whole has given Israel a free hand to continue
to act with impunity and immunity as a country above the law and beyond
accountability, while the Palestinians continue to be deprived of
protection of the law and the minimal imperatives of moral and human
decency.  We continue to plead for a global rule of law that would check
the aggression of the powerful, and eliminate the ongoing dehumanization of
the Palestinian people.  Such absence of will and abrogation of
responsibility on the part of the international community has not only
perpetuated the Nakba and prolonged the suffering and victimization of the
Palestinian people, but has also served to undermine the quest and chances
for peace throughout the region.

 When we joined the peace process launched in Madrid in 1991, we did so as
an act of will, as a commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict
with the aim of ending the occupation of 22% of historical Palestine and
the establishment of our independent state on the territory occupied by
Israel in 1967.  As victims, we rose above the pain of the moment and
reached out to our occupiers to wrench the course of history away from
inevitable conflict, towards reconciliation based on justice and parity.
Buttressed by the confidence of the peoples will to endure and resist
oppression, as manifested in the intifada of 1987, we offered Israel and
the world a unique opportunity to legitimize a daring pursuit of peace, and
to gain a constituency for an equitable resolution.

 Unfortunately, the peace process became a punitive process manipulated by
Israel to pursue its policies of expansion, ethnic cleansing, colonialism,
and subjugation of the weaker side by force.  It further served as a guise
to rationalize the separation of the people from the land and to fragment
both the people and the land, transforming the occupied Palestinian
territories into a series of isolated reservations or Bantustans while
maintaining full Israeli hegemony and direct control.  While seeking to
bestow retroactive legitimacy on illegal Israeli settlements, and on
Israels annexation of Jerusalem by force, it also sought to negate the
Palestinian refugees right of return thereby denying the very essence of
peace and destroying its foundations.

 The so-called generous offer of Barak has been exposed for the sham that
it is - an occupiers version of what's good for the natives, based only on
what's good for Israel, thus ensuring further conflict and instability
rather than cementing a fair and durable solution.  Having been
historically the victims of war and conflict, we found ourselves the
victims of a flawed and unjust peace process.

 Sharons incursion into the Haram Al-Sharif on September 28, 2000, was only
the calculated spark that ignited a powder keg already in place as a result
of the inequities of the process itself.  The use of live ammunition and
lethal force against the unarmed Palestinian protestors unleashed horrific
forces of hostility, racism, and orchestrated violence against the captive
Palestinian people. The continued intensification of these measures sends
an ominous and stark message of brutality and is symptomatic of the
regression to fundamentalist Zionism witnessed in the bloodbaths of the
1940s.  By claiming that this is the continuation of Israels War of
Independence, Sharon is sending a message to the Palestinian people and to
the whole world that the national eradication and the ethnic cleansing of
the 1948 Nakba are still in process.

 The current Israeli government represents the most lethal combination of
extremist right-wing political ideology, religious fundamentalism and
zealotry, and unbridled forces of militarism with a deceptive veneer of the
civilized face of the Labor party.  Sharon is the same army general who had
committed crimes against humanity in such atrocities as the Qibya massacre
of 1953, the cleansing of Gaza in 1973, the invasion of Lebanon and the
massacres of Sabra and Shatilla of 1982.  Intent on pursuing this bloody
path and on repeating the mistakes of history, Sharon has not learned that
no amount of brutality, cruelty, or violence can break the will of a people
determined to gain its freedom, dignity, and independence.  He shows no
signs of drawing the right historical conclusions that colonialism is by
nature a temporary form of enslavement, and that a people colonized cannot
be brought to their knees by the colonizers stifling measures of
subjugation and containment.

 Sisters and brothers, I appeal to you today, to restore the absent
Palestinians to the agenda of humanity, to validate our reality and rights,
to recognize and alleviate the pain and suffering of this tortured nation,
and to give recognition to the Palestinian narrative long denied.  You are
the only source of empowerment for a people who feel abandoned and
disempowered, but who have never lost faith in human solidarity and a
shared vision of emancipation.

 I appeal to you, as I have often done to governments and global fora, not
to adopt the stance of cowardly neutrality, for in the struggle against
oppression, injustice, racism, intolerance, colonialism, and exclusion,
there can be NO neutrality.  We are all called upon to take sides on behalf
of the victim, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed, and to stem the tide
of evil and prevent the forces of darkness from prevailing.  Here, there is
no US veto to deprive us of protection and our rights, nor is there
censorship or blackmail to intimidate governments ruled by self- interest.

 Let this meeting radiate the pure light of the human spirit that can never
be dimmed or contained.  Our path to the future must be based on the
redemption of history and the past, free of the shackles of inherited
inequities.  Our legacy to the future must be based on the rectification of
the painful legacies of the past.

 Sisters and brothers, Never before has an occupation army imposed such a
total and suffocating siege on a captive civilian population, then
proceeded to shell their homes, bomb their infrastructure, assassinate
their activists and leaders, destroy their crops and trees, murder their
civilians at will, steal their lands, and then demand that they acquiesce
like lambs to the slaughter. Never before have the victims been denied the
right to articulate, and gain recognition for, the horrendous atrocities
being committed against them as a matter of policy, but were rather blamed
and punished for the fact of their victimization.

 On behalf of the Palestinian people I appeal to you to have the courage to
intervene, to ensure that the oppressor is held accountable and the victim
is protected, to enact those principles and values that not only protect
lives but that also imbue life with the human qualities that make it worth
living. Despite our overwhelming pain, we have not surrendered to the
forces of occupation, colonization, racism, and dehumanization - nor have
we adopted their moral distortions. I ask you also not to succumb, but to
maintain and enhance the struggle for dignity, equality, freedom, and
justice as an act of collective affirmation on behalf of humanity as a
whole.

=====

Thought for the Day:

The United States has sacrificed its interests and
betrayed its principles in its support of the state of
Israel.  The policy may be bad for the country, but it
seems to be lucrative for our politicians.

(Joseph Sobran)