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 ontheir 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 peoplethat 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 Israel's 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
ofpity 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. Israel's 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 Israel's 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 Israel's 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, 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 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 people's 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 Israel's 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 occupier's 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.
Sharon's 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 1940's.
By claiming that "this is the continuation of Israel's 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 colonizer's
stifling measures of subjugation and containment.
Sisters and brothers, I appeal to you today, to restore the absent Palestinians
to the agenda ofhumanity, 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.
The oft-repeated dictum that "Israel will not negotiate under fire"
applies only to Palestinian "fire" or attempts at self-defense.
While Israel must be left unhampered in its fire-shell-assassinate at will
policy, the Palestinians must maintain "zero violence" leading
to a "cooling off period" that would prepare the way for "confidence-building
measures and ultimately award the Palestinians the coveted "prize"
of resuming negotiations withtheir occupiers.
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
