The Right of Return: The Only Key To Peace

EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE 2019
 

I would like to express my thanks to AFOPA (names) for extending an invitation to me to give this lecture.
It is a pleasure to be here in Australia. I have given talks in many places, from San Francisco west to Japan east but I have never been to Australia before.
I am particularly happy to give this lecture because I have historical connections to both Edward Said and Australia.

 

First, Edward.

What added salt to injury was seeing people dancing in the streets of London and New York rejoicing at the occupation of our land. The Zionist narrative was embedded in their minds for so long. The real aggressor and the real victim exchanged places in their minds.


Edward Said had since been participating in all Palestinian activities, advocating tirelessly Palestinian rights.
Barely one month after OSLO, Edward exposed its fallacy and deceit in an LRB paper which remains valid to the letter until today. At the 50^th anniversary of Al Nakba, Ibrahim and I wrote a declaration signed by 1000 Palestinians all over the world, denouncing Oslo and affirming the Right of Return. Edward wrote to me, amid his round three of chemo treatment, suggesting we should see Kofi Anan, the UN General Secretary to hand him the petition. In the year 2000, we participated in a conference in Boston upholding the Right of Return, the first casualty of the OSLO hoax.


We organized another international conference of Palestinians in London in October 2003. Edward was following this progress with interest in spite of his illness at the time. He wrote to me:
“I’m home or in hospital, quite ill and undergoing treatment and having a bad time, though I can still write and, I suppose, think. As for the meeting you mention—can’t we get it going? I think it’s massively important”.
Sadly, he passed away less than a month before holding our conference. He was present in the conference and ever since in our Palestinian life in all but body.
 
As to my connection with Australia, this is a long one. Although as I said I have never been to Australia, Australia came to me.
My father told me that, in the summer of 1916 Allied planes dropped leaflets on them promising them freedom and independence if they join the war effort against the Turks. It did not tell them that, at the same time, two diplomats, the British Mark Sykes and the French Francois Picot, were huddled in a room with the Middle East map on the table, planning how to carve our land between them.
What our people knew and saw was soldiers of the British Empire marching into Palestine.
In the spring of 1917, the British Army advanced to occupy Palestine, under the curious name, The Egyptian Expeditionary Force. They failed twice to take Gaza, suffered tens of thousands of casualties, in spite of bombing Gaza with poison gas canisters.
They had to think of a new plan of attack.


If you look at WWI maps at the ANZAC archives in Canberra, you will see the name of my land: AbuSitta (Slide 3). From this location, the 4^th Light Horse Regiment marched eastward all night in a new line of attack. It surrounded Beersheba from the east where it was least expected.
Beersheba fell at 6pm on Wednesday 31^st of October 1917. It was the first British victory at Palestine doorstep after two major failures, in Iraq and Gallipoli in Turkey. Our apparent joy of being freed from the Turkish dominance in Palestine and our anxious fulfilment of the Allies promise of freedom and independence for Palestine, all these have turned into a nightmare.  Next morning, when General Allenby sent his victory telegram to London, Balfour, the British Foreign Minister, opened his drawer, pulled out the paper he agreed with the Zionists months before and signed his infamous declaration on November 2^nd, 1917. It was a shameful treacherous document, giving away what he did not own, to those who have no title, in the absence of the lawful owners of the land.


Since then, Palestine endured hundred years of wars, death and destruction, with no end in sight.
Fast-forward 30 years from WWI, in 1948, I was then a 10year old primary school student at Beersheba boarding school, (slide school 4) a hundred yards from the pole where the Australians hoisted the British flag and lowered the Turkish flag, after 1400 years of Arab and Islamic rule.
 
Next door to my school lies the War Cemetery where 31 fallen ANZAC soldiers out of 800 in the regiment were interned. At the gate of the cemetery a marble plaque had these words carved on it (slides 5):
  
The land on which this cemetery stands is the free grant of the People of Palestine to whom it was given by the Municipality of Beersheba…
That was a Palestinian municipality and its mayor was Palestinian. He was Sheikh Freih. He had an important role in ANZAC victory.  I’ll come back to this point later.
One morning, in early April 1948, the school master gathered us in the morning procession and told us that the Jews were killing Palestinians in Deir Yassin and attacking many villages around Jaffa and Haifa. “I have no way to protect you. You have to go back to your families”, he said.
The school master did not know of course that that was the week in which Ben Gurion ordered the start of Plan Dalet. He did not know that that was the beginning of the Zionist Invasion of Palestine.
We too did not know the extent of that attack at the time. For myself I have never seen a Jew before. We heard they were somewhere around Jaffa and Haifa where they landed on our shores.  We heard they had their military formations. We heard that they came from different countries and they spoke a babble of languages, they wore a variety of odd uniforms. They did not all look the same. They had machine guns and tanks, which we did not.


As a child, I wondered who were these people? Why have they come from afar to kills us, take our land and destroy our life?
But I had a more urgent task. I was left in the school with two pupils my age and we had to find our way to our homes, 45 kilometers away. We were told that Jewish Jeeps intercept the road towards our home. They ran patrols in jeeps with machineguns scouting a wide area; they shot anybody they could find in their way.
The journey from my boarding school to my home looked like an eternity. We children had to walk all this distance. Finally, we arrived at my home in Al Ma’in. I had to rest in bed for 3 days. My story was told in detail.
(slide6 book cover)
If I thought I was safe, I was wrong. Six weeks later, on the day Ben Gurion declared his state, 14 May, we were attacked in Al Ma’in by the Haganah in the middle of the night. We saw the headlights of 24 armoured vehicles approaching us. A monster with 48 eyes faced us with the ominous roar of its engines. The children and the women went in hiding in a nearby ravine. I was one of them. I saw the flash of bombs and the rising smoke from our demolished houses, from the school which my father built in 1920, from our motorized well and flour mill, Bayara.
As the sun rose, we saw the debris of all our physical existence, in the smoldering remains of the houses. We saw the corpses of those killed. On that day, Ben Gurion and his Polish settlers declared their state of Israel, on my land.
On that day, I became a refugee. From that day, I started my life journey on the Road to Return Home. I am still walking on that road for 26,000 days and nights. I did not and shall not ever give up. Until we return.

Al-NAKBA

Ladies and Gentlemen
Let me tell you in the clearest way possible.
The Palestinian Nakba is unsurpassed in history.
For a country, like Palestine, to be invaded and occupied, emptied of its people, driven into refugee camps, its physical and cultural landmarks systematically obliterated, its geography taken over and renamed, its history erased from all records, its heritage expropriated as the invader’s own, its destruction hailed as a miraculous act of God and as a victory of the few righteous over the savage many, all done according to a premeditated plan outside the country, meticulously executed, supported by colonial powers in every field, its refutation by the rule of law and the words of truth and the cries of the victims for justice are forbidden as the eternal sin of anti-Semitism, with all this maintained, not for a period of a brief war, but for seven decades and counting...
is indeed unsurpassed in history. No colonial project has been beset with so much falsification and deliberate misinformation as the case of Palestine. Ponder these terms
Palestine is a Land without people. God given land. We were there 2000 years ago, now we decided to return. Britain decreed Palestine as our national home. UN decreed the same. We were in a state of self defense. Palestinian refugees left on Arab orders. There were no massacres or ethnic cleansing. There is no occupation today.
It really boggles the mind. None of these statements are true.
That is one reason why justice is elusive so far. International law and a myriad of UN resolutions have been calling for justice in Palestine. The Right of Return resolution has been affirmed more than 130 times, the longest standing resolution in UN history.
Why then is this conflict, which is really Zionist Invasion, still claiming victims almost daily? Why is al Nakba still going on after 70 years?

The beginning was 100 years ago at the treacherous Balfour Declaration. That was a false promissory note. If this was done by an individual today he would be behind bars. In spite of British collusion during 30 years of the Mandate, Zionists could only acquire 6% of Palestine. At the end of the Mandate, and under strong US pressure, the UN passed resolution on partitioning Palestine: 55% to new European Jewish colonists and 45% to the majority Palestinian population. (slide 7) The UN partition plan was only a recommendation; it has no legal authority. Four months later, the UN and the US dropped the plan in favour of UN trusteeship. Zionist media never tells you that the Partition Plan was dropped.
At this event, Ben Gurion got mad. He unleashed his Haganah militia to attack Palestine under the name Plan Dalet.
 
Thus started the Zionist invasion of Palestine. In six weeks from first of April to 14 of May 1948, the Haganah conquered critical locations in Palestine and established Israel on the ground, after Herbert Samuel (1920- 1925) laid its legal foundation 28 years earlier.
In these six weeks, 220 villages including most cities were attacked and depopulated, almost half of all Palestinian refugees were expelled, and 22 massacres out of 50 that took place over the course of the Nakba were committed. During those same six weeks 17 military operations were carried out by nine brigades. In any attack there were superiority of numbers up to 1:10 against the defenders. In total, Israel mounted 31 military operations to occupy several regions of Palestine thus increasing their control from 6% of Palestine at end of the mandate to 78% by the middle of 1949.
(slide- Plan Dalet 8,9)
That was before Israel was declared, before the British left Palestine, before any Arab soldier entered Palestine to save Palestinians.
That was the real invasion of Palestine. It was a Zionist invasion.
So was Israel in a state of self defense? Or was it the aggressor?
The expulsion continued. From expulsion of half the refugees, (slide 10) to total expulsion of refugees in 560 towns and villages, the biggest and longest and continuous expulsion operation in the history of Palestine.
  That was Al Nakba. (slide 11)
An expulsion of this scale could not happen without massacres.
   
You know one of them, Deir Yassin. This is another, Tantoura. (slide 12). Israeli forces attacked the village. 240 farmers were taken to dig ditches, thrown in the ditches, shot and killed. That was one of 50 massacres in 1948. The survivors were taken to 17 concentration and forced labour camps according to the documents of the Red Cross. (Slide map 13). Yes civilians were taken to concentration camps.