May 16, 2010
'Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time Close to the gardens of broken shadows, We do what prisoners do, And what the jobless do: We cultivate hope'- Mahmoud Darwish
When asked for a definition of "peace" during a CBC interview,
Canadian scientist, educator and renowned activist Ursula Franklin
stated: "Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of
justice and the absence of fear." This simple definition helps explain
why there is still no peace in Palestine. The man-made Palestinian
plight has been characterized by a lack of justice and driven by fear
and greed, from the decision of colonialist powers to give away more
than half of Palestinian land without a referendum -- including the
valuable coastal strip -- to the ongoing immoral blockade of Gaza.
Palestinians around the world commemorate on May 15 their collective
national trauma, the forced exodus from their homeland in 1948, or Al
Nakba (Catastrophe) -- a historic injustice inflicted on some 750,000
unarmed civilian Palestinians. As they fled in fear, their properties
were seized, their religious institutions destroyed, and close to 500
of their villages demolished or emptied.
By accepting the declaration of independence -- self-proclaimed one
day before the end of the British mandate -- and by recognizing the
state of Israel, an entity with no defined borders, the international
community officially placed the fate of Palestinians at the mercy of
Israel. At that point, plans "A" "B" and "C" had already been
formulated, and the fourth plan [1]
"Dalet" (letter "D" in Hebrew) which called for the systematic
expulsion of Palestinians from strategic areas had been finalized in
March 1948.
So, before any Arab forces entered the sectors [2]designated
as Arab under the Partition Plan, Zionists -- (Dan Freeman-Maloy
quoting David Bercuson) -- carried out terrorist activities and
operations within them to ethnically cleanse them of indigenous
population. Many well-known terrorists are recognized as Israeli heroes [3],
amongst them Israeli prime ministers. It is odd that Israeli leaders
can't see the similarity between their reaction to the British Mandate
and that of the Palestinians under occupation.
The recent Israeli wars and ongoing campaigns of terror are nothing but means to fully realize the Zionist project [4]
failed to achieve. In the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris, "If
the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will
be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he
left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza
and within Israel itself... In certain conditions, expulsion is not a
war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes.
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your
hands." (Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit, Haaretz, Jan. 16, 2004)
In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987,
updated 2004), Morris uses official Israeli documents to refute the
myth that Palestinians fled under the orders of Arab leaders. He
chronicles the acts of terrorism, rapes, massacres, and ethnic
cleansing that went on with a wink and a nod from Zionist leaders eager
to acquire land without its people. One of the architects of the Oslo
Accord, Yitzak Rabin, had as defence minister urged the country to
"create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would
attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank to Jordan." (Quoted by Alice Gray in Positive Conditions [5] -- The Water Crisis In Gaza and by Robert I. Friedman [6].
The transfer of the Palestinian population is still 'encouraged' through highly discriminatory policies [7],
some visible, such as home demolitions, closures, checkpoints, attacks
on peaceful demonstrations, and others less so, such as the system of
registration, permits, etc., special to Palestinians in the Occupied
Territory (including Jerusalem) -- a bureaucratic process straight out
of Kafka's nightmarish world.
There are concerns that Canada has moved farther away from
international law and UN resolutions on the Arab/Israeli conflict. The
process of siding with Israel that started under Martin's Liberals has
now turned Canada into Israel's cheerleader, overtaking the U.S. The
undermining of the work of Rights and Democracy, the de-funding of
internationally respected NGOs such as KAIROS, the decision to withdraw
funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA] -- when
the USA announced an initial contribution of $40 million that will
provide critical health, education, and humanitarian services to 4.7
million Palestinian refugees across the region -- have raised concerns
that the current government sees human rights not as universal, and
peaceful advocacy in zones of conflict such as Israel/Palestine as
something Canada should not support or fund.
Rhetorically, the Canadian government supports a two-state solution
as does the Israeli government (See official Israeli Ministry of
Tourism's map of Israel), even as Israel expropriates
and builds illegal Jews-only settlements on occupied Palestinian
territory. It also supports the boycott of besieged Gaza while
condemning calls for boycott of and divestment from Israel.
Contrary to Golda Meir's famous sentence ("There is no such thing as
a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and
took their country. They didn't exist." -- Golda Meir, statement to The
Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969), Palestine was a land with a thriving
people. Holding onto shards of memory for six decades of exile,
Palestinians, in the words of British-Palestinian filmmaker Omar
Al-Qattan, know it "is clearly impossible to return to point zero...
But it is also impossible for any Palestinian to honestly pretend that
the trauma of 1948, or of the subsequent dispossessions and forced
exiles which afflicted us and continue to do so, are no longer central
to our lives. Nothing makes much sense without those memories and that
history." (Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, by Ahmad
H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod, quoted in PulseMedia [8]).
Canada has been engaged in the Middle East, in the roles of peacekeeping as well as peacemaking, ever since the fateful UN Partition resolution
through our then representative, Ivan C. Rand, Justice of the Supreme
Court of Canada, and Lester B. Pearson, who shepherded the resolution
to adoption. The only Middle East expert in the Department of External
Affairs, Elizabeth P. MacCallum, objected ("because we didn't give two
hoots for democracy") and warned that the partition would create chaos
for 40 years, a conservative estimate, but her advice was ignored.
Canada may become relevant again as a player in the region when we
stop looking at the conflict only through the Israeli prism. As our
Canadian political leaders once again join in Israel's celebration,
they must also acknowledge that May 15th is a day of mourning for all
Palestinians, and that their continued plight is a source of much
sorrow and anger in the region and beyond.
Whatever the competing historical interpretations, it remains that
for the past six decades one of these peoples has enjoyed its
independence and the other has been denied it, and the most basic human
rights.
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'Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time Close to the gardens of broken shadows, We do what prisoners do, And what the jobless do: We cultivate hope'- Mahmoud Darwish
When asked for a definition of "peace" during a CBC interview,
Canadian scientist, educator and renowned activist Ursula Franklin
stated: "Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of
justice and the absence of fear." This simple definition helps explain
why there is still no peace in Palestine. The man-made Palestinian
plight has been characterized by a lack of justice and driven by fear
and greed, from the decision of colonialist powers to give away more
than half of Palestinian land without a referendum -- including the
valuable coastal strip -- to the ongoing immoral blockade of Gaza.
Palestinians around the world commemorate on May 15 their collective
national trauma, the forced exodus from their homeland in 1948, or Al
Nakba (Catastrophe) -- a historic injustice inflicted on some 750,000
unarmed civilian Palestinians. As they fled in fear, their properties
were seized, their religious institutions destroyed, and close to 500
of their villages demolished or emptied.
By accepting the declaration of independence -- self-proclaimed one
day before the end of the British mandate -- and by recognizing the
state of Israel, an entity with no defined borders, the international
community officially placed the fate of Palestinians at the mercy of
Israel. At that point, plans "A" "B" and "C" had already been
formulated, and the fourth plan [1]
"Dalet" (letter "D" in Hebrew) which called for the systematic
expulsion of Palestinians from strategic areas had been finalized in
March 1948.
So, before any Arab forces entered the sectors [2]designated
as Arab under the Partition Plan, Zionists -- (Dan Freeman-Maloy
quoting David Bercuson) -- carried out terrorist activities and
operations within them to ethnically cleanse them of indigenous
population. Many well-known terrorists are recognized as Israeli heroes [3],
amongst them Israeli prime ministers. It is odd that Israeli leaders
can't see the similarity between their reaction to the British Mandate
and that of the Palestinians under occupation.
The recent Israeli wars and ongoing campaigns of terror are nothing but means to fully realize the Zionist project [4]
failed to achieve. In the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris, "If
the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will
be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he
left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza
and within Israel itself... In certain conditions, expulsion is not a
war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes.
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your
hands." (Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit, Haaretz, Jan. 16, 2004)
In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987,
updated 2004), Morris uses official Israeli documents to refute the
myth that Palestinians fled under the orders of Arab leaders. He
chronicles the acts of terrorism, rapes, massacres, and ethnic
cleansing that went on with a wink and a nod from Zionist leaders eager
to acquire land without its people. One of the architects of the Oslo
Accord, Yitzak Rabin, had as defence minister urged the country to
"create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would
attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank to Jordan." (Quoted by Alice Gray in Positive Conditions [5] -- The Water Crisis In Gaza and by Robert I. Friedman [6].
The transfer of the Palestinian population is still 'encouraged' through highly discriminatory policies [7],
some visible, such as home demolitions, closures, checkpoints, attacks
on peaceful demonstrations, and others less so, such as the system of
registration, permits, etc., special to Palestinians in the Occupied
Territory (including Jerusalem) -- a bureaucratic process straight out
of Kafka's nightmarish world.
There are concerns that Canada has moved farther away from
international law and UN resolutions on the Arab/Israeli conflict. The
process of siding with Israel that started under Martin's Liberals has
now turned Canada into Israel's cheerleader, overtaking the U.S. The
undermining of the work of Rights and Democracy, the de-funding of
internationally respected NGOs such as KAIROS, the decision to withdraw
funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA] -- when
the USA announced an initial contribution of $40 million that will
provide critical health, education, and humanitarian services to 4.7
million Palestinian refugees across the region -- have raised concerns
that the current government sees human rights not as universal, and
peaceful advocacy in zones of conflict such as Israel/Palestine as
something Canada should not support or fund.
Rhetorically, the Canadian government supports a two-state solution
as does the Israeli government (See official Israeli Ministry of
Tourism's map of Israel), even as Israel expropriates
and builds illegal Jews-only settlements on occupied Palestinian
territory. It also supports the boycott of besieged Gaza while
condemning calls for boycott of and divestment from Israel.
Contrary to Golda Meir's famous sentence ("There is no such thing as
a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and
took their country. They didn't exist." -- Golda Meir, statement to The
Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969), Palestine was a land with a thriving
people. Holding onto shards of memory for six decades of exile,
Palestinians, in the words of British-Palestinian filmmaker Omar
Al-Qattan, know it "is clearly impossible to return to point zero...
But it is also impossible for any Palestinian to honestly pretend that
the trauma of 1948, or of the subsequent dispossessions and forced
exiles which afflicted us and continue to do so, are no longer central
to our lives. Nothing makes much sense without those memories and that
history." (Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, by Ahmad
H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod, quoted in PulseMedia [8]).
Canada has been engaged in the Middle East, in the roles of peacekeeping as well as peacemaking, ever since the fateful UN Partition resolution
through our then representative, Ivan C. Rand, Justice of the Supreme
Court of Canada, and Lester B. Pearson, who shepherded the resolution
to adoption. The only Middle East expert in the Department of External
Affairs, Elizabeth P. MacCallum, objected ("because we didn't give two
hoots for democracy") and warned that the partition would create chaos
for 40 years, a conservative estimate, but her advice was ignored.
Canada may become relevant again as a player in the region when we
stop looking at the conflict only through the Israeli prism. As our
Canadian political leaders once again join in Israel's celebration,
they must also acknowledge that May 15th is a day of mourning for all
Palestinians, and that their continued plight is a source of much
sorrow and anger in the region and beyond.
Whatever the competing historical interpretations, it remains that
for the past six decades one of these peoples has enjoyed its
independence and the other has been denied it, and the most basic human
rights.
'Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time Close to the gardens of broken shadows, We do what prisoners do, And what the jobless do: We cultivate hope'- Mahmoud Darwish
When asked for a definition of "peace" during a CBC interview,
Canadian scientist, educator and renowned activist Ursula Franklin
stated: "Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of
justice and the absence of fear." This simple definition helps explain
why there is still no peace in Palestine. The man-made Palestinian
plight has been characterized by a lack of justice and driven by fear
and greed, from the decision of colonialist powers to give away more
than half of Palestinian land without a referendum -- including the
valuable coastal strip -- to the ongoing immoral blockade of Gaza.
Palestinians around the world commemorate on May 15 their collective
national trauma, the forced exodus from their homeland in 1948, or Al
Nakba (Catastrophe) -- a historic injustice inflicted on some 750,000
unarmed civilian Palestinians. As they fled in fear, their properties
were seized, their religious institutions destroyed, and close to 500
of their villages demolished or emptied.
By accepting the declaration of independence -- self-proclaimed one
day before the end of the British mandate -- and by recognizing the
state of Israel, an entity with no defined borders, the international
community officially placed the fate of Palestinians at the mercy of
Israel. At that point, plans "A" "B" and "C" had already been
formulated, and the fourth plan [1]
"Dalet" (letter "D" in Hebrew) which called for the systematic
expulsion of Palestinians from strategic areas had been finalized in
March 1948.
So, before any Arab forces entered the sectors [2]designated
as Arab under the Partition Plan, Zionists -- (Dan Freeman-Maloy
quoting David Bercuson) -- carried out terrorist activities and
operations within them to ethnically cleanse them of indigenous
population. Many well-known terrorists are recognized as Israeli heroes [3],
amongst them Israeli prime ministers. It is odd that Israeli leaders
can't see the similarity between their reaction to the British Mandate
and that of the Palestinians under occupation.
The recent Israeli wars and ongoing campaigns of terror are nothing but means to fully realize the Zionist project [4]
failed to achieve. In the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris, "If
the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will
be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he
left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza
and within Israel itself... In certain conditions, expulsion is not a
war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes.
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your
hands." (Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit, Haaretz, Jan. 16, 2004)
In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1987,
updated 2004), Morris uses official Israeli documents to refute the
myth that Palestinians fled under the orders of Arab leaders. He
chronicles the acts of terrorism, rapes, massacres, and ethnic
cleansing that went on with a wink and a nod from Zionist leaders eager
to acquire land without its people. One of the architects of the Oslo
Accord, Yitzak Rabin, had as defence minister urged the country to
"create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would
attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank to Jordan." (Quoted by Alice Gray in Positive Conditions [5] -- The Water Crisis In Gaza and by Robert I. Friedman [6].
The transfer of the Palestinian population is still 'encouraged' through highly discriminatory policies [7],
some visible, such as home demolitions, closures, checkpoints, attacks
on peaceful demonstrations, and others less so, such as the system of
registration, permits, etc., special to Palestinians in the Occupied
Territory (including Jerusalem) -- a bureaucratic process straight out
of Kafka's nightmarish world.
There are concerns that Canada has moved farther away from
international law and UN resolutions on the Arab/Israeli conflict. The
process of siding with Israel that started under Martin's Liberals has
now turned Canada into Israel's cheerleader, overtaking the U.S. The
undermining of the work of Rights and Democracy, the de-funding of
internationally respected NGOs such as KAIROS, the decision to withdraw
funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA] -- when
the USA announced an initial contribution of $40 million that will
provide critical health, education, and humanitarian services to 4.7
million Palestinian refugees across the region -- have raised concerns
that the current government sees human rights not as universal, and
peaceful advocacy in zones of conflict such as Israel/Palestine as
something Canada should not support or fund.
Rhetorically, the Canadian government supports a two-state solution
as does the Israeli government (See official Israeli Ministry of
Tourism's map of Israel), even as Israel expropriates
and builds illegal Jews-only settlements on occupied Palestinian
territory. It also supports the boycott of besieged Gaza while
condemning calls for boycott of and divestment from Israel.
Contrary to Golda Meir's famous sentence ("There is no such thing as
a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and
took their country. They didn't exist." -- Golda Meir, statement to The
Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969), Palestine was a land with a thriving
people. Holding onto shards of memory for six decades of exile,
Palestinians, in the words of British-Palestinian filmmaker Omar
Al-Qattan, know it "is clearly impossible to return to point zero...
But it is also impossible for any Palestinian to honestly pretend that
the trauma of 1948, or of the subsequent dispossessions and forced
exiles which afflicted us and continue to do so, are no longer central
to our lives. Nothing makes much sense without those memories and that
history." (Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, by Ahmad
H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod, quoted in PulseMedia [8]).
Canada has been engaged in the Middle East, in the roles of peacekeeping as well as peacemaking, ever since the fateful UN Partition resolution
through our then representative, Ivan C. Rand, Justice of the Supreme
Court of Canada, and Lester B. Pearson, who shepherded the resolution
to adoption. The only Middle East expert in the Department of External
Affairs, Elizabeth P. MacCallum, objected ("because we didn't give two
hoots for democracy") and warned that the partition would create chaos
for 40 years, a conservative estimate, but her advice was ignored.
Canada may become relevant again as a player in the region when we
stop looking at the conflict only through the Israeli prism. As our
Canadian political leaders once again join in Israel's celebration,
they must also acknowledge that May 15th is a day of mourning for all
Palestinians, and that their continued plight is a source of much
sorrow and anger in the region and beyond.
Whatever the competing historical interpretations, it remains that
for the past six decades one of these peoples has enjoyed its
independence and the other has been denied it, and the most basic human
rights.
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