HANAN Ashrawi, member of the PLO Executive Committee on Thursday night described the Nakba, or catastrophe, when 800,000 Palestinians were expelled by Zionist militias or fled their towns and villages in massive ethnic cleansing to make way for Israel, as a continuum of injustice that must end.
‘Seventy-two years ago, the Nakba (Catastrophe) that was forced upon the Palestinian people began with a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion, mass murder, theft, and destruction by Zionist militias that later formed the Israeli army.
‘Nakba ravished the thriving and prosperous Palestinian society, turning the majority of the Palestinian people into uprooted refugees, whose identity and basic rights were denied and whose plight continues until today. It is a collective and cumulative trauma that affects every Palestinian,’ Ashrawi said in a statement.
‘The Palestinian people were not uprooted and expelled by a natural disaster. They were the victims of horrendous war crimes that international inaction allowed Israel to commit with abject impunity. This impunity continues to inform and entrench the system of relentless colonial Israeli oppression that has chained our past and present for decades,’ she added.
‘Nakba is not a painful memory of a distant crime. It is a reality that has continued to evolve over the decades, resulting in a continuum of pain, suffering, economic strangulation, and injustice. Israel’s campaign of incitement against the Palestinian leadership as well as local and international civil society and organisations, including the International Criminal Court, is yet another dimension of this systematic badgering against the Palestinian people and the cynical policy of vilification against any form of rightful dissent against Israeli oppression.
‘Israel’s imminent formal annexation of large parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory brings into sharp focus the central objective and ultimate goal of its colonial occupation: usurping Palestinian land and resources while expelling or boxing in as many Palestinians as possible. The agenda of “greater Israel”, extraterritorial expansion, and willful criminality persist with impunity.’
‘As the Palestinian people commemorate Nakba, we renew our determination to ensure that this continuum of injustice is not the Palestinian people’s destiny.
‘We will not relent nor tire. The Palestinian people draw hope and strength from the growing global solidarity with Palestine’s cause for freedom, justice, return, as well as protection for the Palestinian people and accountability for Israel.
‘We are certain that together with principled state actors, human rights defenders, and solidarity groups worldwide, justice will prevail and the Palestinian people’s reality of Nakba will finally come to an end.’
- Israeli forces have ordered a halt on the construction of eight houses and agricultural structures in Nahalin town, west of the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem.
Subhi Zeidan, a local municipal official, confirmed that Israeli forces ordered a stop on the construction of the houses and structures, including a house under construction, purportedly for being built with licences.
He pointed out that just three days stop-construction orders were served to eight houses, at least three of which are inhabited, in the town, under the same pretext, a move that he slammed as a ‘fierce attack’ against Palestinian construction to make room for the expansion of the nearby Israeli colonial settlement bloc of Gush Etzion.
He elaborated that the orders were served after the settlement group Regavim posted a video purportedly claiming that Palestinian urban expansion in the area hinders Israel’s annexation move.
Regavim promotes Israeli Jewish settlers’ ‘right’ to colonise Palestine, mirroring the techniques and strategies of liberal human rights NGOs.
Israel demolishes Palestinian houses and structures almost on a daily basis as a means to achieve ‘demographic control’ of the occupied territories.
Israel denies planning permits for Palestinians to build on their own land or to extend existing houses to accommodate natural growth, particularly in Jerusalem and Area C, which constitutes 60 per cent of the occupied West Bank and falls under full Israeli military rule, forcing residents to build without obtaining rarely-granted permits to provide shelters for their families.
In contrast, Israel argues that building within existing colonial settlements is necessary to accommodate the ‘natural growth’ of settlers.
Therefore, it much more easily gives the estimated 550,000 Jewish Israeli settlers there building permits and provides them with roads, electricity, water and sewage systems that remain inaccessible to many neighbouring Palestinians.
The ‘Civil Administration’ is the name Israel gives to the body administering its military occupation of the West Bank.
Soldiers in the oxymoronically named Civil Administration determine where Palestinians may live, where and when they may travel (including to other parts of the occupied territories like Gaza and East Jerusalem), whether they can build or expand homes on their own land, whether they own that land at all, whether an Israeli settler can take over that land among others.
- Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn last Friday called for harshly condemning Israel’s prospective move to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.
‘If you annex a territory that you do not own, it is a serious violation of international law,’ Asselborn said during an interview with the German news agency DPA.
He added that the European Union ‘must now take a preventive position and apply pressure’ on Israel, the occupying authority, and noted that Israel ‘should fear far-reaching punitive measures.’
The EU foreign ministers, will weigh what action the bloc could take should Israel push ahead with the annexation plan.
On July 1, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, will be able to vote on the annexation of large swaths of the West Bank on the basis of the US-touted Mideast plan, dubbed ‘Deal of the Century’, which in fact endorses Israel’s longstanding policy of permanent occupation, colonialism and apartheid over the Palestinian people.
Israeli Premier Binyamin Netanyahu has declared many times his willingness to annex the illegal colonial settlements besides the Jordan Valley, a fertile strip of land running west along the Jordan River, which is home of some 65,000 Palestinians and makes up approximately 30 per cent of the West Bank, upon the formation of the new coalition government.
The annexation of Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 is illegal under international law, and it would put much of the occupied West Bank under Israeli sovereignty, leaving only a few small pockets of densely populated Palestinian bantustans.
- The International Press Institute (IPI) has called on Israel to allow Palestine TV to reopen in the occupied city of Jerusalem.
‘Israel should remove all restrictions on Palestine TV and allow its office to reopen in East Jerusalem,’ said IPI in a press release.
On May 11, the Israeli government renewed the closure of the office of Palestine TV, a channel run by the state-owned Palestine Public Broadcasting Authority and stopped its crew from operating in East Jerusalem for another six months. The closure was first ordered in November 2019 citing the violation of a 1994 agreement between Israel and Palestine. The order to extend the closure came soon after Palestine TV correspondent Kristine Rinawi was summoned for interrogation by the Israeli authorities.
‘The harassment of a Palestinian journalist who also is a citizen of Israel because she works for Palestine TV is unacceptable’, IPI Executive Board Vice Chair Daoud Kuttab said.
‘All journalists should have freedom of movement and must not be restricted from covering areas of conflict. The 350,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem have a right to have a credible television station and reporters on the ground to report about their situation,’ he added.
The Union of Journalists in Israel has written to the deputy chief of police in East Jerusalem protesting the summoning of Rinawi and the closure of Palestine TV’s office. The union said that as Israeli journalists are allowed to operate without any restrictions in Palestinian areas, the same should apply to Palestinian journalists and media outlets to reporting from inside Israel.
Established in 1993 soon after the Oslo Accords, the Palestine Public Broadcasting Authority is a state-owned body of the Palestinian Authority, which began operating radio and TV in the Gaza Strip and Ramallah under the name of Palestine Broadcasting Corporation. In 2010, it became a public institution following a presidential decree. PBC operates two TV channels, Palestine TV and Palestine live channel, broadcasting in Palestine and also available in Middle East countries as well as in North America, and in Europe via Arabsat.
