AN Arab town council in Jatt, in Israel (occupied Palestine), has been forced to change a street name called after the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, when the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamen Netanyahu said that streets in Israel cannot be ‘named after murderers of Israelis and Jews’.
Mohammed Watad from Jatt council told Israeli TV that the sign had been up for nine years.
Arafat led the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) for 35 years and was responsible for the adoption of the 1983 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, in Algiers.
He accepted the ‘two state solution’ and won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in 1994 for agreeing to Israel-Palestinian peace accords.
He however would not agree to ending the right to return for all Palestinians and their descendants who had been driven out of Palestine by the Israeli army in 1948 and also after Israel seized Jerusalem and the Golan Heights after the Six Day War in 1967. He also would not agree to give up the Palestinian claim that East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state.
Arafat was Palestinian president from 1994-2004, when he fell ill in his compound in Ramallah. He died in hospital in France weeks later, aged 75, the victim of Israeli radioactive poisoning. The decision to remove his street name comes as Israel is preparing to annex the Palestinian occupied territories by force using its military and settler gangs.
It is awaiting the signal for the action to begin. This is believed to be a declaration from President Trump that the US will move its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, the occupied territories are being subjected to a reign of army and settler terror. But the Palestine masses are fighting back. There have been mass protests against the Palestinian Al Quds newspaper for publishing an interview with the extreme right-wing Israeli Minister of Defence, Avigdor Liberman, who says that the Gaza Strip is the Palestinian state.
The head of the Union of Palestinian Writers, Murad Sudani, on behalf of writers’ unions and federations affiliated to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), has confirmed their rejection of the al-Quds newspaper’s ‘treachery.’ Sudani demanded the newspaper ‘apologise to the Palestinian people and to journalists.’
Protesters delivered a letter to the head of the journalists’ union, Nasser Abu Bakr, demanding that it take ‘appropriate procedures against the normalisation and promotion of settlements by the al-Quds newspaper.’ Palestinians are also very angry at the Israeli army assassination of Palestinian activist and writer Basel al Araj.
In a lengthy statement released on Monday, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) described al-Araj as a freedom fighter, intellectual and theorist, who was ‘one of the most prominent young Palestinian strugglers’ to resist the Israeli occupation, and who ‘worked to chronicle the history of Palestine and confront all attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause.’
On the eve of his death Araj wrote: ‘How hard it is to write your own will. For years I have been contemplating testaments written by martyrs, and those wills have always bewildered me. They were short, quick, without much eloquence. They did not quench our thirst to find answers about martyrdom.
‘Now I am walking to my fated death satisfied that I found my answers. How stupid I am! Is there anything which is more eloquent and clearer than a martyr’s deed? I should have written this several months ago, but what kept me was that this question is for you, living people, and why should I answer on your behalf? Look for the answers yourself, and for us the inhabitants of the graves, all we seek is God’s mercy.’
The Palestinian people will find their answer with a massive Third Intifada the moment that Trump and Israel move the US embassy to Jerusalem and declare that only Gaza is the Palestinian state.
Workers in the West – 100 years after ‘Perfidious Albion’ announced the Balfour Declaration – handing over Palestine to the Zionists – must give this Third Intifada all the support that it requires, and not rest until the Palestinian state has been established with Jerusalem as its capital, with all settlements and separation walls abolished, and with Muslims, Jews and Christians living side by side in peace in a socialist, secular Palestine!