Dialogue n°20 (February 2008)- Introduction
The events that took place recently in Gaza lead us to reprint what we wrote two months ago while preparing for the Madrid conference, After 1993, many people believe that the proposal to establish two states on the lands of Palestine would bring peace. Since 1993, the situation of the Palestinian people has not stopped its deterioration.
Today we see a new picture.
On January 23, the Palestinian population of Gaza broke the oppressive situation in which the Israeli army of occupation wanted to bury it. A hole was made in the wall which was closing the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Like escaped prisoners from a penal colony, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were searching for food, a place to get warm and shelter to protect themselves from the barbarism of the Jewish state. By this movement, the Palestinians show that they can not accept a life as outcasts. No people would know how to accept it.
Barely four days after the recent departure of George Bush from the Mideast, one can already count 40 dead in the Gaza Strip and more than 90 wounded the majority of them civilians. The Israeli blockade, a halt to the supply of fuel and goods of vital necessity, plunged the city of Gaza into darkness and destitution. The images from Gaza (without forgetting those from West Bank and the refugee camps) bring us back to the worst moments of history.
More than ever it is impossible to accept. Everyone knows and the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak reaffirmed that the offensive is not over. The objective of the occupation forces is the complete annihilation of all forms of resistance and the destruction of the Palestinian nation because these are the preliminary steps for the creation of the pseudo Palestinian State where two-thirds of the people would be excluded and displaced.
Fifteen years after Oslo, 8 years after the election of Bush as president of the U.S., it is the same policy of ethnic purification that began with the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 and which continues. From the Road Map to the Annapolis Conference, the pressure against the democratic national demands of the Palestinian people, the first of which is the right of return, has always been maintened. Neither the United States nor Israel is looking for new solutions, but rather the annihilation of all the foundations upon which a people exist. The right of the refugees to return and to rebuild the destroyed villages - is it not this right which is at stake?
The Palestinians are supposed to accept their confinement inside of the pseudo state
which rests upon less than 12% of their historical territory and inside of their camps. They are supposed to abandon their right to be a nation. Is it normal for a people to live freely on their own lands? What democratic person can be opposed to this?
How can Bush talk about the objective of peace and liberty
while it prohibits about seven million refugees to return, and while a people, divided by force, finds itself threatened everywhere, whether it be in the interior of the Israeli state, inside of the occupied territories since 1967 or in the Diaspora?
We repeat, as we never cease to do, doesn't the condition advanced by an all around democratic solution reside in implementation of the right to return? The implementation of this right implies the establishment of a political democracy, in other words a framework which can secure the full and complete expression of the equality of rights for everyone, Arabs and Jews, who want to live upon the same land, in a single democratic secular state.
Enough of barbarism and repression! For the right of return of all refugees to a single secular and democratic state!
The magazine Dialogue, which supports the international conference convened by Salah Salah and Daniel Gluckstein, believes that under the present circumstances it is more necessary than ever for such an initiative to be organized. We propose that the Palestinian question be freely discussed and that, we repeat, it be established as a world question to bring about a halt to the antidemocratic chaos that has been organized on a global scale. This is our commitment.
Contents :
- p.3
- Introduction
- p.4
- Messages sent by endorsers of the appeal for an international conference
- p.6
- The security of the Israeli state is synonymous with repression of the right to return.
By Salah Mohammed (Palestinian activist - Algeria). - p.8
- November 2, 2007 90th Anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
By Sam Ayache - p.11
- Book review:
Exile and Sovereignty - Judaism, Zionism and Binational thought
By Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin.
By Jacques Werschtein - p.14
- Israel in Search of its Roots in the Land of Palestine.
Zionism and Archaeology (Part II).
By Claudine Dauphin. - p.23
- Statement on the 59th anniversary of Al Nakbah.
By Eyad Kishawi - p.27
- Charles Enderlin,
Shattered Dreams: the Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002
.
By Pierre Lambert
