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Appendix 2/Speech with Analysis
Excerpts from the Address by Hanan Ashrawi
to The World Conference
Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia,
and Related Intolerances.
Durban, South Africa August 28, 2001
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on the red sentences to see the analysis.
Printing
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| Sisters and Brothers,
From
Jerusalem, from the heart of Palestine, a land besieged,
and repeatedly violated by a most brutal Israeli military occupation,I
have come to join you today. |
| From
the midst of the people of Palestine, a tortured nation, guilty
only of an unwavering commitment to freedom,
dignity, and independence, |
| I have come to join you today. From the depths of unredeemed
history, I have come to join you today. I represent a narrative of
exclusion,
denial, racism, and national victimization, but I also
come with a message of hope, redemption, and historical vindication
embodied in the spirit and the will of a people that has refused to
succumb to all forces of oppression, violence, cruelty, and injustice. |
| [...]
... I come to you today with a heavy heart leaving behind a nation
in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba [catastrophe],
as the most intricate and pervasive expression
of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and victimization.
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| More
than half a century ago [53 years], the Palestinians as a people
were slated for national obliteration, cast
outside the course of history, their identity denied, and their
very human cultural and historical reality suppressed. We became
victims of the myth of a land without a people for people without
a land, whereby the West sought to assuage its guilt over its
horrendous anti-Semitism by the total victimization of a whole
nation. Zionism sought to implement its agenda of exclusivity
by usurping not only the lands and rights of the Palestinians,
but also by confiscating their utterance and distorting their
historical narrative.
In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested
in a dual victimization: on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession,
dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population that
has come to be known as the refugee question that currently encompasses
more than 5 million Palestinians. On the other hand, those that
remained were subject to the systematic oppression and brutality
of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their rights
and liberties, including their national identity on their own
land. |
| ...
Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive
means of wholesale brutalization and persecution.
Since 1967, Palestinian land has been expropriated at an increasing
pace, while whole Jewish populations have been brought in, in
a calculated scheme of settler colonization. Throughout the land,
an artificial and colonial grid of infrastructure was superimposed
on our authentic reality to create a spurious settler superstructure
as a means of Israeli demographic, geographic, and extraterritorial
incursions into Palestine.
So-called bypass roads for the exclusive use of the illegal Jewish
settler population [the bypass roads were first created to avoid
contact between tear through the heart of Palestinian land, to
bypass Palestinian realities and create a unique form of racism. |
| ...
Another unique manifestation of Israeli racism is the blatant and
sinister policy of demographic engineering.
To maintain the Jewish character, or the purity of the state of Israel,
the Palestinians have been depicted and dealt with as a demographic
threat. Proposed remedies included calls
for forced birth control and population management, to transfer and
expulsion of whole communities, to the racist and punitive unilateral
separation scheme currently being advocated. |
| A
state of siege has been imposed not only on the West Bank and Gaza,
but also within these territories, to transform each village, town,
and city into an isolated prison, thereby destroying every aspect
of human life, including economic, educational, health, and social
cohesiveness in an attempt to sever every fiber
of the fabric of normal life. Israeli occupation troops using
tanks, helicopter gunships, F-16s, military barges, and checkpoints,
not only render a whole Palestinian population captive in 64 isolated
bantustans, they also use the full force of their military power against
a vulnerable and defenseless people.
Daily, they shell Palestinian homes assassinate Palestinian activists
and leaders, destroy crops and fields, indulge in cold-blooded
murder of children and other innocents while implementing a policy
of deliberate humiliation and suffocation at every checkpoint.
[...] |
| Sharon's
incursion into the Haram Al-Sharif on September 28, 2000, was only
the calculated spark that ignited a powder keg already in place
as a result of the inequities of the process itself.
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... Sisters and brothers, I appeal to you
today, to restore the absent Palestinians to the agenda
of humanity, to validate our reality and rights, to recognize
and alleviate the pain and suffering of this tortured nation,
and to give recognition to the Palestinian narrative long denied.
You are the only source of empowerment for a people who feel abandoned
and disempowered, but who have never lost faith in human solidarity
and a shared vision of emancipation.
I appeal to you, as I have often done to governments and global
fora, not to adopt the stance of cowardly neutrality, for in the
struggle against oppression, injustice, racism, intolerance, colonialism,
and exclusion, there can be NO neutrality. We are all called upon
to take sides on behalf of the victim, the disenfranchised, and
the oppressed, and to stem the tide of evil and prevent the forces
of darkness from prevailing. Here, there is no US veto to deprive
us of protection and our rights, nor is there censorship or blackmail
to intimidate governments ruled by self-interest.
Let this meeting radiate the pure light of the human spirit that
can never be dimmed or contained. Our path to the future must
be based on the redemption of history and the past, free of the
shackles of inherited inequities. Our legacy to the future must
be based on the rectification of the painful legacies of the past.
Sisters and brothers, Never before has an occupation army imposed
such a total and suffocating siege on a captive civilian population,
then proceeded to shell their homes, bomb their infrastructure,
assassinate their activists and leaders, destroy their crops and
trees, murder their civilians at will, steal their lands, and
then demand that they acquiesce like lambs to the slaughter. Never
before have the victims been denied the right to articulate, and
gain recognition for, the horrendous atrocities being committed
against them as a matter of policy, but were rather blamed and
punished for the fact of their victimization.
On behalf of the Palestinian people I appeal to you to have the
courage to intervene, to ensure that the oppressor is held accountable
and the victim is protected [...] |
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Analysis by Neil Lazarus with Gila Ansell Brauner,
© The Pedagogic Center,
The Department for Jewish Zionist Education,
The Jewish Agency for Israel,
Jerusalem - 2001
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