“Progressive forces need to push for the inalienable right of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, which has been systematically denied since the British mandate.”
South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, has said “it has never been so urgent for progressive forces around the world to come together in a collective effort to exert maximum pressure to end the genocidal campaign underway in Gaza and to end the apartheid system of Israel in the occupied territories.”
Minister Pandor delivered the keynote address at Friday’s opening of the Global Anti-Apartheid Conference for Palestine in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“Progressive forces need to push for the inalienable right of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, which has been systematically denied since the British mandate,” she said.
“They must also push for the right of refugees in the diaspora to return to their homeland,” stressed Pandor.
We’re at the Global Anti Apartheid Conference on Palestine in South Africa
She described the conference as “a watershed moment” as it is “the beginning of the global anti-apartheid movement on Palestine with all of us from around the globe coming together and joining forces in the struggle for justice for the Palestinian people.”
The three-day conference aims to set the basis for the mobilisation of a Global Anti-Apartheid Movement “to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people, and to work to dismantle Israeli apartheid,” according to the conference organizers.
Pandor said the “ongoing genocidal atrocities” being committed by Israel “have put renewed focus on the urgent need for wider international community demand for decolonization.”
Call to ICC
She also called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to expedite its investigation into the situation in occupied Palestine, saying the Court “must prioritize the case against Israel.”
“There can never be peace if the Palestinian people are not free …We should be ashamed that 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza,” the minister said.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 34,904 Palestinians have been killed, and 78,514 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.
Pandor said she was sure that when Israel planned its response to the October resistance operation, “it did not realize that its impunity and cruelty towards Palestinians will finally be naked to the world.”
She stressed that South Africa’s “association with the people of Palestine did not begin on the 8th of October 2023.”
The minister emphasized: “We continue to do so following in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela and will not rest until the freedom of the peoples of Palestine is realized.”
— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) May 10, 2024
Symbolic Gesture of Kuffiyeh
In a symbolic gesture, Reverend Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem placed a kuffiyeh around the shoulders of Minister Pandor.
“There is symbolism in what I’m going to do, to take the keffiyeh from the shoulder of a Palestinian and place it on the shoulder of a South African leader, and acknowledge that today you carry our cross as Palestinians with us upon their shoulders,” explained the reverend.
Various other speakers addressed the conference on the first day including Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian Legislative Council; Reverend Frank Chikane, moderator of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs for the World Council of Churches; Declan Kearney, chairperson of Sinn Fein; and Ronnie Kasrils, former South African Minister of Intelligence.
The conference is being attended by delegations from across the globe, representing civil societies, religious institutions and Palestinian solidarity movements. Various workshops aimed at developing strategies for action are lined up for Day 2.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth.’ Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The distance between Gaza and Namibia is measured in the thousands of kilometers. But the historical distance is much closer. This is precisely why Namibia was one of the first countries to take a strong stance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Namibia was colonized by the Germans in 1884, while the British colonized Palestine in the 1920s, handing the territory to the Zionist colonizers in 1948.
Though the ethnic and religious fabric of Palestine and Namibia differ, the historical experiences are similar.
It is easy, however, to assume that the history that unifies many countries in the Global South is only that of Western exploitation and victimization. It is also a history of collective struggle and resistance.
Namibia has been inhabited since prehistoric times. This long-rooted history has allowed Namibians, over thousands of years, to establish a sense of belonging to the land and to one another, something that the Germans did not understand or appreciate.
When the Germans colonized Namibia, giving it the name of ‘German Southwest Africa,’’ they did what all other Western colonialists have done, from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria, to virtually all Global South countries. They attempted to divide the people, exploited their resources and butchered those who resisted.
Although a country with a small population, Namibians resisted their colonizers, resulting in the German decision to simply exterminate the natives, literally killing the majority of the population.
Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Namibia answered the call of solidarity with the Palestinians, along with many African and South American countries, including Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, South Africa, Brazil, China and many others.
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most… pic.twitter.com/ZxwWxLv8yt
Though intersectionality is a much-celebrated notion in Western academia, no academic theory is needed for oppressed, colonized nations in the Global South to exhibit solidarity with one another.
So when Namibia took a strong stance against Israel’s largest military supporter in Europe – Germany – it did so based on Namibia’s total awareness of its history.
The German genocide of the Nama and Herero people (1904-1907) is known as the “first genocide of the 20th century”. The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza is the first genocide of the 21st century. The unity between Palestine and Namibia is now cemented through mutual suffering.
However, Namibia did not launch a legal case against Germany at the International Court of Justice (ICJ); it was Nicaragua, a Central American country thousands of miles away from Palestine and Namibia.
The Nicaraguan case accuses Germany of violating the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.’ It rightly sees Germany as a partner in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.
This accusation alone should terrify the German people, in fact, the whole world, as Germany has been affiliated with genocides from its early days as a colonial power. The horrific crime of the Holocaust and other mass killings carried out by the German government against Jews and other minority groups in Europe during WWII is a continuation of other German crimes committed against Africans decades earlier.
The typical analysis of why Germany continues to support Israel is explained based on German guilt over the Holocaust. This explanation, however, is partly illogical and partly erroneous.
It is illogical because if Germany has, indeed, internalized any guilt from its previous mass killings, it would make no sense for Berlin to add yet more guilt by allowing Palestinians to be butchered en masse. If guilt indeed exists, it is not genuine. It is erroneous because it completely overlooks the German genocide in Namibia. It took the German government until 2021 to acknowledge the horrific butchery in that poor African country, ultimately agreeing to pay merely one billion euros in ‘community aid,’ which will be allocated over three decades.
The German government’s support of the Israeli war on Gaza is not motivated by guilt but by a power paradigm that governs the relations among colonial countries. Many countries in the Global South understand this logic very well, thus the growing solidarity with Palestine.
A photo titled “Captured Hereros,” taken circa 1904 by German colonists in Namibia. Photo | German Historical Museum
The Israeli brutality in Gaza, but also the Palestinian sumud, resilience and resistance, are inspiring the Global South to reclaim its centrality in anti-colonial liberation struggles.
The revolution in the Global South’s outlook—culminating in South Africa’s case at the ICJ and the Nicaraguan lawsuit against Germany—indicates that change is not the outcome of a collective emotional reaction. Instead, it is part and parcel of the shifting relationship between the Global South and the Global North.
Africa has been undergoing a process of geopolitical restructuring for years. The anti-French rebellions in West Africa, demanding true independence from the continent’s former colonial masters, and the intense geopolitical competition involving Russia, China and others are all signs of changing times. And with this rapid rearrangement, a new political discourse and popular rhetoric are emerging, often expressed in the revolutionary language emanating from Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and others.
But the shift is not happening only on the rhetorical front. The rise of BRICS as a powerful new platform for economic integration between Asia and the rest of the Global South has opened up the possibility of alternatives to Western financial and political institutions.
In 2023, it was revealed that BRICS countries hold 32 percent of the world’s total GDP, compared to 30 percent held by the G7 countries. This has much political value, as four of the five original founders of BRICS are strong and unapologetic supporters of the Palestinians.
While South Africa has been championing the legal front against Israel, Russia and China are battling the US at the UN Security Council to institute a ceasefire. Beijing’s Ambassador to The Hague defended the Palestinian armed struggle as legitimate under international law.
Now that global dynamics are working in favor of Palestinians, it is time for the Palestinian struggle to return to the embrace of the Global South, where shared histories will always serve as a foundation for meaningful solidarity.
Feature photo | Hon. Yvonne Dausab, Minister of Justice of Namibia, joined representatives of over 50 nations in presenting testimony to the International Court of Justice on the legality of the Israeli occupation. Photo | International Court of Justice
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Even though this article is the writing of an anonymous author, it is so well detailed and supported by historic facts which Zionist-controlled historians and media have erased from public knowledge, that it should be made known to the world populations at large.
For starters, it may be telling to illustrate the characters of Palestine and Israel, by presenting the lyrics and songs of two contrasting school choirs, the one from The Ramallah Friends School Choir, hailing Peace and Harmony – see first video below; contrasted by “Annihilate Everyone”, Israeli’s Children’s Choir’s “Friendship Song”, promoting outright genocide in Gaza; see second video below.
In essence, the terror to eliminate Palestinians from their own territory started way before the creation of Israel, a colonialist idea by the Brits. This summarizes what Wikipedia has to say:
“The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and soon to be first Prime Minister of Israel. It declared the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, which would come into effect on termination of the British Mandate at midnight that day.”
The establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had been the goal of Zionists since the lates 19th Century. In 1917 British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote to British Jewish community leader, Lord Rothschild, that:
“His Majesty’s government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
This letter became known as the Balfour Decaration, upon which British government policy officially endorsed Zionism. After WWI, the UK was given the mandate for Palestine, conquered from the Ottomans during WWI.
This colonial spirit prevalent to this day, instead of conferring independence to Palestine after freeing it from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, is largely responsible for the mess and political instability in the Middle East, notably the apparent everlasting conflict between Israel and Palestine, now always fueled by Zionist Israel.
According to the Balfour Declaration, a Jewish national home was to be established in Palestine while civil and religious rights – but not political and national rights – of non-Jewish Palestinian communities may prevail.
Palestinians wanting their political rights and autonomy as a sovereign state, resented continued Jewish immigration into Palestine. They disapproved of the British mandate and by 1936 their dissatisfaction had grown into open rebellion.
The so-called Peel Commission, named after its head Lord Robert Peel, was established by the UK in 1936 to study the conflict situation. The Commission’s report of July 1937 admitted the mandate was unworkable because Jewish and Palestinian objectives were incompatible.
The Commission proposed the partitioning of Palestine into three zones, an Arab-Palestine state, a Jewish state, and a neutral territory containing the holy places like Jerusalem. This was the equivalent of a two-state solution.
The Peel Commission’s recommendation was eventually rejected by the British Government as “unworkable”.
The reason for the rejection was most likely the interpretation and possibly pressure by the Jewish-Zionist leader Lord Rothschild that the establishment of Israel in Palestine would give Zionist Israel unlimited rights over what he, Lord Rothschild, considered henceforth their land.
The British rejection of the Peel Commission’s “reasonable” two-state solution gave rise to the 1936 – 1939 Palestine revolt.
Nevertheless, the partition of Palestine – 57% to 43% for Israel and Palestine respectively, rejected by Palestine, was presented to the newly established United Nations as Resolution 181 – and largely approved by 33 to 13 in favor and 10 abstentions.
This background is necessary to understand the Holocaust-like long-term cruelties by Israel over Palestine; the Zionists devastating atrocities in the years before Israel was officially established. This report bears testimony to Zionist-Israeli oppression for almost 100 years.
The Zionist terror attacks, largely silenced by the media, were to intimidate and weaken Palestine, before the creation of Israel in 1948 – an Israel which way before she officially existed, had already plans for Greater Zionist-Israel for the “Chosen People”.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
The Palestinian people have the right, given 75 years of massacres, ethnic cleansing, land theft, torture, and abuse, to fight their occupier through any means necessary.
Palestinians should enjoy the same rights and standards as the rest of humanity. This statement seems self-evident, but many who would proclaim to believe in just that, in reality, do not actually support this notion. The Palestinian people refuse to remain as victims, and the only way for them to achieve justice is through armed struggle.
In the West, the Hamas-led operation of October 7 has been presented as an act of unjustified terroristic violence, one that happened in a complete vacuum. The shock of what occurred had even put many well-meaning people who have campaigned for Palestinian rights into a trance, one where they allow the event to be analyzed as a stand-alone atrocity and something to be condemned. Others have scrambled to condemn the Palestinian Resistance for its actions on that day, while concocting a narrative to try and work to maintain the popular idea of Palestinians, that they are the eternal victim, one that should always be treated as a victim and remain as such. This idea, while it may come from well-intentioned people in the West, is inherently racist, patronizing, and fits into a Western-savior complex.
The Palestinian people have the right, given 75 years of massacres, ethnic cleansing, land theft, torture, and abuse, to fight their occupier through any means necessary. Although an argument can be made to justify this notion, using international law, I will argue this through common sense and an appeal to the humanity of all people.
Throughout history, oppressed groups, whether suffering under settler colonialism, systems of enslavement, apartheid, or colonial domination, have used armed struggle as a strategy to free themselves and restore their human dignity. Often, after failing to make an impact with non-violent strategies, such as boycotts, general strikes, and appeals to the goodwill of their oppressors, violence becomes the natural tool of the oppressed.
Western media pundits pose the question of a need for a Palestinian Nelson Mandela. Although this question is often asked in bad faith, it is a great place to begin explaining the predicament of Palestine. Just like in South Africa, Palestine is under a system of apartheid, a form of injustice that the African National Congress (ANC) fought against using various forms of struggle, including armed resistance. Nelson Mandela, who is widely praised across the Western world today, was considered for some time a “terrorist” in most Western capitals. Why was Mandela considered as such? Because the ANC, of which he was an active member, used armed struggle and killed South African Whites who were indeed unarmed. In fact, when Mandela was arrested by the apartheid authorities, he had just arrived back in his homeland after traveling to receive military training.
Despite it being a somewhat hidden event, the Haitian revolution, which led to the abolishment of slavery on the island nation, was not free of violence and indiscriminate killings. In fact, when the French deposed and arrested the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture in 1802, the revolutionary stated the following, “In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep.” Less than two years later, Jean-Jacques Dessalines had taken over the revolution and signed a decree for all whites to be put to death; this was only months after Dessalines had declared Haiti an independent nation on January 1, 1804. Although there were moments when peace prevailed and the Haitian people, who had revolted violently to end slavery, spared the lives of non-combatant whites, there were also times of great bloodshed.
In the case of the Algerian struggle for independence, it is also true that the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) used violent tactics that directly targeted the European settlers, who were known as the Pieds-noirs. Thousands of settlers were killed in a variety of attacks, leading to around 1 million of these Europeans fleeing the country, following the war of independence. Although tactics like shooting at settlers in their privileged communities and planting bombs in packed areas are objectively unpleasant, they were not committed without reason and in a vacuum.
The immense suffering of the Algerian people had pushed them toward the only options that were available to free themselves of French occupation.
Violent Resistance in Palestine
To go through the entire historical record at this point would be too steep of a task for a singular article, however, we need to understand the historical legitimacy of the armed struggle against the Zionist entity.
Dating back to the days of the British Mandate in Palestine, the only times that the Palestinian people were able to sway the UK toward granting them any favorable solutions was through violent uprisings. The British Mandate authority encouraged Jewish settler immigration from Europe, and the leadership in London was clearly committed to upholding the promise that was issued, through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to create a so-called “Jewish State” on the land of Palestine. It was therefore necessary for the Palestinians to organize, educate, and push for strike action that would pressure the Mandate authorities into adopting a more favorable position to their plight. In the end, the violent uprising of 1929, and later the Arab Revolt of 1936-9, proved enough for the British to cede ground on their previously held solutions for the Zionist-Palestinian struggle.
Despite the British having inflicted a brutal defeat against the Palestinian Resistance by the end of the Arab Revolt, the White Paper of 1939 was issued, a document that pledged to limit the number of Jewish settlers to Palestine, along with reneging on the idea of partitioning the land or creating an exclusively “Jewish State” in all of Palestine. This document is what inspired Zionist terrorists to begin committing attacks against civilian targets affiliated with the UK, which again swayed Britain’s stance on the future of Palestine.
After 78% of historic Palestine was occupied and what was left of the Arab Resistance was defeated in 1948, the Palestinian cause was in a state of disarray, before it was re-ignited through the Battle of Karameh in 1968. This battle was technically a military defeat for both the Palestinian resistance parties – most prominently Fatah – and the Jordanian army that had joined the fight, yet it inflicted damage on the Israelis in a way that no one could have believed would be possible. Throughout history, the Palestinian Resistance, whether it be the Arab Nationalist Movement, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), or others, has all been labeled “terrorist” by the Israelis and their Western backers. The above-mentioned groups are all secular nationalist, or Marxist groups, while the Palestinian Islamic resistance groups didn’t become a major factor until the 1990s.
When Egypt gained back the Sinai Peninsula from the Israeli entity, it only did so following the October War of 1973. When South Lebanon was liberated from Zionist occupation in 2000, this was because of the Lebanese Resistance’s decades-long armed struggle. Even when the Gaza disengagement occurred in 2005, this was because the Palestinian Resistance was relentless in its attacks on soldiers and settlers, making the Zionist entity fed up. The Israeli entity has never given back land out of the good of their hearts, never made an agreement that hasn’t been driven by violence, and always worked in their best interests to manage that violence. There is no reasoning for this racist settler-colonial apartheid entity.
The people of Gaza rose non-violently in 2018-19 in what was known as the Great March of Return, where hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians protested for their rights under international law; their right to return and to the end of the illegal siege. The answer from the Israeli army was to slaughter 310 innocent people, while the Western leadership claimed that the Zionists were “defending themselves”.
On the question of violence: Everyone is a supporter of violence, even the most devout preacher of non-violence and pacifism will make exceptions. If you disagree, imagine the following scenario: An Al-Qaeda suicide bomber is preparing to detonate himself in a packed crowd of innocent civilians. There is a police officer with a gun who can shoot the would-be attacker in the head and save hundreds of lives, is the officer justified in using a firearm?
Another thought experiment is this: If you see a man beating a woman profusely, is it justified to hit him in response? And if the woman who is being battered fights back and severely hurts her attacker, is she without justification?
The above-noted questions will demonstrate that the majority of people do support some form of violence but only in limited and defensive manners. When we observe the plight of the Palestinians, why is it that they overwhelmingly support armed struggle against their occupier? Is it because they are savages who love blood and violence, or is it because they see armed struggle as a legitimate form of self-defense and a tool with which they can restore their dignity and attain freedom? Any fair-minded person who takes the time to study the struggle would conclude the latter.
Palestinians should not be obligated to sit down and take their suffering so that they can be viewed as victims. This may make some Westerners more comfortable with supporting their plight but will ultimately lead to their complete elimination as a people. The Zionist entity is predicated on Jewish supremacy and creating a “state” that only serves Jews, meaning that the ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of Palestinians is an inevitable by-product of their ideology as a regime. Unless you are a Palestinian that is suffering under the Apartheid regime, you are not in the position to lecture them on how they fight back against their oppressor. Like all oppressed peoples, the Palestinians will use all means necessary to achieve the right to live in dignity and to be free. You are not obligated to agree with every tactic, but there is no moral equivalence that can be drawn between the reactionary violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
The Palestinian Nakba began exactly 105 years ago with the release of a letter from then-British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to the leader of the Zionist movement in what became infamously called the Balfour Declaration.
The project to establish the Zionist entity was and still is based on a long-term joint program between the Zionist movement and some colonial powers, primarily Britain and the US
As someone who grew up and was raised in the city of Yafa after the occupation of eastern Palestine in the 1967 war – known as the Naksa – in the house of his late grandfather and under the auspices of a great educational figure such as my grandmother, known as Madame Khoury, who’s slogan “I’d rather die in my house in Yafa than become a refugee” became a mantra that engraved in our minds the effect of attachment to the land… and as someone who listened and read the successive enthusiastic political articles of his father, the political writer Naim Youssef Machool, about the Nakba, the land, agriculture and steadfastness, as well as the articles, plays, interviews, and lectures of his mother, writer and novelist Antoinette Adeeb El-Khoury, I thought that based on this extensive personal experience, I should support and base my claim, listed below, on journalistic observations from the 80s and 90s in Palestine in particular and on two decades of academic research on the Palestinian issue in Britain in particular, and present a contribution to an expanded project whose main idea I will briefly list below.
We say that it is widely accepted that the Nakba of the Palestinians took place chronologically under the British mandate between the partition plan and Resolution of 29/11/1947 and the 1949 armistice with Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, although there was no agreement within the framework of an armistice or the like with the Palestinian people; whether those who were expelled from it or those who remained in their homeland.
Accordingly, the struggle involving the Palestinian people remains open: Zionist domination of Palestine and Palestinian resistance against the occupation.
This article, part of which was presented at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 2011 and the Bandung Conference in 2015 and 2022, argues that although the most catastrophic period of the Palestinian Nakba (lit. catastrophe) reached its peak between 1947 and 1949, the Nakba was neither the beginning nor the end of the Palestinian people’s catastrophe.
This article claims that the Nakba of the Palestinian people began exactly 105 years ago with the release of a letter from then-British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to the leader of the Rothschild Zionist movement in what became infamously known as the Balfour Declaration issued on 2/11/1917, which followed the occupation of Palestine by Britain that was involved in WWI, especially the occupation of Al-Quds by General Allenby in December 1917.
It also argues that the Nakba includes everything that has happened since then until now, but certainly, this catastrophe reached its peak between 1947 and 1949 – which witnessed the forced expulsion of half of the Palestinian people from their homeland and the destruction of the majority of Palestine’s cultural, commercial, and social structure – and is continuing deliberately according to a plan that has not stopped until achieving liberation and independence.
Apart from emotional slogans, the project to establish the Zionist entity was and still is based on a long-term joint program between the Zionist movement and some colonial powers, primarily Britain and the US. In addition, this article claims and warns that an attempt to implement a new chapter of the Nakba of the Palestinian people is very possible, including the expulsion of additional Palestinians from West and East Palestine because the goal is to seize Palestine as a whole and the Palestinian people are seen as an obstacle that must be eliminated to achieve this goal.
Since the peak of the Nakba between 1947 and 1949, Palestinians, whom I defined as the survivors of the Nakba – meaning those who were able to remain in their homeland and who were intended to be loggers and waterers, as per the Israeli occupation administration, for the ruling Zionist class and its Jewish Arab servants who were brought in from the Arab countries to colonize Palestine – consisted a “security problem” not only in Al-Jaleel, the Triangle Area, and Al-Naqab, but also in the Palestinian coastal cities, such as Akka in the north and Yafa in the south.
When late historian Dr. Constantin Zureik published the book The Meaning of the Nakba in 1948, a few months after the catastrophe and the peak of the Nakba, his description of the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people was accurate – due to what he witnessed personally and through his professional academic tools – being coupled with a resounding catastrophic psychological trauma.
However, examining what has happened to the Palestinian people, during the past 105 years, requires a new definition or at least an updated definition of the Nakba that has prevailed so far. What happened since 1917 onward shows the numerous and ongoing chapters of the Nakba of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration till now, including the decision to partition Palestine in 1947 and the occupation of the second part of Palestine in 1967, the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, the Oslo Accords and their offshoots between 1993 and 1994 and the second Palestinian Intifada that began in Al-Quds in 2000, as well as the killing of the first official Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2004, the repeated wars on the Gaza Strip, and the ongoing aggression against the occupied West Bank and Al-Quds, in addition to a set of racist laws against the Palestinian people in western Palestine, specifically the so-called “National Law” of 2018, the continuous killing of the Palestinian people in occupied East Palestine and the arrest of more than a million Palestinian since the Naksa, including women, children and elderly, the expanding settlement that hasn’t stopped and the confiscation of lands, the so-called “Deal of the Century” and Netanyahu and Trump’s annexation scheme, which I called in a previous article the “third armed robbery,” and the economic and “military” occupation siege on the Gaza Strip by air, sea and land,
On December 16, 2016, exactly on the 99th anniversary of the issuance of the Balfour Letter, we launched the Palestine Initiative 100 to re-engage with the beginning of this catastrophe. We were determined to renew encouragement to open the Balfour file since the beginning of the Palestinian people’s Nakba in 1917 and held a publicity evening in London, the capital of the British Empire that issued the Balfour Letter to the Zionist movement. As part of holding Britain to its historical, legal, and moral responsibilities, we demanded three types of steps: apology, compensation, and correction. We believe that canceling any of these steps would be naive, incomplete, or deceptive.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
As soon as I left prison, I went to Nael’s grave. It is adorned with the colors of the Palestinian flag and verses from the Holy Quran. I told my little brother how much I loved and appreciated him, and that, one day, we would meet again in paradise.
The above is part of a testimony given to me by a former Palestinian prisoner, Jalal Lutfi Saqr. It was published two years ago in the volume ‘These Chains Will Be Broken’.
As a Palestinian, born and raised in a refugee camp in Gaza, I was always familiar with the political discourse of, and concerning, political prisoners. My neighborhood, like every neighborhood in Gaza, is populated with a large number of former prisoners, or families whose members have experienced imprisonment in the past or present.
However, starting in 2016, my relationship with the subject took on, for the lack of a better term, a more ‘academic’ approach. Since then, and up to now, I have interviewed scores of former prisoners and members of their families. Some were imprisoned by Israel, others by the Palestinian Authority. I even spoke to prisoners who experienced the brutality of Middle Eastern prisons, from Iraq, to Syria, to Egypt and Lebanon. A few particularly unlucky ones have endured multiple prison experiences and were tortured by men speaking different languages.
Some prisoners, now quite old, were imprisoned by the British army, which colonized Palestine between 1920 and 1948. They were held according to the 1945 so-called Defense (Emergency) Regulations, an arbitrary legal code that allowed the British to hold as many rebelling Palestinian Arabs without having to provide a cause or engage in due process.
This system remains in effect to this day, as it was adopted by Israel following the end of the British Mandate. Following minor amendments in 1979, and the renaming of the law into the “Israeli Law on Authority in States of Emergency”, this is essentially today’s so-called ‘Administrative Detention’. It allows Israel to incarcerate Palestinians, practically indefinitely, based on ‘secret evidence’ that is not revealed, even to the defense attorney.
These ‘emergency’ laws remain in place, simply because Palestinians never ceased resisting. Thousands of Palestinians were held without evidence or trial during the First Palestinian Intifada, the uprising of 1987. Most of them were kept in horrific living conditions, in tent cities in the Naqab Desert.
According to the Palestinian Commission on Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, around one million Palestinians were imprisoned between 1967 and 2021. Currently, hundreds of Palestinian ‘administrative detainees’ are held in Israeli prisons, an act that violates international law on various counts – holding prisoners without trial or due process, and transferring prisoners to enemy territories, the latter being a stark violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
Of course, respecting international law has never been Israel’s strongest suit. In fact, Israel continues to deliberately ignore international law in numerous aspects of its illegal military occupation of Palestine, rationalizing such actions on ‘security’ grounds.
Palestinians are also doing what they do best, resist, under the harshest circumstances and by every means available to them. Tellingly, the strongest of such resistance takes place inside prison walls, by gaunt looking, and often dying hunger strikers.
Khalil Awawdeh, a 40-year-old Palestinian from a village near Al-Khalil (Hebron) is the latest prisoner hunger striker to make history, by simply refraining from eating for 180 days. His weight has dropped to 38 kilograms, after losing over 40 kilograms while on hunger strike. The images of his half-naked, skeletal body have been deemed ‘graphic’ and ‘offensive’ to some social media users, and were removed as soon as they were shared. At the end, he could only whisper a few words. Though barely audible, they were filled with courage.
Khalil Awawdeh in bed at Asaf Harofeh Hospital in Be’er Ya’akov, Israel, Aug. 24, 2022. Mahmoud Illean | AP
On August 31, Awawdeh ended his hunger strike, after reaching a deal with the Israeli prison administration to release him on October 2. His first words after that agreement were hardly those of a dying man, but of a triumphant leader: “This resounding victory extends the series of great victories achieved by the mighty and honorable people of this nation.”
These words, however, were not unique. They carried the same sentiment communicated to me by every single freed prisoner I have interviewed in recent years. None have any regrets, even those who spent most of their lives in dark cells and in shackles; even those who lost loved ones; even those who left prison with chronic diseases, to die soon after their release. Their message is always that of defiance, of courage, and of hope.
Awawdeh is neither the first, nor the last prisoner to undergo these life-threatening hunger strikes. The strategy may be explained, and understandably so, as the last resort or as acts of desperation by individuals who are left without alternatives. But for Palestinians, these are acts of resistance that demonstrate the power of the Palestinian people: even in prison, handcuffed to a hospital bed, denied every basic human right, a Palestinian can fight, and win. Awawdeh did.
When Jalal Lutfi Saqr learned that his brother Nael was killed by the Israeli army in Gaza, he was a prisoner in Israel. He told me that the first thing he did when he learned of his brother’s death was kneeling down and praying. The following day, Jalal spoke to the mourners in his Gaza refugee camp using a smuggled cell phone by telling them, “Ours is a long and painful march for freedom.
“Some of us are in prison; others are underground, but we will never cease our fight for our people. We must remain committed to the legacy of our forefathers and our martyrs. We are all brothers, in blood, in the struggle and in faith, so let’s remain united as one people, as brothers and sisters, and carry on, despite the heavy losses and tremendous sacrifices.”
Jalal’s call on his people was made twenty years ago. It remains as relevant today, as it was then.
What took place between May 2021 and May 2022 is nothing less than a paradigm shift in Palestinian resistance. Thanks to the popular and inclusive nature of Palestinian mobilization against the Israeli occupation, resistance in Palestine is no longer an ideological, political or regional preference.
In the period between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and only a few years ago, Palestinian muqawama – or resistance – was constantly put in the dock, often criticized and condemned, as if an oppressed nation had a moral responsibility in selecting the type of resistance to suit the needs and interests of its oppressors.
As such, Palestinian resistance became a political and ideological litmus test. The Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas, called for ‘popular resistance’, but it seems that it neither understood what the strategy actually meant, and certainly was not prepared to act upon such a call.
Palestinian armed resistance was removed entirely from its own historical context; in fact, the context of all liberation movements throughout history, and was turned into a straw man, set up by Israel and its western allies to condemn Palestinian ‘terrorism’ and to present Israel as a victim facing an existential threat.
With the lack of a centralized Palestinian definition of resistance, even pro-Palestine civil society groups and organizations demarcated their relationship to the Palestinian struggle based on embracing certain forms of Palestinian resistance and condemning others.
The argument that only oppressed nations should have the right to choose the type of resistance that could speed up their salvation and freedom fell on deaf ears.
The truth is that Palestinian resistance preceded the official establishment of Israel in 1948. Palestinians and Arabs who resisted British and Zionist colonialism used many methods of resistance that they perceived to be strategic and sustainable. There was no relationship whatsoever between the type of resistance and the religious, political or ideological identity of those who resisted.
This paradigm prevailed for many years, starting with the Fidayeen Movement following the Nakba, the popular resistance to the brief Israeli occupation of Gaza in 1956, and the decades-long occupation and siege starting in 1967. The same reality was expressed in Palestinian resistance in historic Palestine throughout the decades; armed resistance ebbed and flowed, but popular resistance remained intact. The two phenomena were always intrinsically linked, as the former was also sustained by the latter.
The Fatah Movement, which dominates today’s Palestinian Authority, was formed in 1959 to model liberation movements in Vietnam and Algeria. Regarding its connection to the Algerian struggle, the Fatah manifesto read: “The guerrilla war in Algeria, launched five years before the creation of Fatah, has a profound influence on us. […] They symbolize the success we dreamed of.”
This sentiment was championed by most modern Palestinian movements as it proved to be a successful strategy for most southern liberation movements. In the case of Vietnam, the resistance to US occupation carried out even during political talks in Paris. The underground resistance in South Africa remained vigilant until it became clear that the country’s apartheid regime was in the process of being dismantled.
Palestinian disunity, however, which was a direct result of the Oslo Accords, made a unified Palestinian position on resistance untenable. The very idea of resistance itself became subject to the political whims and interests of factions. When, in July 2013, PA President Abbas condemned armed resistance, he was trying to score political points with his western supporters, and further sow the seeds of division among his people.
The truth is that Hamas neither invented nor has ownership of, armed resistance. In June 2021, a poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), revealed that 60% of Palestinians support “a return to armed confrontations and Intifada.” By stating so, Palestinians were not necessarily declaring allegiance to Hamas. Armed resistance, though in a different style and capacity also exists in the West Bank, and is largely championed by Fatah’s own Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The recent Israeli attacks on the town of Jenin, in the northern West Bank, were not aimed at eliminating Hamas, Islamic Jihad or socialist fighters, but Fatah’s own.
Skewed media coverage and misrepresentation of the resistance, often by Palestinian factions themselves, turned the very idea of resistance into a political and factional scuffle, forcing everyone involved to take a position on the issue. The discourse on the resistance, however, began changing in the last year.
The May 2021 rebellion and the Israeli war on Gaza – known among Palestinians as the Unity Intifada – served as a paradigm shift. The language became unified; self-serving political references quickly dissipated; collective frames of reference began replacing provisional, regional and factional ones; occupied Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque emerged as the unifying symbols of resistance; a new generation began to emerge and quickly began to develop new platforms.
On May 29, the Israeli government insisted on allowing the so-called ‘Flag March’ – a mass rally by Israeli Jewish extremists that celebrate the capture of the Palestinian city of al-Quds – to once more pass through Palestinian neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem. This was the very occasion that instigated the violence of the previous year. Aware of the impending violence which often results from such provocations, Israel wanted to impose the timing and determine the nature of the violence. It failed. Gaza didn’t fire rockets. Instead, tens of thousands of Palestinians mobilized throughout occupied Palestine, thus allowing popular mobilization and coordination between numerous communities to grow. Palestinians proved able to coordinate their responsibility, despite the numerous obstacles, hardships and logistical difficulties.
The events of the last year are a testament that Palestinians are finally freeing their resistance from factional interests. The most recent confrontations show that Palestinians are even harnessing resistance as a strategic objective. Muqawama in Palestine is no longer ‘symbolic’ or supposedly ‘random’ violence that reflects ‘desperation’ and lack of political horizon. It is becoming more defined, mature and well-coordinated.
This phenomenon must be extremely worrying to Israel, as the coming months and years could prove critical in changing the nature of the confrontation between Palestinians and their occupiers. Considering that the new resistance is centered around homegrown, grassroots, community-oriented movements, it has far greater chances of success than previous attempts. It is much easier for Israel to assassinate a fighter than to uproot the values of resistance from the heart of a community.
What do these four separate events have in common?
The Nakba, administrative detention, Jenin and Shireen Abu Akleh
The Nakba as many people are already aware refers to the mass expulsion of ethnic Palestinians from their homes towns and villages in 1948.
Over 750 000 old men, young women mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, fled for their lives, under the threat of annihilation and ethnic genocide from the forces of the newly created “Israel”.
“Israel” was born into the bloodied hands of Zionist terrorism, the Irgun, Stern gangs, and Haganah.
Terrorist groups murdered, maimed mutilated, and raped Palestinians as part of their campaign to create the colonial regime of “Israel” in the land depleted of its indigenous population.
Europeans who were not born in Palestine carried out a wave of ethnic cleansing and a campaign of murder to replace the indigenous population with a nonindigenous invasion of European Jewish and Zionist colonial carpet baggers, who stole farms, occupied homes and robbed the national wealth and resources of Palestine for their own selfish gain.
They not only stole the land, but they stole the lives, the future, the dreams and the aspirations of a nation and its people, forcing 8 million Palestinians to live in exile, many still surviving in refugee camps, and two open-air defacto prison camps, incarcerating the remaining Palestinians living under illegal military occupation.
The ‘Nakba’ is the name given to the Catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948.
That ongoing catastrophe continues today as illegal Israeli settlements are built on land stolen by the apartheid regime in the occupied territories.
The theft of homes in Al-Khalil and Sheik Jarrah, combined with the recent Israeli Court decision to expel 1000 Palestinians from their homes in order to plant trees on top of their land, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ethnic cleansing house by house, dunum by dunum, continue apace and is indeed Israeli state policy
The remodeling of Palestine into “Israel” continues.
Add to this the cultural appropriation of Palestinian culture and food, and we have nearly the complete expropriation of most things that are Palestinian into a hybrid “Israel” society.
Even the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem) is under constant assault by Israeli occupation forces and illegal settlers, who wish to take and ultimately destroy the mosque, the third most holy site in Islam, in order to build the fabled Temple Mount on the site, of which “Israel” archaeologists have found no historical evidence.
All this violence, death, destruction, and regional conflict were delivered by the US, Britain, and the UN.
They gave away 52% of Palestine on the 14th of May, 1948.
They gave it to the armed militant Zionist gangs who were designated as terrorists at that time.
“Israel” was built on terrorism and continues to exist through its use of terrorism, illegal occupation, siege, bombings, warships, F16 aircraft, attack helicopters, nuclear submarines, extrajudicial murders, spies, and collaborators.
Palestinians have paid the ultimate price for European antisemitism from 19th-century Czarist Russia to Hitler’s 20th-century Germany.
Palestinian are paying the price for crimes they did not commit.
The riots in Al-Quds in 1926 prove Zionist intentions to colonize Palestine long before the second world war.
The primary resistance to this military occupation of Palestinian homes, towns, lands, and villages by Zionists was the use of armed resistance.
Although Palestine had no army, navy, or airforce, with most of the civilian population having been disarmed by the British occupation prior to partition, the people tried valiantly to defend themselves.
As part of the occupation’s oppressive control of Palestinians today, the use of administrative detention, also known as internment without trial, used by the British during the British Mandate laws, has no legal basis in international law.
It is used to disrupt peaceful opposition to the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation as a blunt tool of repression.
No charges are brought against the plaintiff.
Secret evidence may be produced for the non-jury, trial judge to peruse.
This secret evidence, if it even exists, is not made available to the defense, and universally the victim of this miscarriage of justice is carted off to jail for periods of 6 months at a time.
This can be extended at the whim of the court upon expiry.
Some Palestinians have served concurrent periods of administrative detention leading to between 10 and 15 years of incarceration.
No formal charges are presented, no trial by jury, no evidence provided in open court to be challenged by the defense, just a nod and a wink between the state enforcement branch of government and the state judiciary branch of government, and you’re locked up.
A whole society and government based on the continued exploitation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in order to allow Zionists to steal their homes and their land.
This is all carried out under the protection of the IOF.
Palestinians are subject to military law and military courts while illegal Israeli settlers are subject to civil law and civil courts.
Administrative detention, controlled movement, extrajudicial murder, house demolitions, live bullets rubber bullets, batons, tear gas, bombs, and missiles are the order of the day in the arsenal of the repressive apartheid regime to be used as necessary against the Palestinian people.
While the UN passed resolution 194 allowing Palestinians who fled the ethnic cleansing of 1948 to return to Palestine, “Israel” consistently refuses to comply.
Any Jew not born in Palestine can immigrate there from Russia, America, France, Ukraine, Britain, or indeed from any part of the globe and be given land or homes that have been stolen from the indigenous people?
Palestinians have the right under international law to resist the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by ‘ Any Means Necessary’ this includes the right to armed self-defense.
Jenin is one of the many refugee camps that are to be found in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and indeed all over West Asia.
Many of its inhabitants are refugees from the expulsions of 1948 and again in 1967 when the Israeli militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza.
A refugee camp filled with the nightmares of occupation and the dreams of returning to their homes and land.
A place where the spirit of freedom shines bright amidst the darkness of oppression.
The only response to the overwhelming and complete control of their society, and as a reaction to the continued Israeli military brutality and provocations, was to use their very bodies in an act of desperation to remind the world and Israeli society they refuse to be treated like this, they chose to resist
Recently we have witnessed Israeli provocations at Al Aqsa,
The beatings and arrests inside the mosque combined with the firing of tear gas at peaceful worshippers, the brutality shown towards the old men, young women, and girls near Damascus Gate and the apparent shoot to kill policy being used by the IOF against unarmed civilians, has enraged Palestinian civil society and roused the resistance into action
Many children, young men, and even mothers have been murdered by the IOF.
A death sentence is a price for resisting the illegal occupation with a stone.
Jenin is not alone in continuing to resist the occupation, every Palestinian – except those who profit from the occupation or collaborate with it – demands peace, justice and dignity for Palestine.
Shireen Abu Akleh died as she lived exposing Israeli violations of international law, its war crimes, its brutality and its viciousness.
The hierarchy of victimhood, which is so well defined in the West, can also be found in Israeli coverage of the occupation.
Palestinians are “terrorists”.
Israelis are “peace-loving people who just want to live in safety.”
The reality is most likely the reverse of this narrative.
Why was Shireen assassinated?
Well, its quite simple really, from the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba which is commemorated every May 15, the day after “Israel” was created and the ethnic cleansing began in earnest, through Administrative detention, used to repress legitimate dissent and opposition to the occupation, to the abandonment of Palestinians to the refugee camps in order to control them, it is the broadcasters, journalists, photographers and eyewitnesses that the occupation also wants to control.
They want to control not only what Palestinians are allowed to do in their own country in their homes on their land and even in their mosques but they want to control what you and I outside of Palestine are allowed to see and hear.
Targeted assassination of journalists is as much a tool in the arsenal of the apartheid regime as ethnic cleansing house demolitions, Administrative detention, controlled movement, and murder.
Shireen was executed because she exposed the truth to the world of the brutality of “Israel”s continuing illegal occupation
She reported on house demolitions, peaceful protests, military house raids, and on the excesses of the Israeli Courts
She was a thorn in their side.
According to the Palestinian Union of Journalists 55 journalists have been murdered, executed by the IOF in Palestine from 2000 and many many more injured.
The press is regularly attacked, cameras are broken and journalists are assaulted.
There is no freedom in Palestine from the brutality of the repressive military occupation for any indigenous person.
Indeed international solidarity activists are also under threat, while walking children to school like the ecumenical accompaniers in Al-Khalil, to Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndell both International Solidarity members murdered by the Israeli regime.
There is a linear line that goes from 1901 through to 2022 that joins land, acquisition, ethnic cleansing, race riots, the partition of Palestine, the 1948 and 1967 Israeli wars of aggression, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh.
It’s called Zionism.
It is a cancer that has invaded the body politics and society of WestAsia if not treated it will destroy the host.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
Although the Israeli occupation displaced a large portion of the people of Diyar Bir Al-Sab’ (al-Naqab) in 1948, these lands are still attributed to their owners, some of whom are descendants of tribes originating from the Arabian and Sinai peninsulas.
Some of Al-Naqab’s Bedouins are descendants from Bedouin tribes in the Arabian Peninsula
Diyar Bi’r Al-Sab’, otherwise known as the desert of Al-Naqab, comprises almost half the historical area of the land of Palestine, meaning close to 12,577,000 dunums (1 dunum ~ 1,000 square meters).
Although it’s called a desert, it actually isn’t one; yet, it is a mix of very fertile agricultural land, dry rocky mountainous lands, and sandy lands, and all of them have large amounts of groundwater, according to studies performed by Arab experts in the field, not to mention sizeable mineral riches found in the region.
This large area has been inhabited by Bedouins for hundreds of years, during which they owned title deeds that were written with legible legal wording since the days of the Ottoman Empire. The British mandate also issued them specific deeds that asserted their ownership of the lands. These vast lands are still attributed to their owners, those currently living there, or those displaced, as the Israeli occupation forcibly displaced a large number of them in the Nakba of 1948.
It also worked during the 1950s to forcibly displace a large number of the rest and concentrate them in an area called Al-Siyaj (the fence), robbing them of a large portion of their lands, which it later turned to a closed militarized zone, despite people still living there. The Bedouins were thus left with only 2% of their lands; still, Israeli occupation authorities try today to confiscate what little they have left, and forcibly remove them to ghettos that lack even the basic elements of a normal life.
Bedouin society: A sacred outlook on land
Al-Naqab’s Bedouins are former nomads that used to travel with their cattle according to the seasons from one area to another, each within the recognized boundaries of their lands, as Bedouin tribes have always respected others’ lands, which for them was something they held very sacred, like one’s honor. Later on, they became semi-nomads that lived on raising cattle and agriculture in unrecognized villages, while those who were forcibly concentrated in sedentary towns developed a more comfortable lifestyle, much like that of towns and cities. Still, people still raise cattle in these towns under very restricted conditions.
The Bedouin society is a traditional and conservative society. Some of Al-Naqab’s Bedouin tribes are descended from the Arabian peninsula’s bedouin tribes, and some from the Sinai peninsula’s. In Al-Naqab, a clan is a specific social unit, and the tribe is a grouping of clans that existed in Palestine before 1948, a small number of which remained after the Nakba. In Al-Naqab, clans are split into Rub’, the Rub’ into big families (Hama’el), and each big family split into smaller families.
Al-Naqab historian Dr. Mansour Al-Nasasirah says in his book Badw Al-Naqab wa Bir Al-Sab’ (The Bedouins of Al-Naqab and Bir Al-Sab’: 100 Years of Politics and Resistance) that out of 95 clans that existed in the south of Palestine during the British mandate, only 19 remained in Al-Naqab and Bir Al-Sab’ after the Nakba. These 19 were forcibly gathered after 1948 and taken directly to the Al-Siyaj area northeast of Bir Al-Sab’ until 1967.
It should be said that the number 19 here goes back to the Israeli concept of the remains of the clans that were recognized, despite there being a much larger number of clans, but the idea was to group the ones that were left under these 19 in order to better control them after 1948. These were the clan leaders that Ben-Gurion’s government ‘acknowledged’.
Al-Nasasirah also clarifies that the policies that were applied against Al-Naqab’s Bedouins in the 1950s, after they were grouped in Al-Siyaj, included the separation of clans while keeping peaceful clans intact, forcefully ejecting clans that remained in the western and northern regions of Al-Naqab to Al-Siyaj, appointing new clan leaders, confiscating their lands by passing new laws, robbing them of their historical ownership, and conducting censuses that aim to keep them under strict observation at all times.
A systemic attack on Al-Naqab’s traditions
The people of Al-Naqab respect each other’s land ownership, even if they’re not registered on paper, and they are arbitrated in accordance with the binding Bedouin traditions and rulings in these matters. Land, just as one’s family, is considered something that cannot be assaulted or taken for granted. These traditions were, however, not listed in the rules of the occupation, especially in this period of time. Al-Naqab was a very neglected region for them, until the first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion drew attention to it and built his residence there, as he famously said “we wish to protect the desert in Al-Naqab, to protect the vacuum.”
Lastly, censuses show that the population of Al-Naqab is about 380,000, half of whom live in sedentary villages and the other half still steadfast in their villages – which the Israeli occupation authorities do not acknowledge – under living conditions that can be said at best to be unsuitable for human life and the modern way of living in the third millennium. They live in these villages without any infrastructure, water, electricity, schools, or infirmaries, in houses that are all made of tin that can neither protect them from the heat of summer nor from the cold of winter.
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