|
Back to
Opinions Page
Jamila Moussa was 19 when she and her husband fled Kfur Yassin, her
village in Akka, north Palestine. They had just had their first child,
Nicolas, who now has children of his own. Fearing for his safety they
fled, hoping they would return within a matter of weeks. Since that day,
Moussa has witnessed several wars -- though none of them in Palestine.
In interview with Al-Ahram Weekly this spring, from her home in
Dbayye refugee camp, Lebanon, she recalled that the force of their
expulsion was "a violence like I have never seen since, or had witnessed
before. The British used to burn homes, yes, but the Jews, they were
flattening our houses, so they no longer existed."
Though Moussa will soon turn 80, she tells her story with remarkable
detail, perhaps sensing the foreclosure of time. She has transmitted her
memories countless times to her children and grandchildren, all of whom
were born refugees, reminding them of who they are. Now, on the eve of
the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe) of the founding of the
state of Israel in 1948, her story takes on new significance. Of the 6.5
million Palestinian refugees dispersed around the world today, precious
few carry firsthand memories of their home.
Often discussion of the Nakba treats the ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians -- the 60 plus massacres, the depopulation of over 420
villages and the dispossession of at least 700,000 Palestinians that
culminated in 1948 -- as a thing of the past, mourned annually on 15 May
while pressure to forget or even move on is ever increasing. Yet as we
approach the 60th year after Israel was established, literally on top of
Palestine, it is important to note that several writers in recent years
have pointed to the continuity of the Nakba.
Indeed, the crimes that culminated around 1948 (though by no means did
they begin there, as proven by Palestinian writer Salman Abu Sitta) have
not ceased. The massacre in Jenin of 11 April 2002 is not, in political,
historical or legal terms, separate from the massacre at Deir Yassin on
9 April 1948. Not only did both massacres involve the committal of mass
crimes, including the killing of children; they are both cruel
manifestations of Israel's historical denial of the right to
self-determination the Palestinian -- a right that in international law
has peremptory character. In spite of the bloodshed, land theft and
agony of dispossession, justice -- and crucially time -- is still and
irrevocably on the side of Palestine.
"In any adequate examination of international crimes, we need to look
for the intent underlying the crime," UK-based human rights lawyer Amr
El-Bayoumi told the Weekly. As scores of statements issued by
Zionist and Israeli leaders prove, from the inception of Israel to the
present day, the intent of Israeli state policy is no less than the
destruction of the Palestinians.
In 1937, David Ben-Gurion -- Israel's "founding father" and first prime
minister -- uttered the clearly criminal phrase, "we must expel the
Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force [then] we have
force at our disposal." More starkly, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir
denied in 1969 the existence of Palestinians altogether, saying, "there
is no such thing as a Palestinian people." More recently, in 1989,
former prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu commented, "Israel should have
exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world
attention focussed on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among
the Arabs of the territories." And in 2001, former tourism minister and
supporter of Israel's policy of extrajudicial assassination, Rehavam
Zeevi, said, "each one eliminated is one less terrorist for us to
fight."
Such policy statements correlate directly with Israel's crimes against
the Palestinians over the past 60 years, leading up to the current siege
-- which constitutes collective punishment and is illegal under
international law -- on Gaza. Under international law such purposive
destruction constitutes genocide. According to the Convention on the
Prevention and Prohibition of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948,
genocide is defined as the committal of one or more acts "with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group," and involves, among other acts, killing of members of an
enumerated group and also the deliberate infliction "on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part."
Importantly, if intent is critical to understanding Israel's crimes of
transfer and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, it would be
historically and legally wrong to view these crimes but within the same
frame as today's crimes of extrajudicial assassination, collective
punishment and deprivation of fundamental human rights, including the
rights to life, education, water and work, and not least the alienable
right to return to one's country. As such, it has been proven by legal
experts, including Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, that Israel's crimes
during the Nakba are continuing violations; not violations committed in
and belonging to the past. That the realisation of Israeli state policy
has been gradual by no means relieves its responsibility, for there are
no statutory limitations on the redress of mass crimes.
In public international law, "a crime remains a crime until it has been
remedied," Habitat International Coalition coordinator and human rights
lawyer Joseph Shechla told the Weekly. Remedies for international
crimes -- as explicitly laid out in UN General Assembly Resolution
60/147 -- include restitution of victims "to the original situation"
before the violations occurred, compensation, rehabilitation,
satisfaction, and guarantees of the non-repetition of violations.
If compensation has been proposed by Israel as a remedy for mass
expulsions committed over decades since its inception, it has proposed
inappropriately, because compensation is afforded "as part of a package.
It is not the package," according to Shechla. Furthermore, compensation
must be offered for damages incurred over time, including accumulated
rent and profit from agriculture had the Palestinians not suffered the
Nakba. "One way of calculating that would be by looking at the Israeli
economy," Shechla says.
Regardless, compensation does not absolve Israel of responsibility to
provide additional remedies, including restitution, which includes the
inalienable right of return. Even among the youth that has never seen
Palestine, the prospect of return remains a sacred goal. "If I were able
to go back to Palestine, I would go immediately," said Arwa Saleh, a
25-year-old Palestinian journalist living in Cairo. "Why would I give up
my right? I can't imagine that anyone would."
What legal analysis reveals is that the foundation and continuity of
Israel -- as Israeli and Zionist leaders and their US and European
supporters and donors know full well -- are in themselves war crimes
because the provision of adequate remedy would mean undoing the Nakba
and the state that emerged on its back. In this regard, it would be by
no means improper to invoke the responsibility of the international
community for its recognition of the state of Israel and the assistance
-- ideological as well as material -- provided to it through the
decades.
According to Elna Sondergaard, professor of public international law at
the American University in Cairo, it is incumbent upon international
lawyers, in the absence of moves to enforce state responsibility, to
take it upon themselves to "bring cases to courts and human rights
bodies", related to more than six decades of Israeli crimes in
perpetuity against Palestinians. Failure to do so undermines all faith
in legal solutions, thereby leaving recourse to rebellion -- affirmed as
a right by all means in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- as
the only option.
Indeed, until effective legal action is taken it is inevitable that
direct resistance is embraced by an increasing number of dispossessed
Palestinians and Arabs. In this, international law is on their side, in
lieu of its own failures.
|
