|
Highlights from al-Majdal, BADIL's Quarterly
Magazine
Gaza Disengagement...Ongoing Displacement
For Immediate Release
| No.
(E/17/05) |
2
June 2005 |
The Gaza Strip will continue to be occupied
territory even after disengagement. But the problems with disengagement do
not stop at the Gaza border, says the editorial in the current issue of al-Majdal.
Both left and right Zionist political parties in Israel agree that one of
the main purposes of the disengagement plan “is to maintain Israel's Jewish
demographic majority. In exchange for redeployment from Gaza, it seems that
Israel will be permitted to retain its large colonies in the West Bank...The
process of colonization on both sides of the 'Green Line' - i.e. the 1949
armistice line-- thus continues unabated.”
The editorial calls on the international community to disengage from Israel
and isolate it until Israel complies with international law “as every other
normal state”. This issue also reports on The Absentees' Property Law which
is another means Israel uses to deal with the demographic threat.
Ali Kazak, head of the Palestinian Delegation to Australia and New Zealand,
asks in al-Majdal: “Who is responsible - the Jews of the Zionists?” He says
that instead of reviewing its policies and practices, Israel is accusing its
opponents of being anti-Semitic. He says that the international community
should put an end to the “extremely dangerous Zionist game of playing with
words, challenging international law and norms and turning facts upside down
because the damage this causes goes far beyond the Palestinian people and
affects Jews themselves and the world at large”.
Al Majdal also reports on the 5th World Social Forum, on workshops on
assessing how Palestinian refugee communities living in exile can build
civic structures and mechanisms for communication with their national
representative and its institutions as well as host countries, agencies that
serve them and other refuge communities, the recent meeting on Palestine
under the auspices of the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the
Palestinian people, the Impact of Israel's wall on refugees and carries an
interview with outgoing UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen.
In other articles, al-Majdal looks at the UNRWA's policy on official and
“unofficial” refugee camps, a monitoring report by the University of
Geneva's Graduate Institute of Development Studies on the situation of
Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories and on displacement of
Palestinian Arabs from the villages of Baqqara and Ghaname who were
internally displaced in Israel after 1948, expelled to the Syrian Golan
Heights in 1956 and displaced again during the 1967 war.
Copies of Al-Majdal issue No. 25 will be mailed to subscribers shorly and a
PDF version will be on:
http://www.badil.org/al-Majdal/al-Majdal.htm
Annual subscriptions are available from admin@badil.org for $20.
Download and
read the PDF version
|
