BADIL

1. Scope of Palestinian Displacement 2008
The Palestinian refugee and IDP population described here comprises the total estimated number of Palestinians and their descendants whose “country of origin” is the former Palestine (now divided into Israel and the OPT), who have been displaced within or outside the borders of this area, and who do not have access to voluntary durable solutions and/or reparation, including the right to return to their homes of origin and the right to repossess their properties.

Joint written statement submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Twelfth Session
14 September - 2 October 2009

Affirming Refugee Rights while Advancing Strategic tools to Achieve these Rights

BADIL Report

Veiled in secrecy, the preparations of the US-sponsored international Middle East peace meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, give rise to rumors and conflicting messages. As always, the parties themselves screen optimism, and President Bush has declared the Palestinian state to be a foreign policy interest of the United States. Still, things have apparently not yet fallen into place. While a joint Israeli-PA statement suggests progress towards an agenda that will “address all core issues” (Haaretz, 18 October), it is common knowledge that Israel is unwilling to go for a detailed agreement.

How the unresolved Palestinian refugee question stands for the failure of the international human rights and humanitarian regime

At the beginning of the 20th century, most Palestinians lived inside the borders of Palestine, which is now divided into Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today, almost 75% of the Palestinian people are displaced, and Palestinian refugees present the world’s largest and longest-standing unresolved refugee case. Approximately half of the Palestinian people live in forced exile outside their homeland, while another 23% are displaced within the borders of former Palestine.¹ Six decades after the first and most massive wave of forced displacement in 1948, Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDP) still lack access to durable solutions and reparations, including return, restitution and compensation, in accordance with international law and UN resolutions. While more Palestinians are being displaced today, effective protection is still not available for them.

At the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, over 10,000 people declared the launch of a “second anti-apartheid movement.” The participants at the conference acknowledged that “The suffering in the West Bank and Gaza is the continuation of the colonization of all of Palestine.” Four years later, in 2005, over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for a worldwide boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign similar to the one launched against the South African Apartheid state. It was a call on the world to join those in South Africa and the millions in Palestine in the “second anti-apartheid movement.”

Apartheid is an Afrikaans term for "apartness," which means to "separate," to "put apart," to "segregate." It can be summed up as the institutionalization of a regime of systematic racial discrimination or more precisely, "a political system where racism is regulated in law through acts of parliament."¹

Discussions on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid are not new; numerous articles were published in the 1980s and 1990s concluding that the situation in Israel and to some extent the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) is one of apartheid.²  These discussions were, however, sidelined by the Madrid-Oslo process in the mid-1990s, which was widely expected to bring about at least partial self-determination of the Palestinian people in the OPT. Discussions on the applicability of the apartheid label to Israel have recently re-emerged, mainly as a result of the entrenchment of Israel's regime of occupation and colonization in the OPT and its continued discriminatory policies towards Palestinian refugees and citizens of Israel.³

As Israel celebrates the 60th year since its establishment, the Palestinian people commemorate the 60th year of the Nakba (catastrophe) in which Zionist forces drove out the majority of the Palestinian people from Palestine, deprived them of their homes, lands and property and turned them into destitute refugees. The expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their homes and replacing them by Jews from various parts of the world over the past 60 years has been a premeditated crime concocted deliberately by the Zionist movement whose ideology continues to be based on the war crime of population transfer aimed at simultaneously pumping out the indigenous Palestinian population and pumping in Jews from the world to create and maintain a Jewish state on the land of Palestine.

Segregated Palestinian Towns and Villages of the West Bank[¹]

 Today, 266,422 Palestinians residing in 77 West Bank localities have been surrounded and isolated by apartheid infrastructure and settlements and are facing displacement.[²] The current crisis in the West Bank is one of the most wide-scale attempts at dispossession in recent years, with the occupation systematically targeting villages located in strategic areas along the 'green line' and near settlements. Palestinian communities are set to be expelled from areas required for settlement expansion, or are marked for inclusion outside de facto borders of the Palestinian ghettos delineated by the path of the Wall.

Since high school, writing has been my way of dealing with crises and with the imponderables of the ebb and flow of life. Together with gardening, it has been my psychotherapy. Whenever a major issue weighed heavily on my mind, whenever I wanted to maximize the pleasure from an experience I enjoyed, to savor the aftertaste of an achievement or to lick the wounds of a defeat, I would steal time from my busy schedule to sit in a quiet corner and write. I would read each piece I wrote after I had finished it and then I would put it away never to look at it again.