Good morning everyone, thank you for being here today. It is an honor to be here and to have the opportunity to represent my people in this conference.
I’m sure you like me remember that Mrs. Nomura was with us for the last forum, now in my heart I still feel her spirit is still with us, encouraging us, inspiring us and guiding us through.To illustrate the present situation in Palestine
it took me six weeks to be able to cross the Egyptian Palestinian boarder with ten attempts ,then my stay in Cairo was extended for three months because I was unable to return as a result of the closure. Keep in mind that I am but one person and there have been thousands of patients waiting to leave for medical reasons, and more students trying to get back to their schools.
A million and a half Gazans have been under total siege and continuous bombing despite agreements of so called Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Very limited medical and food supplies have been allowed through the boarders and, with most of the medical attention concentrated on healing the thousands injured throughout the intifada there is barely anything left for anybody else. In the face of all these difficulties we as the members of Nomura Center in Palestine managed to continue our activities in the absence of electricity, communication, and transportation
we kept spreading the message of peace, education, and harmony thanks to the continuous support of the international division of Nomura Center Tokyo who have been with us on a regular basis. Despite popular misconceptions our conflict with Israel is not a religious one; it is in fact a matter of freedom, equality political power, self-determination, and independence.
This foreign oppression did not begin in 1948 and it did not end with the Oslo agreement. The Zionist conspiracy against Palestine is dated to 1621 CE,
three centuries before the Balfour Promise, when a book entitled The Great Revival of the World, written by Henry Fish, a Jew, called for the sons of Jacob in Diaspora to go back to Palestine and establish a State that could eclipse all other States*.
While the Jewish people were facing genocide in Europe (throughout World War I and until World War II when an estimated 60 million people were killed),
the Zionist movement began spreading a powerful myth that there is a land without people for the people without a land. This encouraged the Jews of the world to begin immigrating to the land of Palestine even before 1948. (I would like to make sure everyone understands that this land was actually called Palestine).
Yes, our fathers and grandfathers might have been simple farmers, but their land represented and held their pride, it was their link to the past, security for the future and their whole life. The Palestinians by nature were hospitable to all the families escaping torture in Europe, as they had been for centuries before; Palestine has always been a cross-road for many civilizations, and a place of pilgrimage for many people. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived together in peace and harmony, before the rise of the Zionist ideology, which implements a racist agenda that believes there is a chosen land for the chosen people.
Zionists did not direct all their hatred toward Europe where they had been persecuted but instead put pressure on those European states in order to capture Palestine, especially Jerusalem, and banish the Palestinians from their home to destinations throughout the world.
, the following goals of Zionism have become obvious to everyon
1. The gathering of Jews from all over the world to Palestine.
2. The preserving of the pillars of the Zionist State, as well as its security.
3. The expanding regionally, via settlements, to establish Greater Israel and its capital in Jerusalem.
4. The controlling of the Middle East region. *
In 1917 the Zionists came to an agreement with the British foreign minister Balfour to establish a national Jewish state in Palestine, with the condition that it doesn’t interfere with the present residents of Palestine.
Therefore there must have been Palestinians.
For the Zionist ideology to become a reality the Palestinians must be annihilated.
Erasing the Palestinians proved to be harder than the Zionists hoped or imagined it would be, because,
we like all people of the world, are a people who will never betray our land, lose our dignity, or change our identity.
The Zionists wouldn’t admit that their ideology was based on a lie, and therefore was doomed to fail; they couldn’t face up to their failure
so instead of working on integrating the immigrants with the natives of Palestine they decided to make the lie of a land with no people a reality.
The regional and international support for the Zionist movement against the Palestinians led to the events of 1948.
The Zionist terrorist militia took advantage of the chaos created by the events of World War II to kill innocent civilians, destroy their homes, and those who survived the onslaught were forced at gun point into exile.
The Palestinian people were denied any basic human rights.
You didn’t witness these massacres because of the biased media but you did see the massacres that took place against the Jews and you sympathized with them,
so the state of Israel was established on the ruins of the Palestinians.
Even though we are not responsible for any of the Jewish suffering we are still paying the price of the establishment of the state of Israel and its unlawful expansion. But I’m not here to take you back to the discrimination against the Jews
this is the time to go back and reconsider our own judgmen
The international community does not approve of transferring discrimination against women onto men, or the black man onto the white man,
we have to acknowledge that there are forces that create wars and crises all over the world to avoid making the mistake of transferring discrimination against Jews to discrimination against Palestinians. How can it be justified by international law or otherwise that I am stripped of my homeland? I was born in Yaffa, Al Nozha and from there I with all my family and people became refugees wandering the world in search for work and residence, because in a flash of sadistic aggression my homeland was stripped away from me. The reality of my childhood is that I watched our cows being milked by the aggressor while we as children were begging for a glass of milk. Oh but I forgot the leading five members of the united nations decided I would be invisible, that was the verdict reached, to be of an unknown nation so that Israel can develop in our stead. Our parents were traumatized by their devastating loss and by the endless wait for their return to their homes. Like all the other refugees in the world after being uprooted only one dream remains and that is to return. What the Israeli leaders were counting on is as their former foreign minister Golda Mayer used to say:
“Where are the Palestinians? The elderly will die, and the young will forge
too bad for them the young grew up and started asking who are we? Where did we come from?
Why are we refugees, staring at our homes from behind barbed wire?
We have gathered anything and everything we could of our homeland so as to rebuild our lives and our children’s lives
and we did so as strangers in exile forced to live with the hostility created by Israeli propaganda. We still carry our identity and culture in our chests as we tolerate living as marginalized strangers in foreign lands.
Is there any escape from this injustice? We keep searching for a way out of this national nightmare. The Conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing were employed successfully in 1948 against the Palestinian population.
Since 1967 so many UN security counsel resolutions have been issued and ignored, and likewise the 4th Geneva Convention has been cynically dismissed. Yet when these refugees find ways to rise up and to express their resistance or to feebly fight back by means of peace or separate acts of desperate terror,
they are labeled collectively by Israel as terrorists and punished with appalling collective cruelty. It may have been hoped that a people who suffered so dearly at the hands of Nazi Germany would behave with compassion and value human life,
but the opposite would appear to have happened with the Israeli army nearly rivaling the cruelties of the Third Reich.
Can’t they see how these strategies of oppression and measured ethnic cleansing is only worsening Israel’s own position by insuring the hatred of many many generations to come in the Arab and Muslim world? If it succeeds in wiping out the Palestinians how much worse will this hatred become? Can’t they and their supporters and lobbyist see that they have created a never ending cycle of East vs. West turmoil? At least 10 Palestinians civilians (women, babies and elderly) are killed daily, which means that there is thousands dead each year, these killings are a form of slow deliberate ethnic cleansing. This is of course different from genocide which wipes out millions in one campaign. But there is no justification of the imprisonment of a nation behind bars and walls, which do not only separate us from the Israeli settlers but also isolate us from the whole world at large. there are no politicians who are able to willingly stop the killing, they fear being called anti-Semitic if they stand up for these brutal and violent forms of unexcused torture, terror, and imprisonment imposed on us Palestinians.
I want to stress that so much depends on the international reaction
When Israel was absolved from any responsibility or accountability for the ethnic cleansing in 1948 and 1967 it turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda.
if the present escalation and adaptation of genocidal policies is going to be tolerated by the world, it will only expand and be used more drastically.
One need only look at the recent events from Jineen to Kana.
Yet there is still hope because some brave pilots, journalists, and politicians who are directly involved with Israel refused to partake in its savage operations.
The international community must seek a fair solution for my home land.
There must be an immediate pull out by Israel to the pre-1967 boarder.
There must be full repair of the Palestinian society
and full support financial and spiritual by the free world.
This can only remedy the current situation, a clean slate is not possible for my generation, it will not remove the hatred but at least it will help to stop the situation from worsening,
as for the generations to come only justice can result in a true peace and re-conciliation.A call for peace and justice is not anti-Semitism, it is just humanity. As the Israeli journalist Ilan Pappe** says
in the name of the memory of the holocaust let us hope the world will not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.” To end I would like to quote our mentor in the struggle for peace and harmony Mrs. Nomura: Politics, the economy and education in our society do not function by themselves
but require humans to make them function. Therefore human education must be given the first priorit Human renaissance, building peace and creating a new civilization on a global level must be the major propositions we are to achieve, in order to prevent us from annihilating whole eco-systems and to pave the way for co-existence. At the end let me thank you again
let us work together toward a peaceful world where our children can grow safe and secure from war and terror.
* http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/am/publish/article_29.shtml
** http://www.ilan.pappe.com
amal abo amara
2006
I’m sure you like me remember that Mrs. Nomura was with us for the last forum, now in my heart I still feel her spirit is still with us, encouraging us, inspiring us and guiding us through.To illustrate the present situation in Palestine
it took me six weeks to be able to cross the Egyptian Palestinian boarder with ten attempts ,then my stay in Cairo was extended for three months because I was unable to return as a result of the closure. Keep in mind that I am but one person and there have been thousands of patients waiting to leave for medical reasons, and more students trying to get back to their schools.
A million and a half Gazans have been under total siege and continuous bombing despite agreements of so called Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Very limited medical and food supplies have been allowed through the boarders and, with most of the medical attention concentrated on healing the thousands injured throughout the intifada there is barely anything left for anybody else. In the face of all these difficulties we as the members of Nomura Center in Palestine managed to continue our activities in the absence of electricity, communication, and transportation
we kept spreading the message of peace, education, and harmony thanks to the continuous support of the international division of Nomura Center Tokyo who have been with us on a regular basis. Despite popular misconceptions our conflict with Israel is not a religious one; it is in fact a matter of freedom, equality political power, self-determination, and independence.
This foreign oppression did not begin in 1948 and it did not end with the Oslo agreement. The Zionist conspiracy against Palestine is dated to 1621 CE,
three centuries before the Balfour Promise, when a book entitled The Great Revival of the World, written by Henry Fish, a Jew, called for the sons of Jacob in Diaspora to go back to Palestine and establish a State that could eclipse all other States*.
While the Jewish people were facing genocide in Europe (throughout World War I and until World War II when an estimated 60 million people were killed),
the Zionist movement began spreading a powerful myth that there is a land without people for the people without a land. This encouraged the Jews of the world to begin immigrating to the land of Palestine even before 1948. (I would like to make sure everyone understands that this land was actually called Palestine).
Yes, our fathers and grandfathers might have been simple farmers, but their land represented and held their pride, it was their link to the past, security for the future and their whole life. The Palestinians by nature were hospitable to all the families escaping torture in Europe, as they had been for centuries before; Palestine has always been a cross-road for many civilizations, and a place of pilgrimage for many people. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived together in peace and harmony, before the rise of the Zionist ideology, which implements a racist agenda that believes there is a chosen land for the chosen people.
Zionists did not direct all their hatred toward Europe where they had been persecuted but instead put pressure on those European states in order to capture Palestine, especially Jerusalem, and banish the Palestinians from their home to destinations throughout the world.
, the following goals of Zionism have become obvious to everyon
1. The gathering of Jews from all over the world to Palestine.
2. The preserving of the pillars of the Zionist State, as well as its security.
3. The expanding regionally, via settlements, to establish Greater Israel and its capital in Jerusalem.
4. The controlling of the Middle East region. *
In 1917 the Zionists came to an agreement with the British foreign minister Balfour to establish a national Jewish state in Palestine, with the condition that it doesn’t interfere with the present residents of Palestine.
Therefore there must have been Palestinians.
For the Zionist ideology to become a reality the Palestinians must be annihilated.
Erasing the Palestinians proved to be harder than the Zionists hoped or imagined it would be, because,
we like all people of the world, are a people who will never betray our land, lose our dignity, or change our identity.
The Zionists wouldn’t admit that their ideology was based on a lie, and therefore was doomed to fail; they couldn’t face up to their failure
so instead of working on integrating the immigrants with the natives of Palestine they decided to make the lie of a land with no people a reality.
The regional and international support for the Zionist movement against the Palestinians led to the events of 1948.
The Zionist terrorist militia took advantage of the chaos created by the events of World War II to kill innocent civilians, destroy their homes, and those who survived the onslaught were forced at gun point into exile.
The Palestinian people were denied any basic human rights.
You didn’t witness these massacres because of the biased media but you did see the massacres that took place against the Jews and you sympathized with them,
so the state of Israel was established on the ruins of the Palestinians.
Even though we are not responsible for any of the Jewish suffering we are still paying the price of the establishment of the state of Israel and its unlawful expansion. But I’m not here to take you back to the discrimination against the Jews
this is the time to go back and reconsider our own judgmen
The international community does not approve of transferring discrimination against women onto men, or the black man onto the white man,
we have to acknowledge that there are forces that create wars and crises all over the world to avoid making the mistake of transferring discrimination against Jews to discrimination against Palestinians. How can it be justified by international law or otherwise that I am stripped of my homeland? I was born in Yaffa, Al Nozha and from there I with all my family and people became refugees wandering the world in search for work and residence, because in a flash of sadistic aggression my homeland was stripped away from me. The reality of my childhood is that I watched our cows being milked by the aggressor while we as children were begging for a glass of milk. Oh but I forgot the leading five members of the united nations decided I would be invisible, that was the verdict reached, to be of an unknown nation so that Israel can develop in our stead. Our parents were traumatized by their devastating loss and by the endless wait for their return to their homes. Like all the other refugees in the world after being uprooted only one dream remains and that is to return. What the Israeli leaders were counting on is as their former foreign minister Golda Mayer used to say:
“Where are the Palestinians? The elderly will die, and the young will forge
too bad for them the young grew up and started asking who are we? Where did we come from?
Why are we refugees, staring at our homes from behind barbed wire?
We have gathered anything and everything we could of our homeland so as to rebuild our lives and our children’s lives
and we did so as strangers in exile forced to live with the hostility created by Israeli propaganda. We still carry our identity and culture in our chests as we tolerate living as marginalized strangers in foreign lands.
Is there any escape from this injustice? We keep searching for a way out of this national nightmare. The Conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing were employed successfully in 1948 against the Palestinian population.
Since 1967 so many UN security counsel resolutions have been issued and ignored, and likewise the 4th Geneva Convention has been cynically dismissed. Yet when these refugees find ways to rise up and to express their resistance or to feebly fight back by means of peace or separate acts of desperate terror,
they are labeled collectively by Israel as terrorists and punished with appalling collective cruelty. It may have been hoped that a people who suffered so dearly at the hands of Nazi Germany would behave with compassion and value human life,
but the opposite would appear to have happened with the Israeli army nearly rivaling the cruelties of the Third Reich.
Can’t they see how these strategies of oppression and measured ethnic cleansing is only worsening Israel’s own position by insuring the hatred of many many generations to come in the Arab and Muslim world? If it succeeds in wiping out the Palestinians how much worse will this hatred become? Can’t they and their supporters and lobbyist see that they have created a never ending cycle of East vs. West turmoil? At least 10 Palestinians civilians (women, babies and elderly) are killed daily, which means that there is thousands dead each year, these killings are a form of slow deliberate ethnic cleansing. This is of course different from genocide which wipes out millions in one campaign. But there is no justification of the imprisonment of a nation behind bars and walls, which do not only separate us from the Israeli settlers but also isolate us from the whole world at large. there are no politicians who are able to willingly stop the killing, they fear being called anti-Semitic if they stand up for these brutal and violent forms of unexcused torture, terror, and imprisonment imposed on us Palestinians.
I want to stress that so much depends on the international reaction
When Israel was absolved from any responsibility or accountability for the ethnic cleansing in 1948 and 1967 it turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda.
if the present escalation and adaptation of genocidal policies is going to be tolerated by the world, it will only expand and be used more drastically.
One need only look at the recent events from Jineen to Kana.
Yet there is still hope because some brave pilots, journalists, and politicians who are directly involved with Israel refused to partake in its savage operations.
The international community must seek a fair solution for my home land.
There must be an immediate pull out by Israel to the pre-1967 boarder.
There must be full repair of the Palestinian society
and full support financial and spiritual by the free world.
This can only remedy the current situation, a clean slate is not possible for my generation, it will not remove the hatred but at least it will help to stop the situation from worsening,
as for the generations to come only justice can result in a true peace and re-conciliation.A call for peace and justice is not anti-Semitism, it is just humanity. As the Israeli journalist Ilan Pappe** says
in the name of the memory of the holocaust let us hope the world will not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.” To end I would like to quote our mentor in the struggle for peace and harmony Mrs. Nomura: Politics, the economy and education in our society do not function by themselves
but require humans to make them function. Therefore human education must be given the first priorit Human renaissance, building peace and creating a new civilization on a global level must be the major propositions we are to achieve, in order to prevent us from annihilating whole eco-systems and to pave the way for co-existence. At the end let me thank you again
let us work together toward a peaceful world where our children can grow safe and secure from war and terror.
* http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/am/publish/article_29.shtml
** http://www.ilan.pappe.com
amal abo amara
2006
