The 5 items below are but a few from many that I decided not to send.A few of you have complained about the load that I have lately been distributing.So I will try to do less, at least for the time being, unless events will demand more information.
The first item is a press release about a book that I have not yet read but definitely will.The subject is one that is close to the hearts of every New Profiler, and should be of interest to all.Please do check out Professor Barry’s website.The link to it is at the bottom of the Press Release.
Items 2 and 3 are brief reports about incidents that occurred, recently (item 2) and yesterday (item 3).Item 2 is about a 13 year old Palestinian youngster thrown in jail and then placed under house arrest (please read the article for the details), the other about a Palestinian man who was killed while evidently trying to get to work or to look for a job in Israel.One can find the information in the Israeli media, but not with the same details as when the Ma’an News Agency or other Palestinian sources publish such unhappy events.
Item 4is a report about Palestinian refugees, but centers on a single person.I comment on it a bit more at the item itself.
As for item 5, I deliberated long and hard with myself about whether or not to distribute it.As important as the opinion is, and as well-known and important as the writer is, the message is debatable.University of Illinois Law Professor Francis A. Boyle argues that since Israel will not longer exist in 20 years, the Palestinians should sign nothing, nopeace agreements.Israel will disappear of itself, and then they will have the whole.
Even if Professor Boyle is right, I believe that his recommendation inadvertently ask for more conflict, killing, and war.One has only to see item 4 to realize that his recommendation will lead to more uses of force and violence by both sides.Israel will not go down lightly, and Palestinians will not give up easily.If the Palestinians were to sit back now and merely wait for Israel to disappear, it would not.It would extend itself as far as its leaders could.Were the United States and the EU to cease their support of Israel, then Israel would not be able to use violence for long—at least not with the power that it has had.But until we see that happening, then I think that the safest course is for all of us—all of us who want justice and peace—to continue to work as hard as possible to bring these into being.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. Pres Release: UNMAKING WAR, REMAKING MEN:
HOW EMPATHY CAN RESHAPE OUR POLITICS, OUR SOLDIERS AND OURSELVES
Amidst all of the war news that saturates our lives, Kathleen Barry’s new book answers the question “Is war inevitable?”with an empathic “No!”And she offers a way out.Revealing how, in demilitarized states, violence against women persists at high levels, Barry, a sociologist, turns to men and shows how they are made expendable for war.She then asks what is required for men to remake themselves, to disengage from “core masculinity,”the socialized expectation of men as protections and aggressors.
The author shows how the military’s goal to drum empathy out of new recruits invokes harm in soldiers who are trained to become remorseless killers.This book is unique—with its exposé of how blinding macho at home is intensively trained by state militariesand resistance militias alike for war.
Finding that state demilitarization does not decrease violence against women, Barry proposes a program for global peace-making that is based on remaking the masculinity that drives men to combat. Of this book, Robin Morgan says “With the courageous vision, scrupulous scholarship, and heartfelt writing that has illumined her books on female sexual slavery, Kathleen Barry here focuses her laser-like intelligence on violence, militarism, and core masculinity. Unmaking War, Remaking Men makes the connections that could save us all. Ignore this book at your peril.”
As if presaging the Wikileaks exposés of random killing by US soldiers in Iraq, Barry documents preventive killing as a daily occurrence in combat zones.She shows it as a military strategy to make enemies and thereby perpetuate war that feeds military industries.This book, published October, 2010, challenges the U.S. preeminence in the world by exposing the other side of empathy – remorseless, psychopathic leadershipin aggressor states, resistance forces and terrorist movements from George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon to Osama bin Laden.
Barry differentiates preemptive war from the crimes against humanity of preventive war (Iraq, Afghanistan, possibly Iran, Lebanon in 2006). She shows how the U.S. and Israel perpetuate ongoing war in their refusal to acknowledge Hizbullah and Hamas as resistance forces struggling against occupation and instead treat them only as terrorists.
Barry’s plausible plan to stop ongoing war includes a radically altered United Nations and an end to the expendability of men for war. War resistors are her model of men who engage their empathy and refuse the criminality expected of them by the military and the macho required of them by society.
About the Author:Kathleen Barry, Professor Emerita, sociologist and feminist activist is the author of five books.Her first book, Female Sexual Slavery, launched an international movement against trafficking in human beings.
2. “The minister pledged to support the family in any way possible, as part of the ministry’s ongoing efforts to secure the release of the 280 children under the age of 18 currently in Israeli prisons. Since 2000, Quraqe said, 8,000 minors were detained by Israeli forces. “ [below, item 2]
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Imagine what it is like to be not only a Palestinian youngster but a Palestinian mother.Some years ago a friend asked a 5 year old Palestinian what he wanted to be when he grew up.His response, “first I will go to kindergarten, then to school, then to high school, then to prison.”He was not being facetious.He was speaking from the reality in which he was growing up.For mothers raising children, especially boys, the prospect that some day or night their sons might suddently be whisked off by soldiers or border police to prison must be terrifying.It would be for me.How about for you?
D
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[forwarded by Elana]
Minister pledges support to boy under Israeli house arrest
Published Friday 01/10/2010 (updated) 02/10/2010 15:14
HEBRON (Ma’an) — Minister of Prisoners Affairs Issa Qaraqe was received on Friday by the family of a 13-year-old Hebron boy on Friday, days after the child’s release from Israeli prison.
Karem Khaled Da’na, from the Wad Al-Bustan neighborhood in the West Bank city of Hebron, was taken from his family home by Israeli forces on 22 September, who said he had thrown stones at settlers on his way home from school.
According to lawyers and testimony from Karem, he was tortured and kept for six days in Israel’s Ofer detention center, and later released on 3,000 shekels ($824) bail under house arrest for a period of five months without exception including going to school.
“Any state who detains young children is a state that is afraid of the future,” Qaraqe told the family during the visit, accusing Israel of breaking international law and UN charters guaranteeing the rights of children when boys as young as Karem are taken from their parents’ care.
[compare the Ma’an news agency report of the incident to the Jerusalem Post one—how differently it is slanted; moreover, in the JP report the individual killed has no name, as is customary when Israel news agencies write about the killing of Palestinians—for that makes them human—human beings with loved ones mourning their death—parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and perhaps even grandparents.
A Palestinian worker from Hebron was shot and killed by Israeli border guards on Sunday while he attempted to enter East Jerusalem near the village of Al-Isawiya.
The deceased was identified as 38-year-old Izz Ad-Din Al-Kawazba from the town of Sa’ir in Hebron. Al-Kawzaba’s cousin, Salah, told Ma’an that border guards shot the victim at close range, refuting police accounts that the shooting was accidental.
Al-Kawazba said he was 20 meters away from his cousin when he was shot, shortly after two groups of workers climbed over the separation wall in the Zayem-At-Tur area and were chased by an Israeli border guard patrol.
He said he urged his cousin, who was with his brother Hassan, to “hurry because the soldiers were behind us.”
“Suddenly I saw a soldier approaching Izz Ad-Din extending his gun to his body and shooting. I moved backward along with dozens of other workers to check up on Izz Ad-Din. As we got close, we were surrounded by special forces who attacked us violently,” he said.
“We saw them shoving the martyr’s body in a black bag dragging it more than 50 meters. More than 100 workers were gathered and were sent to Al-Eizariya. The victim’s brother Hassan was detained,” he added.
Spokesman for Israel’s National Police Mickey Rosenfeld said Al-Kawazba was injured when a “shot was fired apparently accidentally” by a border guard officer after he “attempted to grab one of the border police’s gun.”
Al-Kawazba was transferred to the Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital where he later died of his wounds, Rosenfeld said, adding that an investigation “is being carried out in order to understand what took place at the scene.”
Rosenfeld said the shooting followed the detention of “15 illegal workers [who] crossed the security barrier near French Hill,” after which a chase ensued.
The death comes over a week after an Israeli settler guard shot and killed two Palestinians in the flashpoint neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem, sparking days of clashes.
(This article was UPDATED to include an account of the shooting from the victim’s cousin, Salah Al-Kawazba.)
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4.Al Jazeera,
October 02, 2010
“’God had promised us that we will return to our homes. But we will never get Palestine without jihad.’”[Final statement below might very well indicate what is likely to occur if Palestinians and Palestinian refugees ever give up hope of ending the occupation since 1948 by peaceful means. Dorothy]
Ain al-Hilweh is the largest, most heavily armed and most violent Palestine refugee camp in Lebanon. Home to around 75,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants, Ain al-Hilweh, or Beautiful Eyes, was built on the site of a former British World War II army base just outside the southern port city of Sidon
On Sharia Bustan Yahoudi – Jewish Park Street, named after the Jews who used to live around Sidon – the irony of their address is only one among a litany of indignities suffered by the refugees. Unable to gain citizenship, they live in limbo. The government has passed a law allowing them to claim free work permits for employment in the private sector, but they remain barred from over 70 professional jobs
Ain al-Hilweh today is a two square kilometre pressure cooker of tedium and despair, punctuated by moments of terror. The Fatah faction has long held sway in the camp, including manning the security checkpoints around it, but is being challenged by the rising power of Islamic groups
Fatah gunmen man checkpoints at the entrance to Ain al-Hilweh, but large swaths of the camp are now under the control of Islamist groups who rival Fatah for leadership of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon
Though the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), of which Fatah is the dominant faction, has long held sway over most of the 12 Palestinian camps in Lebanon its relative weakness in Nahr al-Bared allowed Fatah al-Islam to gain a foothold. During its 29 year occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2005, the Syrian army had sought to weaken the PLO because of its involvement in the Lebanese civil war
Sheikh Abu Sharif says his Islamist group Ozbat Ansar is the largest faction in Ain al-Hilweh. The Sunni group has been involved in a number of firefights with its secular rival Fatah
For most Palestinians, the right to return home of the up to six million refugees who can trace origins back to the exodus from Palestine that followed the creation of Israel in 1948, is an absolute
“I was born here in a small tent in 1958,” says Abu Ahmad Fadel Taha, the leader of Hamas in Ain al-Hilweh. “I have lived all my life here with my father, who is now 94, and my eight children. We live with hardship every day and we live the dream of return every day”
“No-one can negotiate on our right to return to Palestine. There is only one country called Palestine and we will never return there except by resistance to Israel,” says Abu Yousef, a fighter with the Palestinian faction Ansar Allah, as a group of about 100 protesters wave flags and guns behind him
At a protest in Ain al-Hilweh demanding the right of Palestinian refugees to return, a boy holds up the key to the home of his family in Palestine and the identification paper his grandfather was given when he fled to Lebanon seven years after the creation of Israel
Israel may be urging Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to continue faltering peace talks despite refusing to renew a freeze on illegal settlement building, but in the tinderbox Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon life is defined by an issue neither side has ever publically expressed any willingness to compromise over: The right of Palestinian refugees to return home.
“No-one can negotiate on our right to return to Palestine. There is only one country called Palestine and we will never return there except by resistance to Israel,” says Abu Yousef, a fighter with the Palestinian faction Ansar Allah.
Absolute right or demographic danger
The right of return polarises the seemingly intractable conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis like no other issue.
For most Palestinians the right of return for the up to six million refugees who are ancestors of those who made the exodus from Palestine that followed the creation of Israel in 1948 is an absolute.
For Israeli officials – whose historians dispute the figure of six million and also the reason for the mass exodus – the issue is existential: The sheer number of Palestinian refugees who can claim a right to return to their pre-1948 homes are a demographic danger to the world’s only Jewish state.
In a speech to former US President Bush’s Annapolis peace conference in 2007, Abbas pledged to begin “deep negotiations” with Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, on final status issues, including the question of refugees “in all its political, humanitarian, individual and common aspects, consistent with Resolution 194”.
That UN General Assembly Resolution and Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts the refugees’ unconditional right of return to live at peace in their old homes or to receive compensation for their losses. The Annapolis talks ended in failure.
The efforts of Barack Obama, the US president, to bring about a peace deal within a year have focused on resolutions pegged to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian land occupied during the 1967 war.
‘Dream of return’
But the issue of the refugees’ return has not been forgotten in the dusty, dangerous cinderblock camp of Ain al-Hilweh, on the outskirts of Lebanon’s southern port city of Sidon.
“I was born here in a small tent in 1958,” says Abu Ahmad Fadel Taha, the leader of Hamas in Ain al-Hilweh. “I have lived all my life here with my father, who is now in his 90s, and my eight children. We live with hardship every day and we live the dream of return every day.”
From his office in the heart of the camp, Fadel Taha’s staff broadcast tapes of Al-Aqsa and Al-Resalah TV channels on free satellite wavelengths to households in the camp. The message is often uncompromising.
“Israel wants the Palestinians to admit Palestine is the home of the Jews. It wants us to give up on the right of return,” says Fadel Taha.
“Palestine is for us and for our grandchildren and can only be liberated by resistance. Oslo and Madrid [peace conferences] brought only shame. We don’t believe in negotiations.”
Even among Abbas’ own Fatah movement in Ain al-Hilweh, support for peace talks has been muted.
“We have been used to the total support of the Israelis by the US, but now we have no other way but to be with the talks,” says Mounir Maqdah, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon, of which Fatah is the dominant faction.
Living in limbo
Besides their dream of return, Palestinians in Lebanon face a unique array of hardships.
Unable to gain citizenship because of fears such a move would upset Lebanon’s delicate sectarian power sharing system, the country’s 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in a double limbo: Refusing resettlement in their host country but demanding better rights, such as the right to work in over 70 professional jobs from which they remain barred, despite a parliamentary decision in August to allow Palestinians work permits.
According to UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian relief organisation, Lebanon has the highest percentage of Palestinian refugees living in abject poverty, and the worst of that is felt inside the 12 official refugee camps.
Under a 1969 Arab agreement, Lebanese authorities have no right of access inside the camps, with Palestinians running an autonomous security system.
But while many fear a repeat of the brutal attacks on the camps that were carried out by Israel and allied Lebanese groups during the 1975-1990 civil war, for camp residents their arms more significantly signal their refusal to relinquish their refugee status.
“We maintain our weapons as a guarantee of our right of return to our homeland,” says Sheikh Maher Oweid, the commander of the Ansar Allah faction in Ain al-Hilweh.
Factional fighting
Too often though, the weapons of rival factions have been turned on each other with regular deadly gun battles over the past few years between Islamist groups, such as Ozbat Ansar, which claim to be the largest faction in the camp, and its secular rivals, such as Fatah.
The destruction in the summer of 2007 of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in a three-month battle between the Lebanese army and Islamists, many of them foreigners who had holed up in the camp, further spiked tensions between the Islamists and secularists inside Ain al-Hilweh.
“Fatah have shot on us many times but our religion tells us we must protect our Palestinian civilians here in the camp,” says Sheikh Abu Sharif, a spokesman for Ozbat Ansar.
Members of Ozbat Ansar define themselves as global jihadis fighting Israeli and American occupation and for the establishment of Islamic rule. They criticise both Hamas and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia movement, for their “narrow agenda” of only seeking an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and a disputed corner of south-east Lebanon.
“We have succeeded in establishing a military wing inside occupied Palestine,” says Abu Sharif, vowing to fight against any two state solution that might arise from peace talks.
“God had promised us that we will return to our homes. But we will never get Palestine without jihad.”
www.Countercurrents.org November 15, 1988 the Palestine National Council (P.N.C.) meeting in Algiers proclaimed the Palestinian Declaration of Independence that created the independent state of Palestine. Today the State of Palestine is bilaterally recognized de jure by about 130 states. Palestine has de facto diplomatic recognition from most of Europe. It was only massive political pressure applied by the U.S. government that prevented European states from according to Palestine de jure diplomatic recognition.
On
Palestine is a member state of the League of Arab States and of the Islamic Conference Organization. When the International Court of Justice in The Hague—the so-called World Court of the United Nations System—conducted its legal proceedings on Israel’s apartheid wall on the West Bank, the World Court invited the State of Palestine to participate in the proceedings. In other words, the International Court of Justice recognized the State of Palestine.
Palestine has Observer State Status with the United Nations Organization, and basically all the rights of a U.N. Member State except the right to vote. Effectively, Palestine has de facto U.N. Membership. The only thing keeping Palestine from de jure U.N. Membership is the implicit threat of a veto at the U.N. Security Council by the United States, which is clearly illegal. Someday Palestine shall be a full-fledged U.N. Member State.
From a world-order perspective, the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence created a remarkable opportunity for peace with Israel because therein the P.N.C. explicitly accepted the U.N. General Assembly’s Partition Resolution 181(II) of 1947 that called for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in the Mandate for Palestine, together with an international trusteeship for the City of Jerusalem, in order to resolve their basic conflict:
Despite the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arab people resulting in their dispersion and depriving them of their right to self-determination following upon U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (1947), which partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, yet it is this Resolution that still provides those conditions of international legitimacy that ensure the right of the Palestinian Arab people to sovereignty and national independence.
The significance of the P.N.C.’s acceptance of the Partition Resolution in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence itself could not be over-emphasized. Prior thereto, from the perspective of the Palestinian People the Partition Resolution had been deemed to be a criminal act that was perpetrated upon them by the United Nations Organization in gross violation of their fundamental right to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter and general principles of public international law. The acceptance of the Partition Resolution in their actual Declaration of Independence signaled the genuine desire by the Palestinian People to transcend the past century of bitter conflict with the Jewish People living illegally in their midst in order to reach an historic accommodation with them on the basis of a two-state solution.
The very fact that this acceptance of Partition Resolution 181 was set forth in their Declaration of Independence indicated the degree of sincerity with which the Palestinian People accepted Israel. The Declaration of Independence was the foundational document for the State of Palestine. It was intended to be determinative, definitive, and irreversible. As the P.N.C. well knew at the time, their Declaration of Independence was not something that could be amended or bargained away.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians have now fruitlessly spent the past twenty-two years trying to negotiate in good faith with Israel over the two-state solution set forth in Resolution 181. They have gotten absolutely nowhere. Israel has never demonstrated one iota of good faith when it came to negotiating a comprehensive Middle Peace settlement with the Palestinians on the basis of a two-state solution. Even the 1993 Oslo Agreement was nothing more than an Israeli-drafted interim Bantustan arrangement for five years that was rejected in Washington, D.C. by the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations for that precise reason.
Both Israel and the United States now want to make the Oslo Bantustan permanent and, incidental thereto, destroy the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as required by U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 1948 and general principles of public international law.
In this regard, shortly before he died on September 24, 2007, I called up the former Head of the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations, Dr. Haidar Abdul Shaffi at his home in Gaza in order to review the entire situation with him. According to Dr. Haidar: “The Zionists have not changed their objectives since the Basel Conference of 1897!” In other words, the Zionists want a “Greater” Israel on all of the Mandate for Palestine together with as much ethnic cleansing of Palestinians out of Palestine that the Zionists believe they can get away with internationally.
After twenty-two years of getting nowhere but further screwed to Israel’s apartheid wall on the West Bank and strangulated in Gaza, it is now time for the Palestinians to adopt a new strategy, which I most respectfully recommend here for them to consider: Sign nothing and let Israel collapse! Recently it was reported that the United States’ own Central Intelligence Agency predicted the collapse of Israel within twenty years. My most respectful advice to the Palestinians is to let Israel so collapse!
For the Palestinians to sign any type of comprehensive peace treaty with Israel would only shore up, consolidate, and guarantee the existence of Zionism and Zionists in Palestine forever. Why would the Palestinians want to do that? Without approval by the Palestinians in writing, Zionism and Israel in Palestine will collapse.
So the Palestinians must not sign any Middle East Peace Treaty with Israel, but rather must keep the pressure on Israel for the collapse of Zionism over the next two decades as predicted by the Central Intelligence Agency. The correct historical analogue here is not apartheid South Africa, but instead the genocidal Yugoslavia that collapsed as a State, lost its U.N. Membership, and no longer exists as a State for that very reason.
All the demographic forces are in favor of the Palestinians and against the Zionists. The United States government is tired of its blank-check support for Israel because this policy seriously undermines and conflicts with America’s imperial objective to obtain the oil and gas lying beneath Arab and Muslim states by hook or by crook. Israel is ridden with and paralyzed by so many internal contradictions and conflicts that they are too numerous to list here.
Indeed, from the very moment of its inception as a direct result of the Zionists’ genocidal al Nakba in 1948, Israel has been the proverbial failed state, and still is so today. Israel would have never come into existence without the support of Western colonial imperial powers throughout the twentieth century. And the same is true today. Without the political, economic, diplomatic, and military support provided primarily by the United States, and to a lesser extent by Britain, France, and Germany, Israel would immediately collapse. The international Campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) against Israel is quickly whittling away Israel’s domestic support in those countries. Israel’s own serial barbarous atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinians and the Lebanese have revealed the true face of Zionism for the entire world to see: genocide.
In fact, Israel has never been a State but just an Army masquerading as a State — a Potemkin Village of a State. Israel is the archetypal Great Band of Robbers described by St. Augustine in Book 4, Chapter 4 of The City of God:
Kingdoms without justice are similar to robber barons. And so if justice is left out, what are kingdoms except great robber bands? For what are robber bands except little kingdoms? The band also is a group of men governed by the orders of a leader, bound by social compact, and its booty is divided according to a law agreed upon. If by repeatedly adding desperate men this plague grows to the point where it holds territory and establishes a fixed seat, seizes cites and subdues peoples, then it more conspicuously assumes the name of kingdom, and this name is now openly granted to it, not for any subtraction of cupidity, but by addition of impunity….
All of these political, economic, military, diplomatic, sociological, psychological, and demographic forces are working in favor of the Palestinians and against Israel and the Zionists in Palestine. It will take a few more years for these historical forces to predominate and then to prevail. But the proverbial handwriting is on the wall for the Zionist Enterprise in Palestine for the entire world to see, including and especially the C.I.A. Even large numbers of Zionists living in Israel have already prepared their parachutes, and their exit plans, and their landing zones to go elsewhere in the world. There is no reason for the Palestinians to give the Zionists a new lease on life in Palestine by signing any sort of peace treaty with Israel.
It is obvious that soon Zionism will enter into Trotsky’s “ashcan” of history along with every other nationalistic “ism” that has plagued humankind during the twentieth century: Nazism, Fascism, Francoism, Phalangism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc. The only thing that could save Zionism in Palestine is for the Palestinians to conclude any type of so-called comprehensive Middle East Peace treaty with Israel. It is for precisely that reason then that the Palestinians must sign nothing and let Israel collapse of its own weight over the next two decades.
Millions of Palestinians have waited in refugee camps since 1948 in order to return to their homes, that is for 62 years.
They can wait a little longer until Israel collapses within 20 years. Otherwise, for the Palestinians to sign a comprehensive peace treaty with Israel means that they will never be able to return to their homes as required by Resolution 194 of 1948. History and demography are on the side of Palestine and the Palestinians against Israel and the Zionists. But the Palestinians must allow history and demography a little bit more time in order to produce the collapse of Israel and Zionism in Palestine. Twenty years is but the blink of an eye in the millennia-long history of the Palestinian People, who are the original indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.
God had no right to steal Palestine from the Palestinians and give Palestine to the Jews to begin with. A fortiori the United Nations had no right to steal Palestine from the Palestinians and give Palestine to the Zionists in 1947.
In the meantime, the Palestinians must keep up the pressure on Israel, Zionism and the Zionists in Palestine.
The Palestinians have a perfect right under international law to resist an illegal, colonial, genocidal, criminal, military occupation regimé of their lands and of their homes and of their People that goes back to 1948 so long as it is done in a manner consistent with the requirements of international humanitarian law. Simultaneously, the Palestinians must continue to build their state from the ground up as they have been doing successfully since the first Intifada began in 1987 with its grassroots Unified Leadership of the Intifada.
Internationally, the Palestinians must continue their diplomatic and political and legal offensive against Israel. Palestine has gained enormous ground since November 15, 1988 when the P.N.C. proclaimed the independent State of Palestine. Palestine will continue to gain more support internationally over the next two decades, including the accelerating B.D.S. campaign that will delegitimize Israel and Zionism all around the world. At the same time, Israel will continue its rapid descent into pariah state status along the lines of the genocidal Yugoslavia that collapsed as a state and no longer exists. Israel will meet the same fate as the genocidal Yugoslavia provided the Palestinians do not sign any type of international peace agreement with Israel.
When Israel collapses, most Zionists will have already left or will soon leave for other states around the world. The Palestinians will then be able to claim all of the historic Mandate for Palestine as their State, including the entire City of Jerusalem as their Capital. Palestine will then be able to invite all of its refugees to return to their homes pursuant to Resolution 194.
Some Jews will remain in Palestine either voluntarily or involuntarily. Palestine and the Palestinians will treat the remaining Jews fairly. Palestine and the Palestinians will not do to the Jews what Israel, Zionism, and the Zionists have done to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians must sign nothing and let Israel collapse!
University of Illinois Law Professor Francis A. Boyle served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence; to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993; and to H.E. Chairman and President Yasser Arafat. The story is told in his book “Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (Clarity Press: 2003)==========_,_.___
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