“’Democracy is the soul of Israel and we cannot do without it. No one can preach democracy or enlightenment to us,” Netanyahu added. “Zionism established an exemplary national state, a state that balances between the national needs of our people and the individual rights or every citizen in the country.’” [ from item 1]
Ah yes, dear friends. Therefore [respecting the democratic nature of Israel] there are no Jewish unrecognized villages in Israel, only Palestinian. Therefore, only seldom are Jewish homes demolished, whether or nor they have permits for adding on or building anew. Therefore Palestinians with Israeli citizenship cannot buy land or live wherever they wish in Israel. Therefore, the Israeli police have never fired a shot at Jewish demonstrators (nor should they), but glibly killed 13 demonstrating Palestinians, 12 of whom held Israeli citizenship. And not one policeman has paid for the crime (nor has anyone else). And on top of this and much more, only non-Jews must sign the loyalty oath!!! And so on and so forth for democracy. Demography (not democracy) is the soul of Israel!!!
——–
Below are 3 items, with a 4th to come in a separate message, since it is quite long.
Item 1 is a report of the cabinet decision on the non-democratic loyalty oath.
Item 2 is about a human being who helps Palestinians in need of medical care. This is important for several reasons, the least of which is the humanitarian part. That is not to say that driving Palestinians in need to hospitals in Israel does not have a humanitarian aspect. One cannot but feel close to the patients, particularly those with whom you have been for months or years. I know from experience. And in the case below the humanitarian is obviously important. But there is more to this than the humanitarian. First of all there is a political aspect. We say by driving Palestinians to hospitals that we will not let the Israeli government separate us. We will not allow the Israeli government to not make friends with Palestinians! And there is also a 3rd aspect. By doing this we show ourselves and the rest of the world that the belief that Palestinians and Jews cannot live together is nonsense! Of course we can. We are all human beings. And while I surely choose my friends, and would not be friends with every human being, regardless of their ethnicity or religion or race, my friendships are not grounded on these but on the humanity in a being.
Item 3 is a proposition for a one state solution to the problems here. I find the proposal to be beautiful and very idealistic. But these are ideals worth striving for. May it come to pass! Please distribute the proposal widely.
All the best,
Dorothy
==================
1. Haaretz Sunday, October 10, 2010
Cabinet votes only non-Jews seeking citizenship must sign loyalty oath
Amendment to Law of Citizenship would require any non-Jew seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic state.’
By Jonathan Lis
Cabinet ministers on Sunday approved by a majority vote a controversial proposal which would require every non-Jew wishing to become a citizen of Israel would have to vow loyalty to “the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
The divided cabinet spent hours deliberating Justice Minister Ya’akov Ne’eman’s proposed amendment to the Law of Citizenship.
Amid the debate on the matter, Ne’eman himself suggested changing the wording of the draft to apply to Jews and non-Jews alike. Defense Minister and Labor Party Chairman Ehud Barak said Sunday that he would vote against the proposal unless the cabinet agreed to include in the draft an allusion to Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
Neither of those amendments was included in the final draft passed by cabinet.
As the cabinet began its deliberations on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his support for the proposal. “The State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people and it is a democratic state for all its citizenship,” he said. “Jews and non-Jews enjoy equality and full rights.”
“Unfortunately, there are many today who tried to blur not only the unique connection of the Jewish people to its homeland, but also the connection of the Jewish people to its state,” Netanyahu added.
“Democracy is the soul of Israel and we cannot do without it. No one can preach democracy or enlightenment to us,” Netanyahu added. “Zionism established an exemplary national state, a state that balances between the national needs of our people and the individual rights or every citizen in the country.”
“There is no other democracy in the Middle East,” he declared. “There is no other Jewish state in the world. The combination of these two lofty values expresses the foundation of our national life and anyone who would like to join us needs to recognize this.”
More on this topic
Justice Minister: Jews should be required to sign loyalty oath too
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2. Ynet Sunday, October 10, 2010
Medical Treatment
‘My son would be proud.’ Inbar Photo: Ann Usher
Bereaved father transports ailing Palestinians to Israeli hospital
Buma Inbar, whose son was killed in Lebanon, helps transfer Gazans in life-threatening condition to hospital just outside Tel Aviv. ‘Leaders from both sides don’t care about people,’ he says, ‘I feel I’m doing the peace.’ Palestinian patient’s negative opinion of Israelis hasn’t changed: ‘Ask me how I feel when we have electricity and water in Gaza’
TEL AVIV – It’s 5 pm on a recent Thursday and Buma Inbar has spent an hour chatting with pediatric doctors at Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, outside Tel Aviv. The bearish 64-year-old former paratrooper wanders down a brightly lit corridor in the cancer ward and spies Hamuda Narem al-Fara sitting in the same chair the Gaza sheikh has occupied for weeks while his four-month-old grandson receives successive treatments for a gastro-intestinal disorder.
The baby is an exception. Dozens of the other children who have occupied adjoining rooms at the hospital in the past three years were picked up and taken there by Inbar, riding in the back seat of his beat-up white Mitsubishi Sedan.
Inbar, who lost his oldest son to fighting in Lebanon in 1995, calls out a greeting in Arabic and the white-bearded sheikh walks up and clasps him in a tight embrace, each kissing the other’s cheeks in a warm greeting. Al-Fara shows him a donated stack of tin-foiled dinners he will serve when he breaks the Ramadan fast.
‘Treated with compassion.’ Palestinian mother and son at Chaim Sheba hospital (Photo: Anne Usher)
This year, there were fewer recipients. Until July, about 65 children and teens from Gaza occupied the beds here, sharing the corridors with Israeli children. Now just 20 remain and there will be “much fewer” in the next several weeks, predicts Raied Baloum, a social worker who coordinates Gaza patients’ stays at the hospital.
More are being denied from entering Israel at a time when hospitals in Gaza are buckling under a shortage of medical equipment, drugs and trained doctors, according to the World Health Organization. Many of those who do get through are now being sent elsewhere by the Palestinian Authority.
Largely as a cost savings measure, it has referred more than 900 patients to Egypt since the Rafah crossing opened in June. That month, it stopped paying for the treatment of all Palestinians at the hospital in Tel Hashomer, Baloum said.
Gaza patients are also now being sent to Palestinian-run hospitals in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and a handful of other Israeli hospitals, where they are expected to have shorter and less expensive stays.
Baloum notes that at Chaim Sheba, children are first run through a battery of tests because many have been misdiagnosed by doctors in Gaza. Most are suffering from cancer and heart disease.
So close and so far’
Gaza’s only children’s hospital has 300 cancer patients, but only 15 beds, said Dr. El Alul, its deputy manager and one of only three pediatric oncologists there.
“It’s getting worse,” said Alul. He is one of six Gaza doctors being trained at Chaim Sheba and other Israeli hospitals as part of a program run by the Peres Center for Peace. Virtually all other exit permits for such training have been blocked during the blockade.
Before the blockade, “we had enough drugs and it was easier because we dealt with the Israeli Health Ministry,” he said. “There was a better chance to be trained and refer patients to Israeli hospitals, and we had access to equipment.”
Israel has since allowed only patients facing life-threatening conditions to cross its border. Children must be accompanied by a family member, and that person is subjected to extensive screening, often including interviews by its security service, the Shin Bet.
Before this summer, Israeli officials rejected about 2% of the roughly 1,000 Gaza patients a month seeking treatment outside the territory, said Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli medical organization that advocates for these patients. Since May, this has risen to about 12%.
The Palestinian Authority ultimately decides where each will be sent, and pays for their care out of an Israeli government account of Palestinian money that it has collected in value-added taxes.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said it is saving money by keeping patients away from the Chaim Sheba medical center, where leukemia patients are usually hospitalized for six to eight months. Those at the highest risk of dying are often kept for a year.
“This costs millions,” said the Palestinian Health Ministry’s general director, Dr. Muhammed al-Kashif. He also accused it of keeping alive patients with no prospects of survival.
Patients needing emergency treatment will still be sent to Israel, he said, but most funds will now go to Palestinian hospitals instead. He added he thinks patients prefer to be in the hands of fellow Palestinians.
Pediatric doctors at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center disagree and express concern that children’s health will be compromised.
“They are treated with compassion, as if they were our sons,” said Dr. Raz Somech, director of the pediatric department and its immunology center, which he says is the only one in the region. “Tel Hashomer must make its best efforts to bring our patients back. It’s ridiculous.”
Gaza sheikh al-Fara with donated tin-foiled dinners for patients (Photo: Anne Usher)
He said he is getting 50 calls a day from parents of children who are back in Gaza and face difficulties following instructions for after-care or have been rejected from returning for further treatment or surgery. “Sometimes we know if we send them home they will die.”
Until he left several weeks ago, Ahmed Rian was one of the “million dollar” patients. Inbar picked him and his father, Riyad, up at the Erez crossing about a year ago after the 16-year-old was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Riyad donated his blood, but a month and a half later, the cancer returned.
In July, after rounds of chemotherapy, he stood quietly next to his father as they greeted Inbar in a lobby filled with colorful animal murals. That Friday, as he always does, Inbar had driven a circuit of restaurants to pick up food for Riyad, who, like other patients’ relatives, was confined to the hospital for the entire duration of his son’s stay and slept by his side.
He was sent home in August with instructions to return soon for further treatment. Palestinian officials plan to send him to Ichilov Hospital instead, where they have just sent his older brother, Nashad, who also has the disease.
Riyad complained about the decision to send the boys to Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center, saying the doctor at Chaim Sheba was “gold” and has all of Ahmed’s paperwork.
Unlike Ahmed, Rim al-Masri’s family has a connection to the ministry’s office in Gaza and she is expected to return to Chaim Sheba soon. She is awaiting a bone marrow transplant from her sister after undergoing surgery to close a hole in her heart.
Heavy-lidded and reed thin, she looked far younger than her 17 years in July, before her surgery.
“I was scared both to come to here and to have the surgeries,” she said then, adding she missed her three brothers and four sisters at home.
A group of volunteers, Orthodox Jews and their children, wheeled food down her corridor that night and she rose from her bed, dressed and wearing a headscarf, to receive it. Despite this and her doctor’s care, Rim’s negative opinion of Israelis has not changed. Her father, who worked in Israel before the blockade, is more charitable. Rim said half of the children in her extended family were killed during the 2008-2009 war.
“Ask me when we have electricity and water,” she said.
“Leaders from both sides – they don’t care about people,” said Buma. “I feel I’m doing the peace.”
This year, he secured permission for a handful of the Gaza patients to join one of his annual visits for 1,400 boys from the West Bank to the turquoise waters off Jaffa on the Israeli coast. He was inspired when a boy there once told him it was his dream to see the ocean – just an hour’s drive away.
“So close and so far,” he said.
His wife, he said, has accused him of caring more for the Palestinians – who killed his son – than his own people.
He grew especially close to Hassan As-Saleya, a gravely ill four year old, as he frequently sat by the boy’s bedside during the year he was at Chaim Sheba. His father, initially barred from Israel for security reasons, was allowed in for several days after Inbar told Shin Bet contacts that doctors expected the boy to die soon. He was forced to return a day before Hassan succumbed, on a Friday. When the staff refused to drive his body to the Gaza border in an ambulance on the holy day, Inbar persuaded them to let him drive the boy’s body to the border so his family could immediately bury him, in keeping with Muslim practice.
“I wanted to hug Hassan’s mother when I gave her the body, but I didn’t want to offend her, so I just put my hand on his back.” His expression softens. He notes she became pregnant six months later and had a little girl.
On Tuesday, he made his weekly visit to Yotam’s grave in a soldiers’ cemetery outside Tel Aviv. About 20 feet away is the grave of son’s best friend, Itay Shahal, who committed suicide just days after Yotam’s death.
“I wonder sometimes what he would think about what I’m doing,” Inbar said. “I know he would be proud.”
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3. The Movement for One Democratic State in Palestine
We, the people of Palestine and our descendants, call on all those who value justice and peace to join us in a movement to establish one democratic state in Palestine that can serve all its people equally.
In making this call, we draw insight and guidance from the past, especially the following:
After World War I, even though Great Britain and France colonized and
divided the Arab world into spheres of control whereby Palestine was deniedindependence, the League of Nations, reflecting the will of the occupying European powers, established a mandate that was intended to culminate in the independent sovereign State of Palestine.
The Zionist movement that originated in Europe brought to Palestine Jewish settlement, Jewish labor and the ideology of a Jewish national home that included intentions to exclude and/or expel the indigenous population from its ancestral home in Palestine in order to create a Jewish-majority state.
In 1939, Britain responded to Palestinian popular resistance to Zionist
settlement by issuing a White Paper clarifying that neither the Mandate nor
British policy to support a Jewish national home in Palestine was ever
intended to support Palestine’s partition into two separate states.
In 1947, the Palestinian people and their representatives, together with all the Arab and Muslim States members of the United Nations, unanimously
rejected the partition of Palestine and called for all of Mandate Palestine
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River to be established as a
unitary democratic state that would prohibit any discrimination on the
grounds of religion and serve all of its citizens equally, and warned that the
partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state would lead to
bitter, endemic and unending conflict.
In 1948, the State of Israel was carved out of a major portion of Palestine
through partition and then expanded to 78% through ethnic cleansing in
which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcefully and deliberately uprooted from their homes, their towns and villages razed, their property confiscated, looted or destroyed, and, when the hostilities ended, were denied their right to return; while those who remained under Israel’s control found themselves deprived of equal human, economic, political, and legal rights, their land and natural resources expropriated, their culture co-opted, and their history falsified and maligned.
In 1967, Israel seized what remained of Palestine, namely, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, all of which are held under brutal military occupation to this day. Israel has consistently refused to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 242, which calls on Israel to withdraw from these lands, and regularly and extensively violates the protections provided by international humanitarian law with respect to the civilian Palestinian population, especially through the construction of Jewish settlements that expropriate Palestinian land and resources and which are progressively confining Palestinians to enclaves alarmingly similar to South African Bantustans.
Despite all subsequent efforts of the international community, including
numerous resolutions of the UN Security Council and General Assembly, the creation of Israel as a Jewish-only state has continued to generate wars and invasions that have caused immense suffering to the Palestinian people as well as people in neighboring States, while disturbing the peace and security of the entire world due to the conflict’s religious and ethnic sensitivities and the involvement of foreign powers.
Israel’s measures to build and consolidate Jewish demographic domination of greater Jerusalem and Jerusalem proper have progressively eradicated the historically Arab character of the city, depriving Palestinians of their historic capital, severing Jerusalem’s vital social and economic connections to the rest of Palestinian society, and restricting access by Muslim and Christian Palestinian communities to holy sites where they have worshipped since antiquity.
The legal, political and ideological systems inside Israel have methodically
discriminated against its non-Jewish citizens, and Israel’s courts along with its government and security forces have regularly rejected and harshly repressed the ongoing demands of Palestinian citizens for democratic reform and equal rights with Jewish citizens, including the right to return to lands and homes in Israel from which they were expelled after 1948.
Palestinian resistance to decades of military occupation, expulsion, land
confiscation, resource depletion, and denial of basic rights has sometimes
caused regrettable suffering to Israeli civilians, although Israel’s attempts to justify its violations of Palestinian rights by citing this resistance is wholly to be rejected, based as it is on distortions of fact and disparity of distress.
Israel’s actions and policies point inescapably to the calculated intent of
permanently annexing most of the West Bank and all of East Jerusalem,
contravening all accepted international principles regarding de jure
occupation. The inevitable conclusion is that Israel is pursuing a policy that
amounts to nothing less than settler colonialism.
Israel’s systematic discrimination against Palestinians, which includes
practices such as forced transfer, segregation, ghettoization, and/or denial
of citizenship and basic human rights and freedoms, is alarmingly consistent with the crime of Apartheid as defined in international law, while the actions of Israeli leaders intended to secure the ethnic, religious and demographic purity of Israel increasingly recall the fascist regimes of Europe’s past.
Israel’s refusal to allow the return of Palestinian refugees in violation of
General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948; Israel’s continuing military
occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, which has
involved massive Jewish settlement and land confiscation in the West Bank
and East Jerusalem in violation of international humanitarian law; the ruinous closure on the Gaza Strip that has created a humanitarian crisis among the Palestinian population; and a plethora of policies such as the building of an Apartheid wall- all indicate that Israel intends indefinitely and irrevocably to deny the Palestinian people their human and civil rights in their own country, including their right to self-determination.
On this basis, we conclude the following:
§ The ongoing conflict along with its pain, anger, and fear originated in the
deliberate colonization and ultimately wrongful partition of Palestine in 1948 and in the injustice, expulsions, inequality and segregation that the State of Israel has enforced on the indigenous Palestinian population to effect and maintain this partition.
§ International diplomacy and mediation and United Nations resolutions
directed toward a two-state solution have been and are misguided due to the obfuscation and subsequent misapprehension of the true origins of the
conflict, which arose from the Zionist ideology of colonization, ethnic
cleansing and ethnic segregation. The facts on the ground, especially the
massive expansion of Jewish settlements and the movement of hundreds of
thousands of Israeli Jewish citizens into East Jerusalem and throughout the
rest of the West Bank have nullified any hope of such diplomacy ever being effective.
§ The division of the people and territory of Mandate Palestine based on the antiquated notion that claims an exclusive birthright to the land for the entire Jewish people alone is inadmissible and violates the human and political rights of the Palestinian people as well as norms expressed in United Nations Covenants on human, social, cultural and political rights.
§ Partition of Palestine into two states only perpetuates conflict, based as it is on sustaining beliefs and practices that foster conflict, especially ethnic
domination and discrimination, forced separation, ghettoization, and land
confiscation that reproduce practices of colonialism and Apartheid and offend the conscience of humankind.
§ The claim that Jews, Palestinians, and all the people of Palestine cannot live together peacefully in one country is just as false and fundamentally racist as were similar arguments about black Africans and white people promoted by the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
§ Endorsing equal rights for Jews and Palestinians is not and cannot be equated with anti-Jewish racism, which is adamantly to be opposed in all its forms.
§ The people in all of Palestine can never know peace, security, prosperity and freedom until we annul the wrongful partition of the country, fully recognize the historic injustices inflicted on the Palestinians, restore the inalienable rights of all Palestinians, including their right to return, defeat all doctrines that separate and discriminate among the people, and ensure that all citizens enjoy equal rights, freedoms and opportunities.
We therefore declare our position to be that:
1. Only a united and genuinely democratic state in Palestine, without
distinction of race, religion, ethnicity or national origin, can provide liberty
and security for all.
2. The entire land of Palestine between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is to be established as one country that belongs to all of its citizens.
3. This country must be constituted as one independent and democratic State in which all its citizens enjoy equal rights and can live in freedom and security.
4. The citizens of this State shall include all those who live there and all those who were expelled over the past century and their descendants.
5. We therefore commit ourselves to building an international movement, based on universal principles of peace, equality, justice and human rights, to establish one democratic State in Palestine. This State will be built on the following pillars:
1. Reunified Palestine shall be constituted as a democracy in which all of its adult citizens shall enjoy equal rights to vote, stand for office and contribute to the country’s governance. This democracy shall be based on the following principles:
a. No State law may discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, religion,
language, nationality or gender.
b. No political party may base its platform on ethnic, religious, cultural
or racial segregation, discrimination or supremacy.
c. No organ of State may be created to administer a group separately or
provide special rights on the grounds of race, religion, ethnicity or
nationality.
d. All citizens of the State shall enjoy full human rights and freedoms
as enshrined in all relevant United Nations Covenants, with special
attention to freedoms of expression, religion, language, movement,
residence and assembly.
e. The rights of all minorities shall be protected from any form of
discrimination or inequality stemming from governance by the
majority.
f. The courts, police and administration of justice shall represent all the
people of the land and shall defend, protect, and preserve the ideals of
equality and democracy.
g. The laws of the State shall provide all citizens with equal access to
security, housing, public lands, education, health care, leisure, cultural
expression and all the basic requirements for living in dignity and
freedom.
h. The State shall operate a transparent and non-discriminatory
immigration policy and provide a safe haven for those seeking asylum
from persecution and especially for those in peril of racial or ethnic
persecution.
i. Schools and curricula shall teach the country’s youth to understand
the history of their country and region so that they may grasp and
respect the origins and historical experience of their fellow citizens,
reject racism and doctrines of segregation, honor human rights and
protect human freedoms, and guard the peace, rights and security of
all the people in the country and the world.
2. The State shall not establish or accord special privilege to any religion and shall provide for the free practice of all religions.
a. All residents of the State shall be free to practice their religion and to
worship at sacred sites without impediment or discrimination.
b. The State shall ensure that all religions enjoy equal standing before
the law and that no religion impede the practice of another.
c. All citizens of the State may freely choose whether to abide by
religious law and traditions and shall never lose the protections of
State civil law.
3. The public land of the State shall belong to the nation as a whole and all of its citizens shall have equal access to its use.
a. No physical barrier or law may create enclaves or restrictions that
divide people and communities on the grounds of ethnicity, race,
religion or nationality.
b. The land, natural resources and public infrastructure of the country
shall be administered to benefit all citizens equally and equitabl.
c. Private property expropriated from Palestinian refugees, Palestinian
citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza shall be
restored or reparations made if the original owners or their
descendants consent.
4. The State shall provide the conditions for free cultural expression by all
of its citizens.
a. The constitution and government shall ensure that all languages, arts
and culture may flourish and develop freely.
b. All citizens shall have equal rights to use their own dress, languages
and customs and express their cultural heritage free of insults or
discrimination.
5. Citizens shall have equal access to employment at all levels and in all
sectors of the society.
a. Employment shall not be determined or restricted by language, race,
religion, gender, or nationality.
b. Education and vocational training shall not be segregated or
specialized in any way that impedes equal access of all citizens to
employment and other opportunities to fulfill their talents and dreams.
c. Equal access to work, public facilities and other amenities for citizens
living with disabilities shall be provided in accordance with
international standards and practices.
6. The State shall uphold international law and at all times seek the peaceful resolution of conflicts through negotiation and collective security in accordance with the United Nations Charter.
7. a. The establishment of one democratic state in Palestine shall be
accompanied by the return of the Golan Heights to Syria and any
Lebanese territory occupied by Israel to Lebanon, in order to achieve a
comprehensive regional peace based on justice and international law.
b. The people of a unified Palestine shall reject racism wherever it
occurs and promote anti-racism throughout the world.
c. The State shall seek to build an international order in which all
people can enjoy their essential social, cultural and political rights as
set out in relevant United Nations declarations and covenants and
international human rights law.
d. The State shall seek and contribute to the establishment of a nuclearfree
zone in the Middle East that will also be free of all weapons of mass destruction. All of Israel’s present weapons of mass destruction (including but not limited to its arsenal of nuclear weapons) inherited by the State will be dismantled or destroyed under the auspices of the United Nations within one year of the creation of the new state.
8 CALL TO ACTION
We call on all those who cherish freedom, justice, equality and democracy and who reject racism and segregation to join us in building this movement.
a. We call on Palestinians everywhere to undertake free democratic
debate about the goals and principles of this Declaration in order to
reunify the people and direct the exercise of their inalienable right to
self-determination into establishing one democratic state in Palestine.
b. We call on Jews in Israel and throughout the world to look beyond
the entrapping illusions of Jewish statehood, which can only rest on
discrimination and thereby lead to endless conflict and insecurity, and
channel their dreams for peace into establishing one shared country in
all of Palestine between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, in
which Jewish aspirations, whether religious, cultural or ethnic, can be
fulfilled without dominating others.
c. We urge individuals and groups active in the Campaign for Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions and the entire Palestine solidarity
movement to adopt the principles of this Declaration and add its goals
openly to their platforms and campaigns.
d. We call on civil society organizations that oppose racism and racial
discrimination throughout the world to join us in building this
movement, on the conviction that racism anywhere is a threat to
equality and justice everywhere.
e. We urge civil societies in the Arab and Muslim worlds to support a
unified non-ethnic democracy in Palestine by building public
consensus and issuing public statements to embrace it and by
formalizing platforms that promote ethnic and sectarian equality in
their own countries.
f. We call on Muslim, Jewish and Christian religious scholars and
philosophers to draw on and disseminate wisdom from the holy and
treasured texts that can guide the faithful to seek and support a shared
state in Palestine with full hearts and spiritual resolve.
g. We call on the United Nations, the European Union, the Arab
League, the African Union, the Organization of American States, the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group (ASEAN), the
Commonwealth, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and all
regional organizations and governments of the international
community to abandon diplomacy directed toward the illusory twostate
solution, which is only perpetuating the conflict and human
suffering, and adopt the goals of this Declaration, which are based on
universal human rights as codified in UN instruments developed to
ensure international peace and security.
h. We welcome additional statements that expand and clarify the goals
expressed in this Declaration, as long as they are consistent with its
goals and principles, especially its commitment to universal human
rights, anti-racism and the fundamental equality of all people in
dignity and rights. We urge those who share the vision and goals in
this Declaration to set aside their differences in order to build a unified
and historic movement to realize the ideals of one democratic state in
Palestine.
On this platform, with our international friends and allies, we commit ourselves to restore justice to the people by establishing a unitary democratic state in Palestine in which all citizens can live in security, peace, equality and freedom.
We firmly believe that this great accomplishment will stand as a monument to humanity’s capacity to overcome the legacy of bitter strife; move all peoples of the world to reject beliefs of ethnic supremacy and separation; and inspire people everywhere to work with new hope and energy to create societies, nations and states that defend and secure equality, dignity and human rights for all.
