Without A Map Rotating Header Image

Postcard From Palestine

Published in The Nation
Christopher Hayes | October 14, 2010

Hebron

The first thing you notice when you drive into Hebron is the lack of cars. Since 1997 this second-largest Palestinian city in the West Bank, the only one with an Israeli settlement in its midst, has been formally divided. Within the Israeli section, which takes up much of the historic downtown, Palestinians are not allowed to drive, so they walk or use donkey carts. When people are ill or injured, they are carried to the hospital. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the 30,000 Palestinians who once lived here have moved out. According to a 2007 report from Israeli human rights organizations, more than 1,000 Palestinian housing units in the area have been left vacant, and more than 75 percent of the businesses in the central district have closed. A handful of shops remain open; a cluster or two of children play in the street. But that’s it. The streets are buried under the heaviness of an ominous quiet. Periodically, buses rumble past bringing settlers to and from the adjoining settlement, Kiryat Arba, and Israel proper. In the absence of routine urban noise, their engines sound like gunshots.

I went to Israel and the West Bank with a group of American journalists on a trip sponsored by the New America Foundation. We were led through the streets of Hebron by Mikhael Manekin, a former Israel Defense Forces soldier who patrolled the city during the second intifada. He now runs an organization called Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony about IDF human rights abuses from Israeli soldiers. I had heard of Hebron, of course, but it was lodged vaguely in my mind as one of those foreign places where awful things happen. To see it in person is to understand viscerally that the status quo in the West Bank cannot hold. To see it is to understand just what occupation requires.

Because of the Cave of the Patriarchs—where Abraham is said to have buried his wife and was later laid to rest—Hebron is a very holy site for Jews and Muslims. Hebron’s long history has been one of occupation and coexistence, punctuated by periods of slaughter. Romans, Crusaders and Ottomans have all ruled the city, sometimes denying access to the holy sites to disfavored groups. In 1929 Arab rioters killed sixty-seven of the small number of Jewish residents of the city (several hundred were saved by their Arab neighbors, who hid them in their homes), and the last Jewish resident left the city in 1948. In 1968, just a year after Israel occupied Hebron, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a spiritual founder of the settler movement, traveled with a few students to the city for Passover. Once there, they refused to leave, extracting a concession from the Labor government at the time to settle them in the adjacent army base of Kiryat Arba, which today is a settlement of 7,200.

In 1979 ten women and forty children from Kiryat Arba sneaked into the abandoned Jewish hospital in downtown Hebron under cover of night and also refused to leave. Over the next fifteen years, they were joined by hundreds of other settlers—men, women and children—drawn from the most zealous, who came to inhabit the surrounding buildings.

Over the past three decades, violence has been a mainstay. In 1980 Palestinians killed six yeshiva students in the city center. In 1988 Levinger shot and killed a Palestinian store owner, pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and served thirteen weeks in prison. In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, from Kiryat Arba, entered the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs and murdered twenty-nine Muslim worshipers before he was overcome and killed. The IDF imposed near total curfews on area Palestinians.

Then, in 1997, as part of the Oslo peace process, security control over Hebron was divided. Palestinian Hebron, now home to some 170,000, fell under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and became known as H1. The section dominated by Israeli settlers remained under IDF control and became known as H2. There are 800 Israeli citizens who live in H2, with 500 IDF soldiers to guard them.

Within its jurisdiction, the IDF enforces a policy it calls “separation,” which has a renewed urgency in the wake of the second intifada. A three-foot concrete barrier runs down the main street of the downtown, creating a small shoulder where Palestinians may walk; Israelis pass on the other side. A few blocks farther on, an Israeli soldier and a flag on a rooftop herald the beginning of the zone the army calls “fully sterilized,” meaning no Palestinians. A young merchant hawking bracelets followed our group, entreating us to buy a souvenir. He stopped short, as if running into a glass wall, the moment we hit the outpost.

It felt as if we were walking through a postapocalyptic urban video game brought to life. The old Hebron gold market sat empty and trashed, every shop door was shuttered, graffiti was scrawled over much of the area. Eight Israeli soldiers with flak jackets and machine guns marched slowly past in formation, making their regular patrol through the deserted streets. A police car began to tail us, since Mikhael has been assaulted by settlers while leading people through the neighborhood.

In the courtyard outside the main settlers’ apartment complex, a group of boys played soccer in a lot sandwiched between a large recycling bin half full of plastic bottles and a sign that read, in part: This land was stolen by arabs following the murder of 67 hebron jews in 1929. We demand justice! Return our property to us! Women in head wraps and long skirts pushed strollers; men walked past with shopping bags. Though they live inside a heavily militarized garrison, they can walk the empty streets as if in a European pedestrian mall.

Around the corner, on Shuhada Street, are the last Palestinian holdouts in the neighborhood. They occupy second-floor apartments with balconies covered in metal braces and chicken wire. Because the street is closed to Palestinians, the residents of these caged apartments are not allowed to use their front doors; at those rare times when they leave to get provisions they must go out via the roof or makeshift doors.

As we reached the limits of H2, past graffiti of Stars of David and the slogan For every settlement evacuated, we will kill 100 Arabs, we arrived at an Israeli checkpoint, a small wooden shack manned by a few soldiers. Mikhael told us that as an Israeli, he couldn’t go through but urged us to do so. As if passing through a magic portal, we emerged on the other side into the honking, bustling chaos of a living city: shops selling T-shirts and DVDs, shopkeepers smoking cigarettes and shouting to one another over the noise, commuters hailing cabs and pedestrians dodging snarled traffic. And then, back through the magic door and into the deathly silence of occupied Hebron.

There, while settlers routinely harass Palestinian residents and the tension sometimes erupts into violence, the IDF has succeeded in its immediate goal of avoiding large-scale bloodshed. This has come, however, at the cost of turning a holy city into a moral obscenity. One might be tempted to dismiss Hebron as unique, but Mikhael insists it’s only a matter of degree rather than kind. “This is the same policy all over the West Bank,” he says. “Separation, militarization, patrol roads. In rural areas it looks a lot nicer, but it’s no different.”

At a lunch earlier that day, a prominent member of the Yesha Council, the organizing body for the settler movement, told us his “conscience is clear” about Israeli settlement and the occupation of the West Bank. But after the tour of Hebron, our bus driver, who hadn’t been to the West Bank since serving there in the 1967 war, looked at us as we boarded the bus and said, “As an Israeli, I am shocked.”

Before long, Israelis may not have to travel to Hebron to see what full-spectrum urban occupation looks like. In recent years, the most ideological of the settler organizations have, with government help, stepped up efforts to “Judaize” East Jerusalem, to make it far more difficult to incorporate into a Palestinian state, should that day arrive.

Things are especially tense in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, where settlers have purchased apartment complexes and number about 500, dotted among 60,000 Palestinians. In September a private Israeli security guard shot and killed a Palestinian father of five named Samer Sirhan. The guard claimed he was faced with a life-threatening ambush from which he had to shoot his way out, but witnesses and security camera footage contradicted his account. The police accepted the guard’s version, and no charges were filed. Since then there’s been an escalation of rock-throwing at the settlers, and settlers have called for a heavier police presence and more security. On the day we toured East Jerusalem, the head of the Silwan settlers, David Be’eri, ran over two Palestinian boys after his car was targeted by rock-throwers. Many people told us that if there is a third intifada, it will start in Silwan.

In the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, another settler group has used a few Ottoman-era land deeds and the power of the state to evict fifty-three Palestinians from their homes—which their families had moved to after being expelled in 1948 from their original homes in present-day Israel. The evictions have been denounced by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Israeli author David Grossman and have sparked a weekly protest that every Friday draws many Israelis to the only municipal park in East Jerusalem. But so far, despite legal appeals, the settlers remain in the houses.

There is a pointed irony in the settlers using pre-1948 deeds to make their case for occupying the homes in Sheikh Jarrah: it is usually Palestinians, demanding their right of return, who argue that pre-1948 deeds are legitimate. “From a Zionist perspective, it’s suicide,” activist and writer Didi Remez says about these settlers. “What they’re trying to do is bring Hebron to Jerusalem.” God help us if they succeed.

SOUTH HEBRON HILLS: Israeli military demolishes three cisterns and two wells in arid region

CPTnet 17 December 2010
A newsletter written by members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams.

SOUTH HEBRON HILLS  On 14 December 2010, the Israeli military demolished three water cisterns and two wells in the arid and hilly Khashem Ad Daraj/Hathaleen region, about twenty-six km southeast of Hebron/al-Khalil on Tuesday. The military gave no reason for the destruction of the wells and cisterns.

The demolitions follow a pattern of destruction of Palestinian property by the Israeli military in the Oslo Accords-defined Area C.

The Israeli army failed to deliver demolition orders to the residents of the villages in the area and instead left them under a stone two days earlier for the residents to find.

The demolished cisterns and wells supplied drinking water to the villagers as well as their sheep and goats, the primary sources of food and income for the villages in the area.

The wells were up to 300 meters deep and over seventy years old, pre-dating the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The Israeli military claims that it does not destroy structures created before 1967.

The region receives an average yearly rainfall of between 150-250 mm.*

*Applied Research Institute, Jerusalem & United Nations World Food Programme. February 2010 Report.

The beginnings of Christmas in Bethlehem

This week, Christmas stores have popped up throughout Bethlehem.

My favorite Christmas goodies

1.  Para-gliding, blow-up Santa

2.  Mix-CD of Arabic and international Christmas tunes, homemade by the shopkeeper himself and on sale for $3.

3.  A tree that showers itself with fake snow.

Christmas cheer!
The city is covered in Christmas lights, from lamp posts to restaurants.  Below is a photo of the Christmas lighting as it ends in front of The Wall near Aida Camp and Rachel’s Tomb.

Christmas cheer + The Wall = Christmas in the occupied territories

AL-KHALIL (HEBRON) REFLECTION: Preparing children for peace

CPTnet Volume 36, Issue 3
A newsletter written by members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams

This autumn, a local businessman alerted three CPTers to the presence of a group of soldiers outside the Ibrahimi School, located in the heart of the Old City.

Upon arrival, the school principal informed CPT that a settler boy, around seven years old, had accused two Palestinian boys from the Ibrahimi School of throwing a rock at him.  Soldiers wanted to enter the school with the settler child to identify and arrest the Palestinian boys, and the school principal responded by saying they would first need to get
permission from the Palestinian Minister of Education.

Over a period of three hours, fifty Israeli soldiers, twenty settlers and Israeli police gathered outside the school. When the Palestinian Ministry of Education told the soldiers that they could not enter the school, the Israeli army disregarded his decision and entered the school with the settler boy in tow.

Two Palestinian boys under the age of eighteen were arrested in front of their peers and taken to the local police station. The Israeli army and police informed the Minister of Education that these arrests were necessary for “maintaining the peace,” because the group of settlers gathered outside the school had threatened to remain and harass the school
children if the police did not arrest the Palestinian boys.

Over the years, people on the Hebron team have witnessed settler children attack Palestinian children many times, and to the best of our knowledge, no police officer has ever taken a Palestinian child into an Israeli school to point out his/her attackers.  Indeed, when adult Palestinians and internationals provide documentation of settler children attacking Palestinian children and adults, police and soldiers usually dismiss them rudely.

The Ibrahimi School incident not only shows the lack of impartiality on the part of the police, but also that settler accusations supersede preserving the educational environment of Palestinian children.

The entry of soldiers into educational institutions signifies to children that schools are not safe places for them, thus creating further barriers to education.

The young settler boy that made the rock throwing accusation was prompted by his father and other adult settlers to demand entry into the Ibrahimi School during school hours. Settler adults brought a number of settler children with them to the school and refused to obey the soldiers instructions for children to leave the scene.

Children need safe environments where they can learn and grow. Unfortunately, what CPT observes here in Al-Khalil is that children, both Palestinian and Israeli, are not being brought up in a spirit of love or respect for others.

The Israeli authorities in this area are not preparing children for a life of peace, tolerance, and equality — a life that all children deserve.

For footage of the Ibrahimi school incident, click here

Wadi Rahal villagers commit to non-violent resistance

In 1975, Wadi Rahal (The Valley of Travelers) villagers built the school where their kids are educated to this day.  Seven months ago, villagers found a map, placed carefully under two rocks so it wouldn’t blow away.  This map was left by Israeli soldiers for villagers to find, it indicated the planned route of The Wall that will be built around the village.  It will be built 10 meters away from their school.

Immediately after finding the map, five college students from Wadi Rahal began organizing non-violent demonstrations against The Wall.  These students, since 2006, have also provided summer camps for the kids in the village, giving them a place to play, English lessons and training in non-violent resistance.  Once, the kids were able to go on a trip to the sea, an opportunity most Palestinian children do not have as the coast is inaccessible by Palestinians.

Wadi Rahal kids enjoying a day at the beach

Wadi Rahal’s 1700 residents live in the shadow of Efrata, one of the largest Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  The settlers control Wadi Rahal’s water, which flows through a shared water pipe that fills the village’s tanks.  During the summer when water is a priceless commodity, villagers say that Efrata cuts their water to one day a week, leaving them to savor the water in their tank for a week.

A mobile clinic run by Palestinian Medical Relief Services comes once a week for three hours.  At other times, villagers must travel to Bethlehem for medical assistance.

Before 6:00pm, the Israeli army locks a gate that separates the highway (route 60) from the road to the settlement and the village.  Once locked up, villagers have to take a much longer, winding route out of the area.

Any noise at night scares the villagers, whose homes are subject to twice-monthly raids.  Israeli soldiers enter the village at night to search a home.  They knock on doors with the butt of their machine guns and, if the door isn’t opened fast enough, the soldiers break it down.  When they leave, the house is ransacked and things are broken.  What they search for, no one is sure.

Every Friday at noon, the college students organize a non-violent demonstration against the impending construction of The Wall.

For more information about Wadi Rahal, please go to their new website here. Without A Map will be working Wadi Rahal villagers to complete their website and upload more interactive elements.  Stay tuned!

Ahava Flashmob

The Bathrobes Brigade has contacted numerous Dutch magazines to inform them about the ugly truth of Ahava beauty products and requested that they do not advertise for this product of stolen beauty.

Remembering Home

This year wasn’t my first Thanksgiving abroad, a holiday that is oh-so-North-American that celebrations overseas usually take on a little local flavor. In Kerala, India we were treated to curried barbeque chicken and the most delicious mashed potatoes I may ever taste. I wore a navy blue churidar to that meal. In Dublin, our Irish hosts had a special meal cooked up for our group of college students on a social justice study trip. We arrived after dark and left patches of snow on the carpeted stairs as we tromped up to the second floor, where we ate family-style. In Rome, I wore chic black and ate Chinese food at a restaurant in Monte Mario. Each time, the food was warm and delicious and I felt thankful to be among friends thoughtful enough to make Thanksgiving part of their week.

This year I celebrated Thanksgiving with hummus and pita in Bethlehem, Palestine while my Mom and younger brother made prime rib and Yorkshire pudding in Madison, WI. They probably talked about his latest rugby game and her projects at work and their upcoming trip to the Holy Land for Christmas. Pete fixed a few things in the house and carried the water softener salt to the basement while Mom set the table with festive placemats and a bouquet of enormous sunflowers. It probably smelled like slowly cooking meat and the house felt warm and cozy, at least in the rooms where Mom didn’t close the vents to save energy. Van Morrison probably crooned on speakers throughout the house. They might have remembered little Briggs, the ancient cat who blessed my family with her tiny presence from my childhood into my young adulthood. Though her little legs were atrophied in old age, she continued to launch herself with reckless abandon over sofas and between our legs, and proceed to sleep for hours with the same reckless abandon that got her to her latest perch.

Thanksgiving, even more than Christmas, is a time when going home is about just that – going home. There aren’t gifts or mad shopping-sprees to make you sweat with pressure. It’s a time to cook extravagantly and eat American-ly, and then sleep with the reckless abandon only possibly during a long weekend.

Once I left home for college, returning home make me conscious of what it felt like to be home, something I had taken for granted when I was always there. I realized that it smelled like detergent and wood and a constantly brewing pot of Red Rose tea. Mom would make up my bedroom with clean sheets, often placing a small vase of fresh flowers on my nightstand. I’d return to school realizing that no, I wasn’t actually Buddhist, and the guy I was dating was a materialistic yahoo and that I should take an afternoon and go to the Art Institute to absorb inspiration and realize my vast potential.

Home, no matter where you are, is a place of rejuvenation and encouragement, solace and stability, family and peace. When I asked friends what home means for them, whether American or Palestinian, their responses were fed with the same nourishing sentiments.

“Home is safe, caring, giving and can be anywhere as long as it’s a place where one can feel alive.”

“There is a song that says that home is where I’m loved, which is turning out to be the most true definition of home for me. Until I reach my own definition of the physical meaning of the home, I would say that my home is the virtual space where I’m comfortable. It could be a nice gathering in the evening or it could be a sweet late phone call with someone you love.”

“A place to be carefree without worries. Being with family. The only door that is always open when other doors are closed. Home is a place where one finds peace, solitude, serenity, tranquility and enjoys his time regardless of how trivial his lifestyle is, he still finds it to be sublime.”

“Home equals warmth, love and encouragement. It’s where you can just be you.”

“Home is where the heart is and where you make it a place of welcome. It is a place where family and friends can come any time…and there will be food.”

Home is hardly ever about the actual structure, it’s about the feelings you have when you are there. That is, until the structure itself is at risk.

My apartment in the West Bank is within spitting distance of The Wall near Rachel’s Tomb. When I look out my bedroom window, I see it wrapping around the other side of my building, up the hill next to Aida Refugee Camp. Heavy cement blocks soar up to 25-feet-tall with metal fencing on top, the kind that protects innocent outsiders from dangerous prisoners inside (I’m on the inside). I have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge kitchen and a living room that seats nine because the family that used to live here moved out when The Wall was built. Their store on the first floor failed because the street was difficult for shoppers to access and their view was, suddenly, demoralizing rather than breathtaking.

Fear and resignation are emotions I don’t relate to when I think of my home, but for some of my Palestinian friends this is their reality at home.

Once, I was invited to dinner during Ramadan at a friend’s house in a village called Sarra, situated near Nablus on the top of a hill and surrounded by Israeli settlements on all sides. As we walked through the village, my friend expressed pride in the beauty of her neighborhood. She pointed to her house from far away, “That is my home.”

The house was gorgeous, with a special room for the eldest daughter to teach English to kids in the village. The three daughters shared a pink bedroom. Her father, a taxi driver, came home just for dinner and then returned to work until nearly midnight. He cracked jokes and his daughters poked fun at him during dinner. He fed his wife a piece of bread with a look of admiration and adoration on his face. He made the best of the few minutes he had with his loved ones, relaxing in the home he created with them.

We sat on their porch to eat, sitting elbow to elbow on a mat that wrapped us around the generous meal. In the distance, I noticed a growing flame. Olive trees were on fire. I looked around at the family members when we all noticed and saw on their faces something frightening, resignation. They were so accustomed to watching their land burn, that they were resigned to it. We watched an Israeli army jeep drive past the fire, doing nothing about the huge flames burning innocent olive trees, the crops and livelihood of Sarra villagers. We continued to eat as the land burned.

Yesterday I visited Wadi Rahal, a beautiful village nestled among sloping hills and surrounded by olive trees just a few kilometers from Bethlehem. We drove the winding path from route 60 to the village, the foundation of The Wall followed us. When built, The Wall will separate the village from its own olive trees. It will sit 10 meters from the village’s one school. It will cut off the village from the highway. I met with two college students, both activists doing their best organize weekly demonstrations and train the village in non-violent ways to resist The Wall.

They said that, about twice a month, Israeli soldiers enter one of the homes in the village in the middle of the night to do a search. They use the butt of their machine guns to bang on the door. If it isn’t opened in time, they break down the door. They wake up the entire family and search the entire house, breaking dishes and wreaking havoc. One of the guys said if he hears any noise at night he believes it is the army and it scares him. His home does not feel safe.

Each Thanksgiving, many recognize that the holiday symbolizes a loss of land and livelihood for one group of people and the victory of another. While I stare at The Wall from my kitchen window, I think about my neighbors in Aida Refugee Camp, who were kicked out of their homes in 1948 so that Israeli families could have a homeland. I am thankful that during my Thanksgiving dinners at home, I have never looked out the window to see our trees burning down. I am thankful that I can sleep, with reckless abandon, after a huge turkey (or prime rib) meal, knowing that I don’t need to feel scared. My home smells like detergent and wood and Red Rose tea, and I’m not afraid of losing it.

Most of the time I feel that the conflict for a home in Israel and Palestine is too complicated to ever truly grasp, but sometimes, like on Thanksgiving, it seems pretty simple.

Princeton Sabra hummus vote

PRINCETON, N.J. — Princeton University students voted Monday in a referendum by a pro-Palestine student group on whether to expand the school’s hummus offerings.

The student group Princeton Committee for Palestine wants university-run stores to offer alternative brands of the Middle Eastern chickpea dip because they say the only brand available is linked to human rights violations.

The brand, Sabra, is owned by PepsiCo and Strauss Group, and Strauss’ website says it supports members of the Israeli military.

The group has been pushing for the university to boycott and get rid of its investments in companies that make donations to parts of the Israeli military that it says violate human rights.

Ilya Welfeld, a spokeswoman for Sabra, which has headquarters in Queens, N.Y., and Richmond, Va., said Sabra only makes donations in North America — and none of them are political.

But the Strauss Group, an Israeli food conglomerate, says on its website that it makes contributions for the “welfare, cultural and educational activities” of members of the Israeli military.

Students seeking the referendum made it happen by collecting 200 signatures. If the effort is successful, it would mean the student government would make a formal request to the Ivy League school’s administration to provide additional brands of hummus.

The pro-Israel student group Tigers of Israel opposes the referendum. The group says the allegations raised by the other side are sketchy.

The results of the vote are scheduled to be released Friday.

The referendum was originally scheduled for last week but was canceled then because of a goof: The wording called for Sabra hummus not to be offered at university stores rather than for additional products to be sold, too.

—Copyright 2010 Associated Press

Read the original article on wsj.com here

Palestine 2011

BY JEFF HALPER for Middle East Post

Struggling as I have for the past decades to grasp the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and find ways to get out of this interminable and absolutely superfluous conflict, I have been two-thirds successful. After many years of activism and analysis, I think I have put my finger on the first third of the equation: What is the problem? My answer, which has withstood the test of time and today is so evident that it elicits the response…“duh”…is that all Israeli governments are unwaveringly determined to maintain complete control of Palestine/Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, frustrating any just and workable solution based on Palestinian claims to self-determination. There will be no negotiated settlement, period.

The second part of the equation – how can the conflict be resolved? – is also easily answerable. I don’t mean entering into the one state/two state conundrum and deciding which option best. Under certain circumstances both could work, and I can think of at least 3-4 other viable options as well, including my favorite, a Middle Eastern economic confederation. The Palestinian think tank Passia published a collection of twelve proposed solutions a few years ago. What I mean is, it is not difficult to identity the essential elements of any solution. They are, in brief,

· A just, workable and lasting peace must be inclusive of the two peoples living in Palestine/Israel;

· Any solution must provide for a national expression of each people, not merely a democratic formula based on one person-one vote;

· It must provide economic viability to all the parties;

· No solution will work that is not based on human rights, international law and UN resolutions.

· The refugee issue, based on the right of return, must be addressed squarely.

· A workable peace must be regional in scope; it cannot be confined merely to Israel/Palestine; and

· A just peace must address the security concerns of all the parties and countries in the region.

These seven elements, I would submit, must configure any just solution. If they are all included, a settlement of the conflict could take many different forms. If, however, even one is missing, no solution will work, no matter how good it looks on paper.

Read the rest of the article on The Middle East Post website.

The Windy City Makes Waves for Peace, Equity and Justice in Palestine

BY STEPHEN LENDMAN for Op Ed News

The suburban Chicago-based Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (CJPIP) “is a diverse, community-based group dedicated to organizing activities and educational events that advance the cause of peace and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.”

It supports:

— equal rights and access to resources (equitably) based on social, economic, environmental, and political justice principles

— peace and equal justice

— an end to Israel’s illegal occupation and continuing land theft

— an end to US policies that sustain the occupation

— international support for an equitable and just negotiation process

— granting Palestinian refugees their right of return, guaranteed under international law

— ending all forms of individual, organizational, and state-sponsored terror.

Read the entire article by Stephen Lendman here.

Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine website.