American Jews launch campaign to ‘break the law of return’

Mondoweiss

by Philip Weiss on February 10, 2010 ·

A new campaign has been announced on Facebook by American Jews rejecting the "Law of Return," which allows me to move to Israel tomorrow, while a Palestinian who was born in the ‘48 territories/Israel can’t go near his or her ancestral village. Writes one of the organizers, Amy Kaplan, an English prof at U of Pennsylvania: "Given that Israel sees itself as the Jewish homeland, which it claims to defend on the part of Jewish people everywhere, I feel personally implicated in the violence it perpetrates in our name." From the facebook page:

We are Jews from the United States, who, like Jewish people throughout the world, have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship under Israel’s "law of return."

Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. Israel denies their right to return to their homes and land—a right recognized and undisputed by UN Resolution 194, the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, we are invited to live on that same land simply because we are Jewish.


We renounce this "right" to "return" offered to us by Israeli law. It is not right that we may "return" to a state that is not ours while Palestinians are excluded and continuously dispossessed.

In 1947-49, Zionist militias destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages and made more than 800,000 Palestinian people refugees in order to create a Jewish state on land where the majority was not Jewish. It is Palestinians who have the right to return to their own land. Now in Gaza, where more than three quarters of the people are refugees, the State of Israel not only denies the population its right of return, but also incarcerates the entire Gaza Strip under illegal and inhumane siege conditions.

River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian