[ 16/05/2011 - 10:59 PM ]
The spectacular determination on Sunday, 15 May, by tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees, to return to their ancestral homeland, from which they were so mercilessly and so brutally uprooted at the hands of evil Zionist gangs, demonstrates that the right of return will never ever die.
It also underscores that the right of return, which the apartheid entity known as Israel, has been trying to obliterate and consign to oblivion by way of propaganda and conspiracies, remains the crux of the matter and will never go away as long as even a single Palestinian refugee remains dispersed in the Diaspora.
The fact that Israeli leaders have lost their composure over the Nakba anniversary commemoration this year is understandable. Israel has been trying in vain to erase the right of return from the collective memory and consciousness of the Palestinian people. Israeli leaders, thoroughly absorbed in their arrogance and insolence, thought the old refugees would die and the young ones would forget.
However, the spectacular events of yesterday, the Nakba Day, was a clarion proof that determination to attain the right of return was still as vivid today as it was 63 years ago when the children of the holocaust sought to carry out another holocaust against a people who had nothing to do with whatever happened to Jews in the course of the Second World War.
One Palestinian refugee from the depopulated village of Dawayma, south of the present Jewish settlement of Kiryat Gad, told this writer the following words in commemoration of the Nakba anniversary.
"The right of return is very much like a religion for the Palestinians. You can imagine Jews converting en mass to Third Reich Nazism, but you can't imagine Palestinians giving up the right of return.
"Because the right of return is the heart of the Palestinian problem, and liquidating this right through international conspiracies would mean one thing: the decapitation of the Palestinian people."
As any western-educated journalist would, I confronted that young refugee with all the cold facts, the impossible odds which seem to make the attainment of the right of return far-fetched and next to impossible.
But the young man interrupted me, saying "why is it impossible, why is it far-fetched?
"We are talking about a people that were unfairly and unjustly expelled from their ancestral homeland. These people simply want to go home."
"Yes, of course," this writer, retorted. "But the Israelis are powerful and they more or less control the government of the only super-power in the world, namely the United States."
He didn't give up. "Military might might have the upper hand for some time, but eventually it will give in to the power of truth. Where is the Roman empire? Where is the Soviet Union? Where is Nazi Germany? Where is the British empire? Israel will face the same fate, sooner or later. A country that is based on falsehood and theft and murder and terror shall not last long. Sixty three years are nothing in the annals of history."
As usual, Israeli leaders, officials and spokesmen were frothing at the mouth as they commented on the spectacular reassertion of the right of return on all fronts, south, north and east as well as inside occupied Palestine itself where at least a million internal refugees are still extirpated from their original towns and villages for 63 years.
Benyamin Netanyahu, the pathologically mendacious prime Minister of the Zionist regime claimed that attempts by Palestinian "infiltrators" to "slip" through the borders were an additional proof that the conflict was not over the 1967 borders, but rather over Israel itself.
Well, wake up Mr. Netanyahu from you stupor! Have you forgotten that the very home you live in West Jerusalem belongs to a Palestinian refugee now languishing in misery at a refugee camp in Lebanon?
Don't you feel ashamed living in a home illegally and unlawfully, a home that belongs to a refugee whom your state, which, ironically, you call a light upon the nations, banished to the four corners of the globe?
Another Zionist cabinet minister claimed that the highlighted commemoration of the Nakba anniversary was a demonstration of hatred. Coming from the lying mouths of those who murder school children and then claim they didn't mean it, this is nothing short of fornication with language.
Indeed, by what standard of morality or imagination can we consider the exercise of one's right to return to his or her home an act of hatred?
Quite the contrary, it is the Zionist denial and recalcitrance to prevent these miserable refugees from returning to their homes that is the real expression of hatred.
A last word. The reassertion of the right of return should be an indelible landmark toward the ultimate actualization of that right. It should also be an opportunity to stress and accentuate the right of return as an inviolable constant that must never be subject to compromise and negotiations.
Yes, we don't expect politicians to implement the right of return tomorrow. But we do expect them to preserve the sanctity and inviolable status of that right. In Islam, one doesn't commit adultery if one doesn't possess dowry for marriage.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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