This autumn edition of the Journal of Palestinian Refugee Studies (JPRS) was developed from the theme of our Palestine memorial week 2011. Articles included in this edition focus on the ongoing Nakba (literally catastrophe, the term Palestinians used to describe their exile in 1948).
The Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine fight for the legitimate rights of the Palestinian People through the medium of international law. For far too long, these rights have been ignored. Not only have the Palestinians suffered injustice as a people and as individuals, something that cries out to Heaven for recognition and compassion, but this denial of justice, this culture of denial that lies behind it, is a source of instability in our world that we cannot afford.
I was looking at the news wires last night and I saw the headline, “Obama condemns violence in Tunisia” and perhaps I’m overly cynical, I assumed it was the violence of the protesters, but actually when I read the news story, it said that “President Obama applauds the courage and dignity of Tunisians that have been protesting, soaring unemployment and corruption” and I think that’s very much to be welcomed and we are all watching with trepidation because many people have been killed but also I think there is hope with the events is Tunisia and I wish that President Obama would use the same language about protests in Silwan or in Bil’in.
The topic that I am supposed to speak on is the strategic outlines of a Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Well, I don’t represent the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and there is no one individual that does or even a few, it really doesn’t have any unified leadership and it either has many leaders or no leaders, take your choice. But what I can do is to give some impressions from my own experience of what actually is happening with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Most of the contributions to the Nakba Conference in January focused on developments in the Occupied Territories and in Israel itself; the continueddenial of the right of Palestinians to self-determination, and the discrimination, expropriation of land and property and displacement that attempt to manipulate the demography of Israel itself as well as in the Occupied Territories, and to extend Israeli territorial control as widely as possible.Donate to Keep Refugee Issue alive
