[News] Even in Palestine, the Birds Shall Return

Thu Aug 1 10:37:33 EDT 2024

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*Even in Palestine, the Birds Shall Return: The Thirty-First Newsletter 
(2024)*

Rula Halawani (Palestine), /Untitled XII /from the Negative Incursion 
series, 2002.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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On 26 July, senior United Nations (UN) officials briefed the UN Security 
Council about the terrible situation in Gaza. ‘More than two million 
people in Gaza remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and 
destruction on a staggering scale’, said 
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Deputy Commissioner-General Antonia De Meo of the UN Relief and Works 
Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Within Gaza, the UN officials 
wrote, 625,000 children are trapped, ‘their futures at risk’. The World 
Health Organisation has recorded 
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‘outbreaks of hepatitis A and myriad other preventable diseases’ and 
warns that it is ‘just a matter of time’ before a polio outbreak spreads 
amongst children. In early July, a letter 
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in /The Lancet/ from three scientists working in Canada, Palestine, and 
the United Kingdom suggested that if they applied a ‘conservative 
estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 
deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or 
even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza’.

Two days before the UN Security Council meeting, on 24 July, Israeli 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed both chambers of the US 
Congress. Two months before this appearance, the International Criminal 
Court (ICC) said 
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it had ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that Netanyahu bears ‘criminal 
responsibility for… war crimes and crimes against humanity’. This 
judgement was utterly set aside by elected US representatives, who 
welcomed Netanyahu as if he were a conquering hero. Netanyahu’s language 
was chilling: ‘give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job 
faster’. What is the ‘job’ that Netanyahu wants the Israeli military to 
finish? In January, the International Court of Justice reported 
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a ‘plausible claim of genocidal acts’ by the Israeli army. So, is the 
‘job’ that Israel wants to complete its genocide of the Palestinian 
people, accelerated by the increased provision of arms and funding by 
the US?

Shurooq Amin (Kuwait), /The Moving Dollhouse/, 2016.

Despite Netanyahu’s complaint that the US has not been sending 
sufficient weapons, in April the US government approved 
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the sale of fifty F-15 bombers to Israel, worth $18 billion, and in 
early July said 
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it would send nearly two thousand 500-pound bombs to be used in Gaza. 
Netanyahu wanted more then, and he wants more now. He wants to ‘finish 
the job’. This genocidal language is sanctified by the US government, 
whose representatives accompanied the call for mass murder with a 
standing ovation.

Outside the halls of government, tens of thousands of people protested 
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Netanyahu’s visit to Congress. They are part of the phalanx of young 
people who have been involved in a cycle of protests against the Israeli 
genocide of Palestinians and against the US government’s total support 
of the violence. Netanyahu called the protestors ‘Iran’s useful idiots’, 
a strange statement made by a foreign guest of the citizens who were 
exercising their democratic rights in their own country. The police used 
pepper spray and other forms of violence to contain the protests, which 
were peaceful and righteous.

While Washington welcomed the accused war criminal, Beijing hosted 
representatives of fourteen Palestinian factions who came to discuss 
their differences and find a way to build political unity against the 
Israeli genocide and colonisation. Just before Netanyahu entered the 
Congressional chamber, the fourteen representatives posed for a 
photograph at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing. Their 
agreement, the Beijing Declaration, advanced their commitment to work 
together against the genocide and the occupation and recognised that 
their disunity has only helped Israel.

Charles Khoury (Lebanon), /Untitled/, 2020.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a range of national liberation 
movements, such as those in South Africa and Palestine, were enfeebled 
and forced to make significant concessions in order to end conflicts 
with their colonisers. After several false starts, the apartheid regime 
in South Africa joined the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum in April 1993, 
which was the site of concessions made by the liberation forces 
(undermined by the assassination of communist leader Chris Hani that 
same month and by attacks from the neo-Nazi Afrikaner 
Weerstandsbeweging). The negotiated transfer of power through the 
interim constitution of November 1993 did not dismantle structures of 
white power in South Africa. Meanwhile, in 1993 and 1995, the 
Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) agreed to the Oslo Accords, in 
which the PLO recognised the state of Israel and agreed to build a state 
of Palestine in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Edward Said 
called 
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the Oslo Accords a ‘Palestinian Versailles’, a judgement that seemed 
harsh at the time but which, in retrospect, is accurate.

Zaina El Said (Jordan), /Ersin/, 2017.

Israel used the Oslo Accords to press its advantage, mainly by building 
illegal settlements across Palestinian land and by denying Palestinians 
the right to free passage through the three non-contiguous territories. 
In 1994, leading groups in the PLO created the Palestinian National 
Authority to bring the factions together in the new state project, but 
the groups that had rejected the Oslo Accords did not want to manage the 
occupation on Israel’s behalf. In January 2006, Hamas won the largest 
bloc in the Palestinian legislative elections, with 74 out of the 132 
seats, and by June 2007 Fatah and Hamas broke relations and ended the 
attempt to build a new, post-Oslo Palestinian national project.

In May 2006, from within Israel’s harsh prisons, five Palestinians who 
represented the five main factions drafted the Prisoners’ Document 
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Abdel Khaleq al-Natsh (Hamas), Abdel Raheem Malluh (Popular Front for 
the Liberation of Palestine), Bassam al-Saadi (Islamic Jihad), Marwan 
Barghouti (Fatah), and Mustafa Badarneh (Democratic Front for the 
Liberation of Palestine). These five factions include two left 
formations, two Islamist formations, and the main national liberation 
platform. The eighteen-point document called upon various groups 
(including Hamas and Islamic Jihad) to reactivate the PLO as their joint 
platform, accept the Palestinian Authority as the ‘nucleus of the future 
state’, and retain the right to resist the occupation. In June, all 
parties signed a second draft of the document. Despite attempts to 
create unity, including during the Israeli assault on Gaza known as 
Operation Summer Rains (June to November 2006), no such convergence was 
possible. The animosity between the Palestinian factions remained.

Zhang Xiaogang (China), /Blindfolded Dancer/, 2016.

This disunity has provided ample space for the Israeli occupation to 
deepen and for Palestinians to flounder without a central political 
project. Several attempts to bring Palestinian political groups into a 
serious dialogue have failed to provide any forward motion, including in 
Cairo in May 2011 and October 2017 and in Algiers in October 2022. Since 
last year, the Chinese government has worked with various regional 
states to invite the fourteen main Palestinian factions to Beijing for 
reconciliation talks. These factions are:

    1. Arab Liberation Front
    2. As-Sa’iqa
    3. Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
    4. Fatah
    5. Hamas
    6. Islamic Jihad Movement
    7. Palestinian Arab Front
    8. Palestinian Democratic Union
    9. Palestinian Liberation Front
    10. Palestinian National Initiative
    11. Palestinian People’s Party
    12. Palestinian Popular Struggle Front
    13. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
    14. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command)

The Beijing Declaration, repeating the formulations in the Prisoners’ 
Document, called 
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for a Palestinian state to be established, for Palestinians’ right to 
resist the occupation to be respected, for Palestinian political groups 
to form 
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an ‘interim national consensus government’, and for the PLO and its 
institutions to be strengthened in order to advance their role in the 
struggle against Israel. Though the declaration of course called for an 
immediate ceasefire and an end to settlement construction in East 
Jerusalem and the West Bank, its main focus was on political unity.

Whether this Chinese-brokered process will yield results when 
Palestinians sit down with Israelis is to be seen. Yet it nonetheless 
marks an advance in this direction and a possible turning point in the 
collapse of a unified Palestinian project that began in the wake of the 
1995 Oslo II agreement. The Beijing Declaration is diametrically opposed 
to the vehemence of Netanyahu’s speech in the US Congress: the latter 
genocidal and dangerous, the former seeks peace in a complex world.

Halima Aziz (Palestine), /Praying Palestinian Women/, 2023.

Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003), one of Palestine’s most wondrous poets, wrote 
‘The Deluge and the Tree’. The fall of the tree, beaten down by the 
deluge, was not its end but a new beginning.

    When the Tree rises up, the branches
    shall flourish green and fresh in the sun,
    the laughter of the Tree shall blossom
    beneath the sun
    and birds shall return.
    Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
    The birds shall return.

The assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (1962–2024) in Tehran 
(Iran) has made the situation deeply difficult, and will make it 
difficult for the birds to sing.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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