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<font size="1"><a href="https://mailchi.mp/22b59d52fd5a/the-nakba-at-72-a-legacy-of-settler-colonialism-apartheid-over-the-palestinian-people-3206790?e=08c14cf485">https://mailchi.mp/22b59d52fd5a/the-nakba-at-72-a-legacy-of-settler-colonialism-apartheid-over-the-palestinian-people-3206790?e=08c14cf485</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Nakba at 72: A Legacy of Settler-Colonialism & Apartheid over the Palestinian People</h1>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">May 15, 2020<br></div>
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<p>Seventy-two years have passed since the Palestinian people were
forcibly expelled from their homes, lands, and property in Palestine
during the Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ which started in 1948. Palestinian
society was decimated during the <a href="https://today.visualizingpalestine.org/?blm_aid=8507392">Nakba</a>,
531 Palestinian villages were destroyed, while Zionist militias carried
out more than 70 massacres in which more than 15 thousand Palestinians
were killed between 1947 and 1949.<a name="_ednref1" title="">[i]</a> Some
two-thirds of the Palestinian people became refugees in and around 1948
and a quarter of those who remained were internally displaced following
the war, denied their right of return to their villages, towns, and
cities of origin ever since. Yet, the Nakba’s colonial legacy lives on.<a name="_ednref2" title="">[ii]</a> At
72, the Nakba is far from a distant memory for the Palestinian people:
it is an ongoing reality of Israeli settler-colonialism, population
transfer, apartheid, and dispossession, policies which have never ended
and continue to be entrenched today.<a name="_ednref3" title="">[iii]</a></p><p><a name="_ednref3" title=""></a><br>
In the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, Israel adopted a series of
laws, policies, and practices, which sealed the dispossession of the
indigenous Palestinian people, systematically denying the return of
Palestinian refugees and other Palestinians who were abroad at the time
of the war, while escalating Palestinian dispossession and imposing a
system of institutionalised racial discrimination over Palestinians who
remained in the land, many of whom had been internally displaced. The
1950 Absentee Property Law became the main legal instrument of
dispossession and was used by Israel to confiscate the property of
Palestinian refugees and displaced persons, who were deemed ‘absentees’
despite the State denying their return. Seventy years after its
adoption, the Absentee Property Law continues to be used to advance the
Judaisation of the city of Jerusalem and to alter its Palestinian
character, demographic composition, and identity.<a name="_ednref4" title="">[iv]</a></p><p><a name="_ednref4" title=""></a><br>
In turn, the 1950 Law of Return and the 1952 Citizenship Law cemented
Israel’s institutionalised racial discrimination in law. Establishing
domination, both in law and in practice, Israel granted every Jew the
exclusive right to enter the State as an immigrant and to obtain
citizenship, while Palestinian refugees have been categorically denied
their right of return, to the homes, lands, and property from which they
were illegally dispossessed, as mandated by international law. These
Israeli laws form the legal foundation of Israel’s settler-colonialism
and apartheid regime of systematic racial domination and oppression over
all Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line and as refugees and
exiles abroad. Seven decades since, Israel continues to impose its
apartheid regime by entrenching the erasure and dispossession of the
indigenous Palestinian people, while ruthlessly fragmenting,
segregating, and isolating Palestinians legally, politically, and
geographically in order to ensure Israeli-Jewish domination.<a name="_ednref5" title="">[v]</a></p><p><a name="_ednref5" title=""></a><br>
As we mark 72 years since the Nakba, the Israeli government’s plan to move forward with <em>de jure</em> annexation
of parts of the West Bank will become another strategic milestone in
Israel’s settler-colonial project in historic Palestine, consisting of
continued land grab, pillage, and displacement of Palestinians through
the maintenance of Israel’s apartheid regime. As recently warned by
Professor Michael Lynk, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on
the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied
since 1967, Israel’s annexation plans “would crystalize a 21<sup>st</sup> century
apartheid, leaving in its wake the demise of the Palestinians’ right to
self-determination. Legally, morally, politically, this is entirely
unacceptable.”<a name="_ednref6" title=""><sup><sup>[vi]</sup></sup></a></p><p><a name="_ednref6" title=""><sup><sup></sup></sup></a><br>
The crimes of the Nakba, including the expulsion of Palestinian
refugees, extensive destruction of Palestinian property, mass killing,
and the prolonged denial of Palestinian refugee return, have never been
prosecuted or remedied. <br></p><p>Just two years ago, the Israeli occupying forces
carried out the mass killing of some 60 unarmed Palestinian protesters
in the Gaza Strip at the eve of the 70<sup>th</sup> Nakba commemoration.<a name="_ednref7" title="">[vii]</a> It
is the injustices of the Nakba and the ongoing denial of the right of
return that led to the Great Return March demonstrations over nearly two
years in Gaza and it is the continued failure to ensure justice and
accountability that has given Israel a greenlight to kill with impunity.
The international community has consistently failed to hold Israel to
account, despite clear tools at its disposal to put an end to this
injustice.</p><p>
Today, States must guarantee international justice and accountability by
supporting a full and thorough investigation by the International
Criminal Court (ICC) into the Situation in Palestine.<a name="_ednref8" title="">[viii]</a> The
Court is competent to investigate the crimes of population transfer,
extensive destruction of property, apartheid,and has a responsibility
to deliver justice to Palestinian victims. At this critical juncture in
the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, which includes the
right of return, support is also needed for the UN Relief and Works
Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) until a durable
solution to the Palestinian refugee question, based on the realisation
of the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights under international law,
is achieved.</p><p>
Seventy-two years on, the Nakba has come to symbolise the ongoing
oppression of the Palestinian people through Israel’s racist colonial
rule, <br></p><p>implemented through an apartheid regime over all Palestinians,
which continues to be entrenched. <a name="_gjdgxs"></a>On Nakba Day, we
call on civil society organisations and state representatives from
around the world to take effective legal and political measures to
eradicate colonialism, to bring perpetrators of suspected war crimes and
crimes against humanity to justice at the ICC, and to publicly
recognise and collectively overcome Israel’s apartheid regime imposed
over the Palestinian people as a whole.</p><p>
<em>See how the Nakba has transformed Palestine since 1948 with this map by Visualizing Palestine marking the Nakba at 72: </em><a href="https://today.visualizingpalestine.org/?blm_aid=8507392"><em>https://today.visualizingpalestine.org/?blm_aid=8507392</em></a><em>.</em><br>
<strong>Signatory organisations:</strong></p>
<ul><li>Members of the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC), including:
<ul><li>Al-Haq – Law in the Service of Mankind</li><li>Al Mezan Center for Human Rights</li><li>Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association</li><li>Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)</li><li>Defense for Children International Palestine (DCIP)</li><li>Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC)</li><li>Aldameer Association for Human Rights</li><li>Ramallah Center for Human Rights Studies (RCHRS)</li><li>Hurryyat – Center for Defense of Liberties and Civil Rights</li><li>The Independent Commission for Human Rights (Ombudsman Office) – Observer Member</li><li>Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights – Observer Member</li></ul>
</li><li>Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO)</li><li>Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem (CCPRJ)</li><li>Community Action Center (Al-Quds University)</li><li>The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD)</li><li>Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS)</li><li>Habitat International Coalition – Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN)</li></ul>
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<p><a name="_edn2" title="">[ii]</a> Rania
Muhareb, “The Nakba 70 Years On: Israel’s Failure to Erase Palestinian
Collective Memory” Al-Haq (15 May 2018), available at: <a href="http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6215.html">http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6215.html</a>.</p>
<p><a name="_edn4" title="">[iv]</a> Al-Haq,
“Palestinian, regional, and international groups submit report on
Israeli apartheid to UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination,” (12 November 2019), p. 10, available at: <a href="http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16183.html">http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16183.html</a>.</p>
<p><a name="_edn5" title="">[v]</a><em> Ibid.</em>, p. 8.</p>
<p><a name="_edn7" title="">[vii]</a> Al-Haq,
“‘Bloody Monday’ – Documentation of the Shoot-to-kill, Egregious
Killings Committed by the Israel Occupying Force (IOF) on 14 May 2018,”
(26 May 2018), available at: <a href="http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6196.html">http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6196.html</a>.</p>
<p><a name="_edn8" title="">[viii]</a> <em>See </em>Al-Haq,
“Al-Haq Publishes Q&A on the Situation in the State of Palestine at
the International Criminal Court,” (29 April 2020), available at: <a href="http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16792.html">http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16792.html</a>. <em>See also</em> Al-Haq,
“Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Publish Detailed Review Paper
on Submissions Made to International Criminal Court on Territorial
Jurisdiction,” (29 April 2020), available at: <a href="http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16796.html">http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/16796.html</a>.</p>
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