The eighth Annual International Al-Awda Convention was held recently in Anaheim, California, and was attended by a packed audience of Palestinians and their growing numbers of supporters. The term "Al-Awda" means "return" in Arabic and refers to the right of Palestinians to return to the homes from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and 1967.
‘The negotiation process’ was the subject of a presentation delivered by Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and former legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiation team. Buttu explained that the issue of negotiations goes all the way back to the 1970s, after Israel had militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. At that time, she stated, there was a fundamental shift on the part of the PLO. It moved away from the belief that Palestinian refugees should return to their homes. "Rather than focussing on Al-Awda, the undoing of 1948, it became an accommodation of current circumstances, an accommodation of Israel's presence, an accommodation to Zionism… Rather than focussing on the right of return, the focus now became on statehood and with it all the trappings of statehood," said Buttu.
Buttu called this a trap that the PLO and later the Palestinian Authority fell into. It led Palestinians down a false path from which Palestinians can only escape if they "redirect, reshape and reframe our mode of thinking".
The negotiations, she said, did not really fail. In fact they succeeded from the viewpoint of Israel. "It ended up being yet another tool that Israel uses in the long term strategy of trying to confine the Palestinians into as small a space as possible, take as much of their land as possible, while all the while pretending that there are talks, partners, and negotiations."
Buttu said Palestinians must challenge the ideology that Israelis and settlers have more rights than Palestinians. The symptoms in this conflict are the construction of settlements, the confiscation of lands, the confining of Palestinians into small spaces. "The disease is the viewpoint that Israelis have more of a right to live in historic Palestine than the Palestinians do."
Read more about the comments of Buttu and other speakers at the Al-Awda Conference in the article "Return, so be it", written by Anayat Durram, published on line by the newspaper Al-Ahram on May 12th, 2010. See: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/997/re5.htm
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