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A life devoted to Peace among People and,
dignity and freedom for his Palestine people

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Newspaper La Republica
Montevideo City, Uruguay Republic
November, 29th, 1997.

To 50 years of the Palestine Partition (view)

By Ambassador Suhail Hani Daher Akel
Palestine National Authority Representative In the Argentine Republic

One thousand nine hundred ninety seven is a very special year for the Palestinian people. In this it is 100 years of the Zionist declaration in Basilea for the creation of a Jewish State above Palestine, 80 years of the British declaration for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, 50 years of the partition of Palestine decided by the United Nations, 30 years of the Israeli occupation to the Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem. But it is ten years of the Palestinian Intifada.

Palestine was, millenary, a land aspired by those who showed the transitory power of turn. From before biblical times up to the present, our Arab-Canaanite-Philistine-Semite people of the Palestinian genealogy resisted all the invasions and maintained firmly held to their roots and stones.

When the last century was dying and Palestine had almost four centuries of Turkish-Ottoman occupation, in August 29th, 1897, the Zionist Organization was born in Basilea, Swiss, claiming the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine.

From there on, a Zionist identity spreads out all over the world under the ideological concept of national liberation movement. A “national movement” which, to raise its country, aspires to the national destruction of the other people: the Palestinian people.

In the semantic game of their propagandistic word, they even confuse the term Zionist with the term Jewish and Semite, up to the point that the person who rose his critics against the Zionism was considered anti-Semite, even when this can be of Jewish origin but opposite to the Zionist declaration.

This action makes, in its first stage, that the new temporal force of British occupation in Palestine grant a Jewish National Home in Palestine – in order to satiate temporarily its aspirations – to the Zionist Agency on November 2nd, 1917, by means of Lord Arthur James Balfour.

In an ungovernable country, razed by violence, confusion and terrorist attacks of the European Zionist forces, which had entered under the umbrella of the British occupation. Palestine, victim of a great conspiracy, is set into de disposal of the newly born Society of Nations. So then, the Zionists get the success of their second stage. Without consulting Palestinians, on November 29th, 1947, the United Nations passes, with 33 votes in favor, a Solomonic decision, the resolution 181/II, which specifies the partition of Palestine into two states: a Jewish one (with 55%) and an Arab-Palestinian one (with a 45% of the territory); Jerusalem, the natural and historic capital city of Palestine up to the moment, must become an internationalized city within the limits of the new Palestine State.

With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, which occupies the 77% of the Palestinian territory, whereas that the rest, reduced to a 23%, is controlled by the Transjordan-Egyptian tutelage, Palestine is literally erased from the atlas, its people are replaced by others, and its lands annexed and confiscated. So that Palestinians become refugees within and without their own homeland.

Israel finishes successfully the third Zionist stage with the war on June 5th, 1967, when it occupies militarily the rest of the Palestinian territory and the East sector of Jerusalem, along with the Heights Syrian Golan, among other Arab territories.

With the arrogance of power, intransigence and intolerance, Israelis denied – during decades – the existence of the Palestine State and its People, submerging them in their most pathetic moments of humiliation. But it is this very same yoke the one which makes that the Palestinian people crop up as a phoenix bird from the ashes of the Hopelessness and, on December 8th, 1987, Palestine breaks the strength of occupation and imposes the will of its freedom by means of the Intifada (popular uprising in Arabic).

This popular-political phenomenon forced us to reflect. On one side, the Israelis, in their domestic debate, think over the strength of Intifada and they understand that it is impossible to go on with their rhetoric program of denial, repression and occupation and, at the same time, to look for a pacific way out and an own development in the sensitive region. Meanwhile, in the Palestine country, it is evaluated and concluded that the patriot seal that deprived us, as a national sign, of mentioning all referred to Israelis is not worth. We conclude that it is impossible to look for justice provoking injustice to others, in the same way that they have provoked it us and that we cannot either look for our freedom at the cost of another’s freedom, such as we have been victims, and jeopardize the life of a million of people, such as the integrity of our country was put in danger.

The truth is that, after many decades of violence, two people developed along and wide of those 27,009 square kilometers of millenary Palestine. Today, these people who consider the country as their unique home and who are around 8 million people are the ones to which we must save above all the aspirations of borders and centennial ambition. Believe it or not, after 50 years of the partition, Palestine and Israeli have already become irreversibly two States.

After many unmatchings and terrible pains, Palestinians and Israelis, we could shake our hands, we could begin to laugh and learn to share the little things. Here it is our leit motiv, to save and maintain alive this difficult peace process, which will definitively let us live with tolerance and dignity as two sovereign States and two free people in a mutual economic, social and cultural development.

Otherwise, we will be going back and giving place to the old vices of those who whish to see our people faced and toasting with the cup of blood.

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