Posts Tagged ‘Palestinian refugees’
“Women of Color Against Violence” stated its support for the Palestinian liberation struggle: Decision for Grant reversed
Posted on: January 30, 2021
Revolution will not be funded: NGO-ization of Palestine, Ford Foundation
Posted November 22, 2013
While NGO-ization is a more recent phenomenon, it is part of a legacy of outside interests attempting to shape a liberation struggle in a way that support imperial forces rather than the Palestinian people.
While many organizations have responded to such pressures by abandoning their principles for expediency’s sake, INCITE! instead responded in two ways:
1. it engaged in a revision of its fundraising strategies, looking for more grassroots sources rather than foundations; and
2. it organized an anthology of essays by activists and organizers that addresses the “deleterious effects foundations can have on radical social justice movements.”
The essays are collected and published under the title, The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
YAMAN posted in Kabobfest this JANUARY 21, 2010
The NGOization of Palestine
In 2004, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence received an e-mail from the Ford Foundation.
In the e-mail, the foundation rescinded a $100,000 grant it had awarded the group, explaining “that it had reversed its decision because of the organization’s statement of support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.”
The collection is a rigorous analysis and interrogation of the non-profit 501(c)(3) model of organizing. The political costs associated with such forms of incorporation and the loss of accountability associated with a duty towards large donors rather than the constituencies that organizers purport to care about.
The essays study how large foundations — like the Ford Foundation, which was funded in part by the CIA [Edit: To clarify the foundation itself was not funded by the CIA but some of its grants were. Moreover there was extensive collaboration between CIA and Ford Foundation during the Cold War.]– control social justice movements through the power of the purse.
The essays are an important and thought provoking read for all US-based activist concerned with social justice, and even those on the verge of graduation who believe that non-profit work is the most progressive route for change.
Having attended the Al Fakhoora Student Conference in Doha last weekend, I am posting an excerpt of the chapter The NGOization of Palestine, which includes interviews with Professor Hatem Bazian of American Muslims for Palestine, Professor Zeina Zaatari of the Global Fund for Women, and Atef Said an Egyptian human rights lawyer.
Having attended, I thought it worthwhile to consider the issues raised in these interviews and by the book in general.
How have non-profits impacted Palestinian and other Arab liberation struggles?
Hatem Bazian: NGOs control the purse strings. Through this funding or through the staff they hire, they assert their political agenda. For example, the largest coalition of organizations that work on Palestine do not insist on US divestment from Israel or devote organizing resources into achieving this agenda.
But look at the solidarity movements that developed around apartheid South Africa and Central America: they made divestment central to their struggle.
These movements recognized that economic sanctions and pressure are central to change a government’s policies. When it comes to Palestine, NGOs do not want to offend certain segments of the liberal Zionist community.
So they shift their focus to changing Israel’s mind without making Israel suffer. This kind of strategy was dismissed as ineffectual in the South African and Central American solidarity movements.
The Palestinian struggle (which does not differentiate between land stolen from Palestinians in 1948 and land stolen in 1967) has demanded the right of return for all Palestinian refugees and calls for Palestine to be a complete whole.
(Mind you the UN decision in 1947 divided Palestine into 2 States. While the Jews were barely 40%, they were given 57% of the land)
But today, almost all NGOs and foundations call for a “two-state solution” that insists Israel, as it’s currently constructed, must exist as is, and that Palestinians must learn to accept colonization and occupation.
The two-state solution defends Israel’s “right” to define itself on racially exclusivity criteria, and hence exist as a racially apartheid state.
By proposing that Palestine exist as a divided, demilitarized state whose resources are fully controlled by Israel, this approach effectively eliminates the possibility of Palestinians having a real state that encompasses their historical and international rights. In other words, this “solution” would essentially dispense with the 6 million Palestinian refugees.
In other solidarity movements, there is often the understanding that they exist to support liberation struggles, not to dictate the terms of those struggles. However, when it comes to Palestine, NGOs feel they have the right to tell Palestinians what to do.
In their framework, the problem is Not Israeli colonization and occupation; the problem is that Palestinians need to be trained to develop “civil society” and learn to cooperate with Israel.
Consequently, funding is often focused on developing joint “Israeli-Palestinian” ventures and projects rather than address the issue of occupation.
The NGOization of the solidarity movement in the US has been so thorough that anyone who criticizes this position is silenced and marginalized.
(For instance, in the Bay Area there used to be an annual demonstration for Peace, Jobs, and Justice throughout the 1980s, and No speakers on Palestine were allowed to speak , Nor they supported the two-state solution.)
Without exception, every foundation that funds work on Palestine (from the most conservative to the most “progressive”) does so from the understanding that Israel, as it currently exists, should stay intact, and the solution is to change Palestinians aso that they will adapt to their colonial situation.
For instance, the [Open Society Institute] wants to bring Palestinian intellectuals to the US to “train them.” Train them to do what?
Train them to see the situation in the way the US does and facilitate the continued colonization of Palestine?
Zeina Zaatari: Organizations that are able to operate and function and have enough resources to hire staff–these organizations are careful and strategic about what they say. There are lines they do not cross, or else they are penalized.
United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) has more foundation support than Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), although both coalition efforts organize against war.
A big difference is that ANSWER includes Arab organizations with a clear political view, groups UPFJ doesn’t invite into its leadership.
Basically, it is not okay for organizations to address Zionism or historic Palestine. You can talk about occupation, but you cannot talk about discrimination within the Israeli state or the right to return.
For instance, San Francisco Women Against Rape lost funding when it started to address the issue of Zionism in its organization. On the issue of Lebanon, it is okay to send money for support services, but it is not okay to talk about liberation.
If you talk about violence, you must denounce the liberation movement in Lebanon; you cannot focus on the violence perpetrated by Israel.
Follow the money track, and it’s clear that foundations are driving these and other political agendas.
For another example of how deeply foundation funding impacts this movement, compare the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) with the National Council of Arab Americans.
The ADC works with the FBI, supports US interventions in Afghanistan, does not take clear stands on Palestine, and works with US government officials (such as Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright) who are responsible for killing our people. Its focus is to make Arabs acceptable to the mainstream US, not grassroots organizing.
Meanwhile, The National Council of Arab Americans calls for an end to the colonization of Palestine, addresses Zionism, and does not support the two-state solution. Consequently, it has a much more difficult time getting funding. Additionally, as a result of the Patriot Act, even individuals are afraid to support Arab liberation organizations because they are targeted by the US government.
Atef Said: In Egypt, NGOization often competes with grassroots organizing work. or instance, in labor organizing, NGOs encourage workers not to clash with business owners, thus pacifying labor struggles.
Sadly, most NGO leaders were previously involved in the country’s Left movements, but were seduced into the NGO world because they can be funded (including personal benefits like travel and luxury hotel accommodations) and incur less trouble with the establishment.
A significant problem with this model, of course, is that NGOs depend on foundations for their resources, not the people.
Thus, they spend little if any time organizing and are instead accountable only to their funders. For example, since NGOs err dependent on foundation support, directors of NGOs focus on quantity rather than quality of work (that is publish more reports in less time).
In 1997 and 1998, I started to observe from my work in these human rights NGOs that they are a bit isolated, and while they claim to defend people’s human rights, they are not invested in the question of social change and social justice.
For instance, if we look at the case of workers who are fired or o n strike–a labor organizer would work with them to continue their activism and organization. But the NGO legal aid staffer would ask to be authorized legally to sue the employer on the worker’s behalf. In other words, the NGO asks the worker to stop her/his activism: “Go home and just authorize me to sue him.”
After 1998, I continued to work in these NGOs with no big hope that they will really do genuine human rights work. I started to work voluntarily with labor as well as the Palestine solidarity movement, and it became clear that my work for human rights NGOs was just a paid job.
On the positive side, because of growing social movement that are not NGOized, particularly those in support of Palestine, some NGOs are focusing more on grassroots work, even if it impacts their funding.
Historically, how has the NGOization of the Palestinian struggle developed?
Hatem Bazian: Beginning in the 18th century, Christian missionary workers emerged in the middle East and set about influencing policy through education. Banking institutions also developed that became involved with Christian elites.
European countries, in turn, often claimed themselves as the protectors of Christians in the area to justify political intervention in the region. Using educational exchange programs, England, France, and later, the US aspired to create an elite within the region that would support their interests.
After Israel was created in 1948, the Palestinian liberation movement was often shaped by Arab states. They tried to control the movement and its interaction with Israel so that it would not negatively impact their diplomatic relations with Western countries.
The PLO, which was constructed from outside Palestine, mirrored the authoritarian structure and corruption of the neo-colonial Arab states. However, since the uprising of the 1980s, the shaping of this movement has shifted from outside Palestine to inside of it.
It is now less susceptible to being co-opted into the Arab state structure and can assert a different vision for struggle. This vision, of course, is fluid and the movement has diverse sectors.
After the 1970s, NGOs emerged as key shapers of the movement. But they too attempted to influence the movement in ways that accorded with US and Western interests.
So, while NGOization is a more recent phenomenon, it is part of a legacy of outside interests attempting to shape a liberation struggle in a way that support imperial forces rather than the Palestinian people.
Zeina Zaatari: Oslo helped set the framework for what is and is not acceptable. Pre-Oslo, or during the first intifada, political movements were still strong, organizing within Palestine, and, to a lesser extent, in refugee camps outside Palestine.
But Oslo isolated the Palestinian issue as unrelated to larger Arab-Israeli conflicts, and transformed the movement by shifting its focus from liberation to statehood and from decolonization to peace.
Funders supported the Oslo agenda by rewarding projects concerned with mutual coexistence, and forced the collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian groups.
Within Palestine, organizations previously concerned with a broader vision for justice — such as freedom for historic Palestine ,the right of return, and the land — turned their attention to smaller issues such as social services and other structures necessary for statehood, representational politics, and constitutional development.
Donors put much money behind this kind of work, and the work of liberation became much more compartmentalized: for instance, the issue of refugees became separated from the larger liberation struggle, its emphasis redirected in the post-Oslo political and funding climate from the right of return to humanitarian relief.
Status of Palestinian “refugees” in Lebanon and how they feel they have been treated in last 70 years
Posted on: August 8, 2019
Status of Palestinian “refugees” in Lebanon and how they feel they have been treated
محمد بركة – رئيس لجنة المتابعة العليا لشؤون الجماهير العربية (Muhamad Barkat) posted on Fb
بيان ونداء
باسم مليون ونصف مليون فلسطيني في الداخل
من محمد بركة
رئيس لجنة المتابعة العليا لشؤون الفلسطينيين في الداخل
إلى الأشقاء في لبنان وإلى الدولة اللبنانية:
الفلسطينيون اللاجئون الى لبنان امانة في اعناقكم حتى العودة
نتابع بقلق وغضب شديدين ما يجري على الساحة اللبنانية من استهدافٍ لحق الحياة لأبناء شعبنا الفلسطيني اللاجئين في لبنان الشقيق.
نحن المليون ونصف المليون فلسطيني في الجليل والمثلث والنقب والساحل الذين بقينا في وطننا رغم سموم التشريد والنكبة وبقينا قابضين على وطننا كالقابض على جمرة،لا نقبل باي حال التعرض لأبناء شعبنا واهلنا والمس بكرامتهم وحقوقهم وبمصدر رزقهم الذي يبلغونه بشرف عرقهم وتفانيهم وعملهم.
موضوع وجود اللاجئين على ارض لبنان هو إفراز للكارثة التي حلّت بالشعب الفلسطيني في العام 1948 وإقامة إسرائيل كرأس حربة امبريالي في المنطقة العربية بهدف النيل من الامن القومي والاقتصادي، ولتقصير حبل الاستقلال الوطني في كل العالم العربي بما في ذلك لبنان.
على ذلك فان شعبنا الفلسطيني يدفع الفاتورة الغربية والصهيونية نيابة عن الامة كلها.
موضوع وجود اللاجئين الفلسطينيين على أرض لبنان لا يمكن ان يكون سياسة وزير او سياسة حزب انما هو يخصّ جوهر ألامن ألقومي اللبناني ويخص كرامة الدولة اللبنانية التي نرى أنفسنا حريصين عليها كما على فلسطين، لان فلسطين هي جنوب لبنان ولبنان هو شمال فلسطين: تاريخا وثقافة ووشائج قربى.
نحن لا نقبل مشاغلتنا بتعابير انشائية حول الحق الفلسطيني من ناحية، والتعرض لحياة وكرامة الانسان الفلسطيني من ناحية أخرى او كما هتف الكاتب اللبناني الكبير الياس خوري: “يحبّون فلسطين ويكرهون الفلسطينيين”.
أبناء شعبنا اللاجئ في لبنان الشقيق ليسوا عالة على لبنان، بل هم من ساهموا في رفعته وكرامته واقتصاده وصروحه الاكاديمية والثقافية، لكن العالة القاتلة على لبنان هم أولئك الذين يسعون الى ارتهان الشموخ اللبناني الأصيل – مقابل منافعهم- للطاعون الأمريكي وبالتالي “للأمن الإسرائيلي” ولهواجس “الخطر الديموغرافي ” الذي تمتهنه بغايا الصهيونية.
نحن نعرف أبناء شعبنا اللاجئين في لبنان وفي غير لبنان..
نحن نعرف مَن هم شخصيا ونعرف أين تقع بيوتهم ومراتع طفولتهم او طفولة ابائهم او طفولة اجدادهم ونعرف صلات قرابتهم ونعرف انسبائهم ونعرف حكاياتهم في مواسم الحصاد وفي مواسم الزيتون وفي قوارب الصيد وفي أسواق شطارة التجار..
نحن نعرف قطعا انهم ليسوا “مقطوعين من شجرة”، فهم اشقائنا واهلنا ونعرف ان المتآمرين على حقوقهم المدنية إنما هم مقطوعون عن شجرة الارز الشامخة في لبنان.
نحن نعرف ان الذين يستكثرون على اللاجئ الفلسطيني حقه الإنساني في الحق المدني والحق في العمل وممارسة الكفاءة، إنما هم بالجوهر متآمرون على حقه الوطني في العودة بما يتّسق مع صفقة كوشنير وفريدمان وجرينبلاط وتابعهم الاحمق الاكبر.
ان توقيت الحملة المكررة على الحقوق المدنية والإنسانية للاجئين الفلسطينيين ليس عارضا فنيا إنما هو ملازم لدمار مخيم اليرموك وقبله لدمار مخيم النهر البارد، وهو ملازم لتجفيف الاونروا، وهو ملازم للتدمير في غزة ومخيماتها، وهو ملازم للاستيطان في الضفة، وهو ملازم جدا لاغتيال القدس وهويتها العربية الفلسطينية الإسلامية المسيحية،وهو ملازم اولا وأخيرا للإجماع الصهيوني الساعي لقبر حق العودة.
لقد حددنا لأنفسنا، نحن أبناء الشعب الفلسطيني في الجليل والمثلث والنقب والساحل، ان احدى وظائفنا الوطنية ان نحرس ظل الزيتون ومسميات المكان وان نفرد ركنا في كل بيت من بيوتنا ليستريح فيها العائد الفلسطيني من منافيه، ريثما يعود كلٌ الى بيته.
حددنا لأنفسنا ان نقف بأذرع مفتوحة في محطة الوصول لاستقبال أهلنا العائدين الى وطنهم الذي لا وطن لنا ولهم سواه.
يستطيع الطغاة من صهاينة وامريكان، كما تستطيع أنظمة الطغيان والتطبيع كما تستطيع أذنابهم العفنة ان يتلهّوا بأحلام الإجهاز على حق العودة.. لكنهم جميعا ذاهبون الى حيث ألقت،
والفلسطينيون اللاجئون آتون الى حيث ترفرف رايات العز والحق والعودة.
هل هذا كلام في الخيال؟ فلنراجع التاريخ لنرى كم محطة فيه كانت خيالا.
نحن نكنّ أسمى آيات الاعتزاز والشموخ والاحترام لأشقائنا اللبنانيين الرافضين للتعرض لأهلنا وأقاربنا وأبناء شعبنا ونعرف انهم يشكلون الأغلبية الساحقة في الشعب اللبناني الشقيق..
اننا ندعو الدولة اللبنانية والشعب اللبناني الشقيق والأحزاب السياسية ومؤسسات المجتمع المدني ان لا يسمحوا بهذه السياسة الملوثة التي لن تنال من الفلسطينيين فقط إنما ستنال من لبنان الكرامة والشعب العنيد… وهذا ما لا يرضاه احرار لبنان واحرار فلسطين.
وختاما من باب الشفافية بودي ان افيدكم انا محمد ابن سعيد وعائشة بركة اللاجئ في وطنه من قرية صفورية المهجرة والتي أراها كأجمل بقعة في الكون، ان الامر اعلاه يخصني شخصيا وكل ما دوّنته أعلاه كان بصفتي التمثيلية وبصفتي الشخصية.
Living conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon
For decades, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been living in poverty and subpar conditions in Lebanon.
Some 450,000 Palestinians are registered as refugees in the country, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
More than 50% live in one of the country’s 12 refugee settlements, “all of which suffer from serious problems, including poverty, overcrowding, unemployment, poor housing conditions and lack of infrastructure.”
As much of the world turns a blind eye on the problems these refugees must deal with on a daily basis, generations and generations of Palestinians continue to be born and die within a harsh and unfair reality. Here are 7 horrible facts about life for the majority of these people.
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A young man walks in an alleyway of a Palestinian refugee settlement in Beirut. Source: Jason Lemon
More than half of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are unemployed, leaving only 37 percent of the working age population employed, according to a 2012 report by ANERA.
Despite educational backgrounds, Palestinians are restricted from even being considered for employment in as many as 20 professions, according to the UNRWA.
Often, the only jobs Palestinians are able to find in Lebanon are menial labor, paying poor wages.
2. Very low average income
An elderly Palestinian woman walking down an alley. Source: Jason Lemon
As a direct result of the employment situation, Palestinians on average have a significantly lower income than Lebanese. Out of other countries hosting Palestinian refugees, Lebanon has the highest percentage of Palestinians living in extreme poverty, according to ANERA. Two out of three Palestinians in the country survive with less than $6 per day.
3. Subpar education facilities
An UNRWA school for Palestinians in Beirut. Source: Jason Lemon
Palestinians are not allowed to enroll in Lebanon’s public school system. (The new Syrian refugees can). Although they could enroll in private institutions, with just $6 a day, paying tuition is virtually impossible. Thus, refugees rely on UNRWA schools and vocational centers that are increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of the population.
As many as half of Palestinian teenagers, especially males, drop out of school – usually to work in part-time menial jobs to support their families.
4. Crumbling infrastructure
A Palestinian refugee settlement in Beirut. Source: Jason Lemon
While Palestinians have been living in the same settlements for decades, with little support and poor economic prospects, these settlements remain to be some of the poorest and least developed areas in Lebanon.
Increasingly overcrowded, ANERA reports these Palestinian settlements suffer from “Poor housing conditions, leaky pipes, deteriorated water and sewage treatment systems, contaminated water, and jerry-rigged electrical connections.”
5. Poor health
A young Palestinian girl traces a crack in the street with her umbrella. Source: Jason Lemon
Its not surprising that all of the aforementioned factors have a negative affect on the average Palestinian refugee’s health. “One out of three refugees suffers from a chronic illness such as hypertension, cancer and diabetes,” according to ANERA.
Additionally, “infant, child, and maternal mortality rates are high.” Numerous disabilities, mental health problems and poor nutrition also plague the community.
All of these factors are complicated by the reality that Palestinians are unable to access Lebanon’s public health system. They rely on UNRWA facilities that are understaffed and underfunded, with one doctor at an UNRWA clinic seeing nearly 120 patients per day.
6. Severely limited travel
Residents of a Palestinian refugee settlement walking. Source: Jason Lemon
Why would Palestinians choose to stay in this situation?
Well, despite the obvious economic problems involved in leaving, traveling outside of Lebanon is extremely difficult for Palestinian refugees. Requiring visas to visit the vast majority of countries in the world makes things complicated.
Add to this the fact that Palestinian refugees’ travel is also limited and controlled by the Lebanese government through a complicated visa system based on their particular legal status within the country, and you have a population of people that is essentially stuck in a dire situation.
And the bad news? With the influx of refugees from Syria, some of whom were already Palestinian refugees residing there, the situation only becomes more complicated and hundreds of thousands of innocent people continue to suffer the consequences.
Note: Many Palestinian refugees have been living in Lebanon for 6 decades since their forced exodus by Israel in 1948.
Many more flocked in in 1967 after the June pre-emptive war against Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
More came in after King Hussein of Jordan drove them to Lebanon in 1971.
Lebanon main reason for denying a Lebanese woman to give citizenship to her children is because many married Palestinians.
Lebanon refused to give Palestinian descendants any rights
When justice is served to Palestinian refugees: Roger Waters to Dionne Warwick
Posted on: May 19, 2015
When justice is served to Palestinian refugees: Roger Waters to Dionne Warwick
Thank you Roger Waters ….Humanity and Justice for All.
ROGER WATERS, former PINK FLOYD frontman:
“Dionne Warwick called me out by name in asserting she’d play Tel Aviv. Here’s what she misunderstands.
Singer and U.N…. global ambassador Dionne Warwick recently released an interesting if puzzling statement asserting that she would, and I quote, “never fall victim to the hard pressures of Roger Waters, from Pink Floyd, or other political people who have their views on politics in Israel.”
“Waters’ political views are of no concern,” I assume she means to her, the statement read. “Art,” she added, “has no boundaries.”
Until today, I have not publicly commented on Ms. Warwick’s Tel Aviv concert or reached out to her privately.
But given her implicit invitation, I will comment now.
First, in my view, Dionne Warwick is a truly great singer.
Secondly, I doubt not that she is deeply committed to her family and her fans.
But, ultimately, this whole conversation is not about her, her gig in Tel Aviv, or even her conception of boundaries and art, though I will touch on that conception later.
This is about human rights and, more specifically, this is about the dystopia that can develop, as it has in Israel, when society lacks basic belief in equal human value, when it strays from the ability to feel empathy for our brothers and sisters of different faiths, nationalities, creeds or colors.
It strikes me as deeply disingenuous of Ms. Warwick to try to cast herself as a potential victim here.
The victims are the occupied people of Palestine with no right to vote and the unequal Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Bedouin Israeli citizens of the village of al-Araqib, which has now been bulldozed 83 times by order of the Israeli government.
I believe you mean well, Ms. Warwick, but you are showing yourself to be profoundly ignorant of what has happened in Palestine since 1947, and I am sorry but you are wrong, art does know boundaries.
In fact, it is an absolute responsibility of artists to stand up for human rights – social, political and religious – on behalf of all our brothers and sisters who are being oppressed, whoever and wherever they may be on the surface of this small planet.
Forgive me, Ms. Warwick, but I have done a little research, and know that you crossed the picket line to play Sun City at the height of the anti-apartheid movement.
In those days, Little Steven, Bruce Springsteen and 50 or so other musicians protested against the vicious, racist oppression of the indigenous peoples of South Africa.
Those artists allowed their art to cross boundaries, but for the purpose of political action. They released a record that struck a chord across the world. That record, “I Ain’t Gonna play Sun City,” showed the tremendous support of musicians all over the world for the anti-apartheid effort.
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Those artists helped win that battle, and we, in the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, will win this one against the similarly racist and colonialist policies of the Israeli government of occupation.
We will continue to press forward in favor of equal rights for all the peoples of the Holy Land.
Just as musicians weren’t going to play Sun City, increasingly we’re not going to play Tel Aviv. There is no place today in this world for another racist, apartheid regime.
As I’m sure you know, Lauryn Hill canceled her gig in Tel Aviv last week. She did not explicitly cite Israeli oppression of Palestinians as her reason for cancelling, but the subtext of her actions is clear and we thank her for her principled stand.
Dionne, I am of your generation. I remember the road to Montgomery, I remember Selma, I remember the struggles against the Jim Crow laws here.
Sadly, we are still fighting those battles, whether here in the USA in Ferguson or Baltimore, or in Gaza or the Negev, wherever the oppressed need us to raise our voices unafraid. We need to stand shoulder to shoulder with them, our brothers and sisters, until true equality and justice are won.
Remember, “Operation Protective Edge,” the Israeli bombing of Gaza last summer, resulted in the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 500 Palestinian children.
It is hard for us over here to imagine what it is like to be exiled, disenfranchised, imprisoned, rendered homeless and then slaughtered, with no place to flee. Hopefully, in the end, love will triumph.
But love will not triumph unless we stand up to such injustice and fight it tooth and nail, together.
Dionne, your words indicate that part of you is set on going through with your concert. I am appealing to another part of you, to implore that other part to join us. We will welcome you.
It is more than likely that you harbor reservations in your heart about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, that when you see a mother’s child in ruins you wonder what if that child were mine?
It is not too late to hear those reservations, to listen to that other voice, to value freedom and equality for all over the value you place on your concert in Tel Aviv.
When global pressure finally forces Israel to end its occupation, when the apartheid wall comes down, when justice is served to Palestinian refugees and all people there are free and equal, I will gladly join you in concert in the Holy Land, cross all the boundaries and share our music with all the people.”
Source: http://www.salon.com/…/roger_waters_to_dionne_warwick_you_…/
The story of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria?
On 18 January 2014, barely five miles from the centre of Damascus – with President Bashar al‑Assad’s office complex visible in the distance – a small crowd of desperate people emerged from a seemingly uninhabited wasteland of bomb-shattered buildings.
News had spread throughout Yarmouk, a district of the capital that is home to Syria’s largest community of Palestinians, that the government and rebel groups had agreed to allow a delivery of food, briefly opening a crack in a year-long siege that had starved the area’s civilians and caused dozens of deaths.
Families had sent their strongest members to collect the newly arrived supplies, and the hungry throng filled the entire width of a street, throwing up dust in the morning light.
The relief workers making the delivery recalled one woman, gaunt with malnutrition, who fell down and was too weak to rise. She died on the spot. The scenes were such that some of these experienced aid workers needed trauma counselling when they returned to headquarters in Damascus.
There was only enough food for a few hundred families.
Thousands of disappointed people staggered home empty-handed. But officials from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established to aid Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East, hoped that the delivery had set a precedent.
They had not publicised it in advance – there was concern that excessive attention would anger the Syrian government – and were reluctant to invite journalists to observe a mission that might have been aborted for security reasons. Four days earlier, an attempted delivery had been abandoned after a mortar exploded very close to the convoy.
After the successful delivery on 18 January, UNRWA officials decided discretion was no longer the best policy.
On 31 January, a convoy delivering food to Yarmouk was accompanied by a local photographer, who took a picture of the vast crowd surging through a street lined with the ruins of destroyed buildings.
This image quickly became an emblem of the Syrian conflict.
To draw attention to the plight of the besieged civilians UNRWA launched a social media campaign (#LetUsThrough) in which millions clicked on a petition to put the image on two of the world’s highest-profile billboards. In Times Square, New York and the Shibuya district of Tokyo people stood in front of giant screens taking selfies, which were then beamed back to Yarmouk as a show of solidarity.
This was how Yarmouk entered the world’s consciousness: a refugee camp designed as a safe haven for the Palestinian diaspora that had become the worst place on earth.
No electricity for months. No piped water. (Reminds me of Lebanon?). No access for food.
Worse still, no chance for people to leave or return, except for a handful of emergency medical cases or the few who had the means to pay people-smugglers to get them through the multiple checkpoints.
Some called it Syria’s Gaza, but its plight was even worse, because the siege was more comprehensive; Yarmouk was a prison from which there was no escape.
But notoriety can be short-lived.
When Gaza came under Israeli bombardment in July 2014 and the world’s media rushed to report the carnage, Yarmouk slipped back into obscurity. (Coordinated events?)
The opening in the siege that UNRWA had negotiated in January 2014 applied only fitfully throughout the year: food deliveries were only possible on 131 days, and often less than half the amount required got through.
Since 6 December, the siege has once again become impassable.
UNRWA reports that it has not been able to deliver any food at all for the past 12 weeks. “We are getting new reports of people dying of malnutrition and of women dying in childbirth, but nothing can be confirmed,” said Chris Gunness, UNRWA’s spokesperson. Unlike in Gaza, where UNRWA has several offices, the organisation cannot enter Yarmouk at all.
As Syria’s civil war enters its fourth year, other towns and villages are suffering long sieges, usually by Assad’s forces but sometimes, as in the case of Nubul and Zahra, two Shia villages north-west of Aleppo, by anti-Assad rebels.
Still, Yarmouk stands out, partly because of the large number of trapped civilians – estimated to be around 18,000 – but also because of its political significance. (Yarmouk hosted 170,000 people before the civil war)
Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for three decades before power passed to his son on his death in 2000, cast his country as the cornerstone of the Arab “axis of resistance” against Israel.
This required that he be seen as the supreme defender of Palestinian rights; a leader who would ensure that Palestinian refugees in Syria lived better than those anywhere else in the Middle East.
For Yarmouk to come under the control of anti-Assad rebels, and then be bombarded by government forces – to become a spectacle of suffering far worse than Gaza – marked an indelible stain on the mantle that Bashar al-Assad inherited from his father.
Before the Syrian civil war began, Yarmouk was home to 150,000 Palestinians. Though people still refer to it as a “camp”, tents were replaced with solid housing soon after its founding in 1957.
In time it became just another district of Damascus. As well as being home to Syria’s largest community of Palestinian refugees, it also housed some 650,000 Syrians.
Nidal Bitari, a co-founder of the Palestinian Association for Human Rights in Syria, fled the country at the end of 2011 after being tipped off that he was wanted by the Assad regime’s security services.
But, like most of the Palestinians in Yarmouk, he wanted to stay neutral when the uprising began. As Bitari wrote in a detailed account of Yarmouk’s recent political history published in 2013, Palestinians in Syria lived under better conditions than in any other Arab state:
“By law they enjoy almost all the rights and benefits of Syrian nationals except citizenship and the right to vote. They have full access to Syrian schools and universities on the same basis as citizens … And because their numbers are tiny compared to the general Syrian population (less than 2%), the refugees were never perceived as a threat, and the degree of integration between Palestinians and Syrians – through work, education, and intermarriage – has no parallel in the Arab world.”
(As the civil war raged, the Palestinians paying allegiance to Hamas and Fateh allied to the Syrian extremistIslamist forces of Al Nusra)
When I first visited Yarmouk in March 2003, it was a hotbed of anger towards the American invasion of Iraq, which had just began.
While other Arab countries muted criticism of US policy or quietly supported George W Bush and Tony Blair, the Syrian state media was full of denunciations. Scores of young Palestinian men from the camp had crossed into Iraq to fight the Americans, often disappearing without telling their own families.
I came across a wake in one narrow back street. It was the third day of mourning for a young man named Issam. He had telephoned home for the first time as he was about to cross into Iraq.
In a bus from Damascus with other volunteers from half a dozen Arab countries, the young Palestinian told his father that he and two cousins were going off to war.
Six days of silence followed, as his family watched TV footage from Iraq even more intently than before. Then one of the cousins phoned: Issam had never even reached Baghdad.
Less than five hours after calling his parents,he died in a hail of fire from a US helicopter. Thirteen other unarmed men in the three buses were killed. The cousin escaped with minor wounds.
When Syrians began to rise up in protest against the government of Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, the situation threatened to unsettle the relatively stable position of Palestinians within the country.
Palestinian groups were closely monitored by the Syrian security services and they were expected to remain uninvolved in the nation’s politics.
According to Bitari, the trigger for Yarmouk’s entrapment in the intensifying conflict came from the Syrian government rather than the opposition.
In May 2011, during the preparations for Nakba Day, which commemorates the expulsion of Palestinian refugees during the creation of Israel in 1948, representatives of the Assad regime began to promote the idea of a demonstration at the Israeli border on the Golan Heights.
Bitari and his friends were wary, suspecting that the regime wanted to divert attention from the internal uprising. He described their decision to form a “youth coalition of Palestinians” in Yarmouk to coordinate decisions pertaining to the camp, which included representatives from each of the Palestinian political factions inside.
The group’s first meeting concerned the Nakba Day protests, and a majority opposed any participation. But on the morning of Nakba Day the government supplied buses, which hundreds of people got on.
At the border, the Syrian army let the buses through the demarcation lines and several protesters climbed the fence that blocks access to Israeli-controlled territory (occupied Golan Heights?). Israeli troops used tear gas and live rounds. Three people died.
A month later, on Naksa Day – the anniversary of the defeat of Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 six-day war – minivans sent by Syrian security took about 50 Yarmouk residents to the border, where they were joined by several hundred other young people. Syrian state TV cameras were on hand to film what happened.
Again people tried to scale the fence, and this time 23 were shot dead by Israeli forces – 12 of them from Yarmouk, according to Bitari.
Though the Israelis fired the bullets, “the rage was almost as great against the factions for not doing anything to stop the bloodshed”, as Bitari said.
The next day the funeral of the victims was attended by 30,000 people.
Angry mourners surrounded the headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC, a faction led by Ahmed Jibril, which rejected the Oslo accords.) The PFLP-GC was a firm supporter of the Syrian government and was seen by many residents as the regime’s enforcer in the camp. When a PFLP-GC security guard shot and killed a 14-year-old boy, the crowd stormed the building and set it on fire. Jibril had to be rescued by the Syrian army.
This event embarrassed Bashar al-Assad and encouraged Syrian opposition groups to see Yarmouk as a potential support base for the uprising against him.
Yarmouk’s geographical position, wedge-shaped with its apex pointing at the heart of Damascus, gave it strategic value.
The district was bordered by two poorer Syrian suburbs, al Hajar al Aswad and Tadamon, which were already being infiltrated by opposition fighters. To the south was open countryside, which was easy for them to move through.
Bitari and his friends still hoped to keep Yarmouk neutral. They were alarmed when the Syrian government, shaken by the anti-PFLP-GC protest and the threat of rebel advances, gave Jibril’s men the right to parade with weapons.
This escalation encouraged the Free Syrian Army – at that time the main opposition group, backed by western governments – to plan to move into the camp and seize it from Syrian government control.
The Palestinian youth coalition’s efforts had failed. The group disbanded in despair. Civilians who wanted to avoid their district being militarised and dragged into conflict found themselves isolated. The same dynamic was affecting most of the rest of the country.
For the Free Syrian Army, Yarmouk was a particularly valued prize after Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas in exile who had lived in Damascus for more than a decade, moved to Qatar in February 2012.
Meshaal felt unable to accede to the Syrian government’s pleas that he condemns the anti-regime uprising. Instead, he accepted an invitation from Qatar, one of the armed opposition’s main financial backers. It was a severe blow to Assad’s credentials as leader of the axis of resistance.
In December 2012 the FSA and the al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al Nusra were ready for a concerted attack to capture Damascus and topple Assad.
Yarmouk was the gateway to the capital, closer to the centre than any of the other suburbs where the regime was losing control.
The crisis came to a head on 16 December, when a Syrian air force plane bombed Yarmouk in what the government later claimed was a mistake. Dozens of civilians were killed. Brigades from the FSA and Jabhat al Nusra seized the opportunity to enter the camp – and in response, the government launched a hail of artillery shells, turning most buildings on the edge of the district to rubble.
Within a few days most of the PFLP-GC, the main Palestinian faction supporting the Assad regime, had fled Yarmouk; some defected to the rebels who went on to gain full control.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians left. The Syrians of Yarmouk mainly went to relatives and friends in central Damascus or other cities, or moved to Lebanon and Jordan.
Palestinians fled to what they hoped would be safer areas inside Syria. Although rebel efforts to capture the rest of Damascus failed, Yarmouk remains in rebel hands today. Some 18,000 civilians still live there, including anywhere between 1,000 and 4,000 Syrians. Still, it is clear that Yarmouk has reverted to being a largely Palestinian enclave.
Assad’s government responded to its defeat in Yarmouk by putting the area under siege.
For a few months food could still be brought in from the rural areas to the south, though profiteering was intense.
In July 2013 the government tightened its grip and the siege became almost total. Inside Yarmouk fighting erupted between the FSA and Jabhat al Nusra, the latter of which had set up sharia courts.
Spasmodic attempts were made to relieve the suffering of Yarmouk’s civilians. In the spring of 2013 Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, even proposed that all of Yarmouk’s 150,000 Palestinian residents move to the West Bank or Gaza. In November 2013, Abbas sent a team to Damascus to discuss humanitarian relief and a ceasefire between the rebels and the government. The idea was to open a safe corridor for the movement of supplies and displaced civilians, but no deal was ever reached.
In September 2014, I met Abu Akram, a member of the PFPL-GC leadership, in a flat on the edge of Yarmouk. A tall older man with one arm in a brace, who moved to Yarmouk from Lebanon in 1994, he had taken part in the abortive ceasefire negotiations with the Syrian opposition, whose breakdown he blamed on the Islamists. A tough, battle-hardened figure firmly allied to the Assad regime, he showed no embarrassment in defending the siege. It was a legitimate tactic, he claimed, in part because the food from UNRWA that was allowed into Yarmouk ended up in the hands of the rebel fighters, for their own use or for sale on the black market.
“We saw that the armed groups were taking food from civilians,” he said, then claimed that boxes of aid meant for Yarmouk could be seen for sale in a nearby district. He even criticised the decision to relax the pressure in early 2014. “It was a mistake to break the siege,” he said. “If we had continued by another week, hunger would have forced them to give up.”
The barbaric nature of sieges has remained unchanged for thousands of years.
The aim is to starve the trapped civilians into submission, in the hope they will turn against whatever armed faction controls the territory and persuade them to surrender. The armed faction, in turn, wants to keep the civilians inside so as to make it less likely the besieging army will bring destruction upon the captives.
Now, in the 21st century, the very same tactics are being deployed not only in Yarmouk but in several other parts of Syria.
Sieges fuel a war economy in which those who man the checkpoints can run a lucrative business selling permission to leave or return. They encourage smuggling of people and food, and keep prices in the camp’s few markets artificially high.
When I visited Yarmouk’s northern entrance in September 2014, I found nothing but bleakness. Syrian government soldiers stood guard near a crossroads known as Battikha – “watermelon” – Square, so named for a green monument of a globe that stands amid a clump of palm trees in the middle of the street. The only route into the camp required a walk through a narrow alley between two five-storey buildings that had most of their windows blown out. The neighbouring alley was shielded by huge white padded sheets strung from the upper floors of buildings on either side – makeshift screens intended to stop rebel snipers from targeting anyone walking in the square.
A young woman in hijab was standing near the entrance, weeping as she and a male companion talked with the officer in charge of the checkpoint. After a few minutes of conversation that ended on what looked to be a frustrating note, the woman and her friend pulled back, then wandered up and down the street, apparently debating whether to try another tack to convince the officer or just give up and leave.
“I am trapped,” the woman, named Reem Buqaee, told me. She had been given permission to leave Yarmouk three months earlier with her three teenage daughters. The oldest one was pregnant. Owing to malnutrition, she was suffering from anaemia so severe that she was at risk of losing her baby. The other two girls also had medical problems. But leaving the camp had meant splitting the family. The husband of the pregnant woman could not leave the camp, nor could Reem’s husband, or her 16-year-old son. Rebel groups were eager to keep people in the camp, she said, particularly men and boys. Their departure was seen as defection from the opposition cause as well as potentially making it easier for government troops to enter the camp by force and regain control.
Buqaee’s daughter had safely given birth and the other girls had regained their strength, so she wanted to take them back into Yarmouk.
“I had to choose between living in a prison under siege but alongside my husband and son, or stay outside Yarmouk separated but free,” she said.
On this particular day, she had come to the camp entrance to see whether her request to return had been granted, but the officer told her he had not received orders to let her and her daughters and baby grand-daughter inside. “Our house is only 100 metres from here, just inside the camp. It’s so near but very far,” she said.
The next day, I visited Buqaee at an overcrowded flat in the Dummar suburb of Damascus, where a distant relative had given her and her daughters temporary shelter.
A thick atmosphere of fear surrounds any discussion of Yarmouk. This affects everyone from UNRWA officials to Yarmouk residents. People worry that their families will suffer if they publicly attribute blame to the regime or the rebels for the siege, the collapse of ceasefire talks, and the impossibility of escaping.
UNRWA officials are concerned about losing the minimal access they have to Yarmouk if they say anything that might be misinterpreted by one side or the other. When I spoke to residents who had left the camp for other parts of Damascus, but who talk regularly with siblings and parents still inside, they refused to be quoted, explaining that people are scared of reprisals from both the regime and the anti-Assad forces inside the camp.
Buqaee, however, described the horrors of the siege without hesitation: women dying in childbirth, infants killed by malnutrition.
There was no anger or hysteria in her voice, just a calm recollection of facts. “You couldn’t buy bread. At the worst point a kilo of rice cost 12,000 Syrian pounds (£41), now it is 800 pounds (£2.75) compared to 100 Syrian pounds (34p) in central Damascus. It was 900 pounds (£3.10) for a kilo of tomatoes, compared to 100 here,” Reem recalled. “We had some stocks but when they gave out we used to eat wild plants. We picked and cooked them. In every family there was hepatitis because of a lack of sugar. The water was dirty. People had fevers. Your joints and bones felt stiff. My middle daughter had brucellosis and there was no medication,” she said. In October 2013, in a sign of how bad things had become, the imam of Yarmouk’s largest mosque issued a fatwa that permitted people to eat cats, dogs and donkeys.
The relaxation of the siege in January last year was limited and insecure, she said. UNRWA’s food deliveries were regularly cut short by mortar explosions and sniper fire. No one was sure who began firing or why. She remembered one incident vividly: “It was March 23. I had gone to collect a food parcel and was on the way back when a mortar went off. Twenty-nine people were killed. My daughter’s husband had come to help carry the boxes. He was hit by shrapnel and cannot walk now. It’ll take him another three or four months to get better.”
For most of 2014, both sides were willing to allow some humanitarian supplies to enter the camp on an ad hoc basis, UN officials told me, even if the amount was far below what was needed.
Every day, UNRWA would check whether there had been exchanges of fire in Yarmouk. Sometimes the agency’s minivans never left the warehouse in central Damascus, on other occasions, delivery convoys were turned back. “We never say we’ve had access. All we say is that they’ve given us some opportunities to provide aid,” one UN official said.
UNRWA has not yet been able to enter the camp to conduct a needs assessment.
Since the graphic scenes of starving masses early last year, the agency developed a more orderly process, with lists of people who are allowed to cross the no man’s land at the edge of the camp once each month to collect food parcels.
Each parcel contains 5 kilograms of rice, 5 kilograms of sugar, 5 kilograms of lentils, 5 litres of oil, five kilograms of powdered milk, 1 kilogram of halva, one and a half kilograms of pasta and five 200g tins of luncheon meat. This is designed to feed a family of 8 people for 10 days.
In other parts of Syria where displaced Palestinians are living, UNRWA provides cash so that people can buy food for the rest of the month, but in Yarmouk that has not been not possible.
Providing medical supplies is sensitive, since the Syrian government fears they will go to wounded fighters.
Initially it only gave permission for rehydration salts and basic painkillers. UNRWA eventually managed to operate a mobile health clinic at the food distribution point, which provided basic treatments for communicable diseases and other infections, as well as conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Tests conducted in 2014 on a random sample of patients found that 40% had typhoid.
Education has been dramatically affected by the siege.
According to residents inside the camp, all of Yarmouk’s 28 schools have been closed, and volunteer teachers hold informal classes in 10 “safe spaces”, including the basements of mosques.
The lack of electricity means children have to do their homework by generators if their parents can afford the fuel for them, or by candlelight. The spotlight that the UNRWA has tried to keep on Yarmouk may have acted as some restraint on government forces – the area has not been bombed as heavily as other rebel-held districts of Damascus. But this is only a crumb of comfort.
“Conditions are far worse than Gaza,” said one UN official. “Palestinians always had dignity, hope, resilience. Now after four years of war I see people giving up. They find it hard to accept there are no options”.
The latest attempt to reach a ceasefire and end the siege of Yarmouk was last June, when the armed groups inside the camp and some civilian representatives signed a pact with 13 representatives of the Assad government, which would have seen gunmen leave Yarmouk after the creation of a new security force to defend the camp. The deal was never implemented.
Nidal Bitari now lives in the United States, where he remains in daily contact with friends in Yarmouk by phone and Skype. He lobbied at UN headquarters in New York for western governments to support the June ceasefire agreement, and blames them, along with supporters of Jabhat al Nusra, for letting the deal collapse.
“I suppose this initiative went against the wishes of France, UK and USA,” he said, “as their policy is based on supporting the interim government in exile, and they believe such truces give legitimacy to the regime.”
Talal Alyan, a Palestinian-American writer and researcher who lives in the US, recently wrote that Jabhat al Nusra controls 60% of the camp, and suggested the group had attempted to ban singing and force women to wear the veil.
Since our conversation, Reem Buqaee has managed to go home to Yarmouk, even though it meant returning to siege conditions. When no response came from the Palestinian authorities who shared control of the camp’s northern entrance with regime forces, she decided to use an unofficial channel.
A friend in the air force, one of the pillars of Assad’s regime, persuaded his commander to contact officers at government checkpoints in Beit Sahem, a village to the south of Yarmouk, to let them cross the frontline. Inside the camp, the water supply has still not returned, 6 months after pipes were damaged by fighting in September 2014. This has forced the residents to rely on untreated groundwater and a single well.
To add to the horror of the siege, the shadow of ISIS has fallen across Yarmouk. When the group announced the establishment of a caliphate last year, Bitari said, some Jabhat al Nusra fighters in Yarmouk switched their allegiance and threatened to kill anyone who supported the ceasefire agreement.
Isis is not yet in Yarmouk in full force, according to Bitari, but it was in nearby suburbs and had threatened to enter the camp at any time. (It did and has occupied a large portion of the camp)
Nidal Bitari is gloomy in exile. When it became clear the US was about to strike targets in Syria in September, he coordinated an appeal from activists back home.
They feared Obama would attack Isis positions in Yarmouk. “Here in Washington I’m surrounded by people from the Syrian National Coalition [the western-supported opposition] who tell me they want Obama to bomb Damascus. It would be a political more than a military action, aimed at warning Assad that the opposition has powerful friends. I told them it would cause a high number of casualties and there’s no way for Palestinians in Yarmouk to flee,” he said.
The appeal condemned the Syrian government for mounting a brutal siege but said any coalition air strike on Damascus would create an even greater humanitarian disaster.
In Bitari view the reimposition of a total siege since early December was a tactic by the Assad regime to drive Yarmouk’s people to despair and have them press the armed groups to accept a truce under the regime’s conditions. It would amount to a surrender like those the government achieved in the city of Homs and the Damascus suburb of Muadhamiya last year.
The armed groups would have to give up their weapons and submit to interrogation, with the risk of torture or execution.
In spite of the siege, Bitari feels that in one way Syria’s Palestinians who have escaped abroad may be worse off than those left behind.
“We heard much about the Nakba from our parents and grandparents, about their suffering when forced to leave their country, at having lost everything,” he wrote. “They worked hard to build their lives in Syria, and what they built is destroyed. And now we, the third generation, are experiencing this also, of starting from zero in other countries.”
- This article was amended on 11 March 2015. It mistakenly described Talal Alyan as a former Yarmouk resident. He is a Palestinian-American writer and researcher who lives in the US. This has been corrected.
This is criminal and nothing else.
Massive Attack band says: “‘All Palestinians have a right to a life of dignity and beauty”
Posted on: September 1, 2014
Massive Attack visit Palestinian refugees in Lebanon:
‘All of them have a right to a life of dignity and beauty’
Members Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall were taken on a tour of the Al Naqab Center, run by Palestinian volunteers.
The center, which offers remedial classes, is a meeting place for active youth and other social activities. It has primarily been set up for Palestinians who have recently arrived from war-torn Syria.
Tonight (29 July), they will stage a concert in Lebanon in collaboration with the Hoping Foundation, part of the proceeds of which will go towards Al Naqab, as well as funding the building of a new public library in a separate camp in the north of the country and supporting the ambulance service in Gaza.
“We have been working with HOPING since 2005 doing gigs for the children of Palestine, so it really thrilling for us to be able to finally meet some of the brilliant young Palestinians we have been working with,” Robert Del Naja said.
“We wish to especially mention three groups of Palestinian refugees today.
First, those we just met, recently arrived from Syria who escaped death but are still living such harsh lives today. They have been made refugees many times – first in 1948, and again since the destruction of the Palestinian camps in Syria.
“Also it is important to bring attention to those Palestinians living in Lebanon since 1948: all the young people I met who weren’t born in Syria were born in Lebanon, and all of them are waiting to go home.
“And today we want to show our love solidarity and support for the Palestinian people in Gaza, indeed most of them are also refugees. All of them have a right to a life of dignity and beauty.
“As citizens of the UK, we are very aware of the role our country has played in shaping the history of the region,” he continued. “Like most people we believe in peace and justice over violence and oppression.
“The crisis for Palestinians everywhere is most evident with the horrific violence and loss of life we have been witnessing in Gaza these past weeks. Massive Attack have always supported the Palestinian people in their struggle. We are therefore honoured to be working with these young people, and with the Hoping Foundation that serves them.”
The band, who have long been vocal in their solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, used their headline slot at Longitude Festival over the weekend to highlight the widening humanitarian crisis caused by the conflict in Israel.
A lit-up message behind the performers said: “Gaza has been occupied or under restrictions since 1948.”
The recent acts of war in Israel and Gaza has seen over 2,200 Palestinians killed, and 11,000 injured, many of which have been civilian casualties.
Adonis Diaries 