Understanding the Palestinian Refugee Crisis

Abbas interviewing Palestinian Girls in his refugee camp

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Ziad Abbas of the Middle East Children’s alliance address a full room of students at City College of San Francisco with his presentation, “Cultural Resistance of Marginality: a Personal Perspective on the Untold Stories of Palestinian Refugees.” I had seen Ziad’s slideshow once previously, at a workshop for educators and community organizers on how to teach the history of the conflict, but this time it evoked much stronger emotions in me than before.

Perhaps because most of the students in the room were still raw with emotion from seeing a performance of Seven Jewish Children given in the school library just a few minutes before, or maybe because the presentation was so deeply personal, Ziad clearly struck a nerve. I saw tears well up in the eyes of people I couldn’t have dreamed would still be paying attention after nearly two hours, and hands spring into the air with questions that betrayed a level of critical thinking and understanding that can only manifest when one’s attention is truly gripped.

In his presentation Ziad flows seamlessly between historical lessons and personal narrative, flashing from a map of Palestine in 1878 marking the first Zionist settlement to a picture of the small tent his mother, father, brother, and sister called home in the first weeks after they were forced from their village of Zakariyya. He shows pictures from the Israeli archive opened in the late 1990s –a village being blown to bits after it was cleared, a group of Hagana soldiers leaning against their military vehicle, a trail of men, women, and children saddled with blankets and baskets as they walk into the distance. The last one, he says, reminds him of his mother.

“She locked the door behind her and left our house barefoot, one child on her hip as she took the other by the hand, thinking she’d be back as soon as the fighting ended.”*

He calls her naïve, exhaling warmly.

Next he moves to images of Palestinians, some trying to escape the fighting on their own, some being forcibly transferred.  He lingers on one in particular. In it we see ragged-looking men and women sitting in a tattered bus as tidy, uniformed Jewish soldiers stand guard nearby, guns slung over their shoulders. He turns to us and asks, “What does this remind you of?” A girl I know, unfamiliar with the conflict, shouts, “The Holocaust. The trains.” I’m shocked. How obvious it all is to those with new eyes.

He speaks of the UN making the decision to turn the tents in his Dheisheh refugee camp into brick and mortar rooms, each about 81 square feet and housing at minimum six people. Every few hundred rooms had two bathrooms, one for women and the other for men.

“We felt like we were always waiting,” he said, “waiting in line for food, waiting in line for the bathroom. Waiting, waiting, waiting.”

And he tells us that when the Abbas family finally got their own private bathroom years later, there was a celebration.

He talks about how difficult it was to live under curfew, especially in the beginning when there was no running water, no electricity. Even after these luxuries became commonplace it wasn’t easy. From 1979 to 1995, refugees in his camp spent nearly 4 months out of every year locked down. The longest single stretch happened during the Gulf War; it was 49 days.

Despite these hardships, Ziad has clearly kept his sense of humor. He laughs when he explains how when he got into particularly bad fights with his mother he would run outside and throw stones at his own house in protest, or how every time he had to escort his older sister to the communal bathroom he would ask for change in return.

“It’s how I made my income!” he jokes.

The most moving part of the presentation comes when he begins to delineate the role of the Jewish National Fund in “greenwashing” Palestine’s ethnic cleansing.  He shows a picture of Zakariyya in the 1920’s, and points out the empty hills rolling into the distance. Then he shows a current view of the same village, the hills now covered in non-indigenous trees, the houses gone.

Next he flashes to a sign for a nature reserve. The upper portion is written in Hebrew, but below you can read in English, “Funded in part by a congregation in Kansas City, Missouri.”

“We call it the Israeli-American occupation, sometimes. You see why.”

Here the mood becomes even darker as he tells us in a somber tone that his uncle passed away only two days ago. He was the last person in his family from the “catastrophe generation” as Ziad calls it, referring to those who actually lived through the 1947-48 cleansing. He recalls the time he smuggled his uncle into Israel to see their village a few years ago. By this time his uncle was quite old, and so when he started pointing to forests and nature reserves, giving them Arabic names and describing the villages that used to stand in their stead, Ziad first thought he was simply confused.

“You’re turned around, that’s all. We’ll find our way.”

When his uncle insisted that the reserve they were standing on was in fact Ziad’s mother’s village, Ziad thought the old man had lost it.  

“No!” He bellowed, shaking his head, wringing his hands. “No! This. Is. The. Village!”

Here Ziad becomes very quiet. I realize he isn’t looking at us anymore, but somewhere above our heads. I close my eyes and imagine the scene.

“The stones, the trees, they all started speaking. My uncle is an artist you see, and he listened. Within 30 minutes the village stood before us, as clear as if we had lived there our whole lives. He described the house, the window, the view from the front steps. I saw it all. And then we started digging. I found that step buried in the ground, that first step. I stood on it, imagining what my mother saw as a girl every morning.”

He called it life-altering. I bit my lip to stop from weeping at the thought of it.

He focused the rest of his energy that night on resistance, showing us pictures taken in and around Dheisheh. As I saw boy after boy bravely stare down tanks and armored soldiers, their childish hands clasped around rocks, their shoulders strong and defiant, I felt ashamed. How could I be such a coward? How could I ever let something as silly as the fear of offending someone stop me from raising my voice, when here stood these little children, fighting against the oppression of the longest occupation in modern history with their bare hands?

 More moving than that was the video he showed us, made by a young girl named Zainab. She wasn’t interested in rocks at all. No, Zainab wanted to become a lawyer, “to give rights back to the Palestinian people.” She was so precious, she reminded me of my baby sister.

I became enraged. How could anyone deny her anything, let alone her basic human rights? As if reading my mind, Ziad finished his presentation with these words:

“We aren’t interested in peace. We are interested in justice. And we aren’t asking for miracles, or even anything special. We are asking for what was given to us by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and by resolution 194. There are nearly 7 million Palestinian refugees now. We cannot be ignored.”

*Quotes are not 100% exact but taken from notes

Ethical Oil: The Canadian Oil Industry and the Israel Connection

Last month I discovered a piece on Feministing about a recent Canadian ad campaign for Ethical Oil. According to Ethical Oil’s website, the group:

Encourages people, businesses and governments to choose Ethical Oil from Canada, its oil sands and other liberal democracies. Unlike Conflict Oil from some of the world’s most politically oppressive and environmentally reckless regimes, Ethical Oil is the “Fair Trade” choice in oil. Countries that produce Ethical Oil protect the rights of women, workers, indigenous peoples and other minorities including gays and lesbians. Conflict Oil regimes, by contrast, oppress their citizens and operate in secret with no accountability to voters, the press or independent judiciaries.

The group’s now infamous ad, which can be seen here, speaks of the abuse women endure in Saudi Arabia, and paints Canada’s environmentally disastrous tar sands as the only alternative. But intelligent women aren’t falling for it. As one blogger puts it, “I am a feminist and I am an environmentalist. I don’t really appreciate being asked to compromise one to support the other….If Ethical Oil was truly interested in women’s rights, they’d be campaign for fuel efficiency standards. Instead they’re using the condition of Saudi women as a disgusting gateway to destroying the planet and encouraging an environmental disaster.”

The ad currently runs on Oprah’s OWN network. Upon discovering this, the exceptionally thorough environmentalist and writer Emma Pullman did some investigative work and found the following, which she then included in an open letter to Ms. Winfrey (the article also does an amazing job of unraveling the absurd logic Ethical Oil operates by):

According to Deep Climate, Ethical Oil isn't the low budget grassroots organization it purports to be. Its principals are some of the rising stars of the conservative movement in Canada, and one is a lawyer for tar sands firms.

Here's the back story: Ezra Levant turned "ethical oil" into a meme late last year. Almost overnight, pro-industry and government officials, keen to sell the filthy oil to a skeptical public, picked up the term and ran with it.  After the Conservative election victory in May, Conservative government spokesperson (and former American Enterprise Institute intern) Alykhan Velshi took over at the helm of the ethicaloil.org blog. The blog is registered to Levant, who also has strong links to the Conservatives.

And, here's another thing that just doesn't add up for me. How is it that a former advisor to Environment Minister John Baird, and communications director for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, would find himself taking an "unpaid" job as a blogger?

Thanks to the folks over at Deep Climate, it makes a lot more sense. EthicalOil.org is connected to the obscure Ethical Oil Institute. Though there is scant reference to them online, according to their notice of incorporation, the institute was registered on March 9, 2011 to an Edmonton address, 12220 Stony Plain Road, Edmonton AB T5N 3Y4.  

That just so happens to be the address of the law firm McLennan Ross. McLennan Ross makes bathtubs full of money doing work for tar sands firms.

The two members of the Ethical Oil Institute's board of directors are Ezra Levant and McLellan Ross partner Thomas Ross. Thomas Ross is one of ten lead partners in McLellan Ross’s OilSandsLaw.com initiative, a “slick new oilsands cross-selling strategy" and marketing campaign.

But it gets better. Pullman mentioned that Alykhan Velshi also contributes to the group. In fact, Ethical Oil openly states this, saying the site “began as a blog created by Alykhan Velshi.” More than simply an “intern for the American Enterprise Institute,” Velshi was also head of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, where he co-founded the Center for Law and Counterterrorism. He is an open supporter of Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, does not believe the Geneva Conventions should apply to those captured in the War on Terror, and advocates the creation of a special National Security Court to try terrorism suspects.

More importantly, Velshi is an open and unabashed Zionist, working for Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney as his Director of Communications and Parliamentary Affairs. You might recall that Kenney made the news in 2009 as he was embroiled in a battle with Canadian Arab Federation president Khaled Mouammar in which Kenney and Velshi were able to successfully defund CAF after comments Mouammar made criticizing Kenney’s support for Operation Cast Lead. According to Velshi, Mouammar was “anti-Semetic.” See here for the full story.

And there's more. Writing for the Huffington Post, Velshi criticized the Saudi government’s attempt to get Ethical Oil’s ad off the air, explaining:

I have also alerted Foreign Minister John Baird and Dean Allison, Chairman of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, about the incident in writing, calling on the Harper government and the parliamentary committee to investigate a foreign dictatorship trying to censor what Canadians can and cannot see on their televisions.

While in a free, open, and democratic society, we can have vigorous disagreements about energy policy and the role Canada's oil sands should play in the energy supply mix, when a foreign dictatorship like Saudi Arabia tries to censor one side of that debate, we all need to stand as one in defending our rights as Canadians. That means that all of us -- including oil sands critics like Greenpeace -- need to condemn this brazen act of domestic political interference by a blood-soaked, conflict oil-fueled foreign dictatorship.

Wait, what? Need I remind you, this is the same man who played an instrumental role in successfully banning British PM and outspoken Israel critic George Galloway from entering Canada. From wiki:

Velshi told the media that the Canadian government would not reverse this decision, stating that Galloway had expressed sympathy for the Taliban cause in Afghanistan and describing him as an "infandous street-corner Cromwell who actually brags about giving 'financial support' to Hamas, a terrorist organisation banned in Canada.^[33] The decision to ban Galloway was supported by the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith Canada and the far-right Jewish Defence League of Canada, which took credit for initiating the action.^[34] It was subsequently noted that Velshi had begun preparing media lines regarding Galloway several days before the ban was announced.^[32]

The Canadian border police would not let Galloway into the country based on instructions from Velshi. Now tell me again, what did he say about free speech and debate?

I guess Velshi has no sense of irony. Either that, or he’s just a hypocrite. A neoconservative Zionist taking talking points from the Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Birth Canada, which act as in part as agents of Israel to insulate its “blood-soaked” apartheid regime from Western criticism has the gall to talk about other countries meddling in Canadian affairs. What exactly is his angle here?

In truth, Ethical Oil is guilty of myriad hasbara-esque techniques, among them greenwashing, pinkwashing, and the old familiar but-look-at-those-evil-Arabs-over-THERE excuse by comparison, except this time they're in the service of Canada rather than Israel. But these obfuscations don't work for Israel, and they shouldn't work for Canada either.

Why We Resist Occupation

To the States - Walt Whitman

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.