Democratic Palestine : 31 (ص 6)
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- عنوان
- Democratic Palestine : 31 (ص 6)
- المحتوى
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The Declaration of Independence
Palestine, the land of the three monotheistic faiths, is where
the Palestinian Arab people was born, on which it grew,
developed and excelled. The Palestinian Arab people was never
separated from or diminished in its integral bonds with
Palestine. Thus, the Palestinian Arab people ensured for itself
an everlasting union between itself, its land and its history.
Resolute throughout that history, the Palestinian Arab
people forged its national identity, rising even to unimagined
levels in its defense, as invasion, the design of others and the
appeal special to Palestine’s ancient and luminous place on
that eminence where powers and civilizations are joined... all
this intervened thereby to deprive the people of its political in-
dependence. Yet the undying connection between Palestine and
its people secured for the land its character, and for the people
its national genius.
Nourished by an unfolding series of civilizations and
cultures, inspired by a heritage rich in variety and kind, the
Palestinian Arab people added to its stature by consolidating a
union between itself and its patrimonial land. The call went out
from the temple, church and mosque that to praise the creator,
to celebrate compassion and peace was indeed the message of
Palestine. And in generation after generation, the Palestinian
Arab people gave of itself unsparingly in the valiant battle for
liberation and homeland. For what has been the unbroken
chain of our people’s rebellions but the heroic embodiment of
our will for national independence? And so the people was
sustained in the struggle to stay and to prevail.
When in the course of modern times a new order of values
was declared with norms and values fair for all, it was the
Palestinian Arab people that had been excluded from the
destiny of all other peoples by a hostile array of local and
foreign powers. Yet again had unaided justice been revealed as
insufficient to drive the world’s history along its preferred
course.
And it was the Palestinian people, already wounded in its
body, that was submitted to yet another type of occupation
over which floated the falsehood that ‘Palestine was a land
without peonvle.’ This notion was foisted upon some in the
world, whereas in article 22 of the Covenant of the League of
Nations (1919) and in the treaty of Lausanne (1923), the
community of nations had recognized that all the Arab ter-
ritories, including Palestine, of the formerly Ottoman pjro-
vinces, were to have granted to them their freedom as provi-
sionally independent nations.
Despite the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian
Arab people, resulting in their dispersion and depriving them
of their right to self-determination, following upon UN
General Assembly resolution 181 (1947), which partitioned
Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, yet it is this
resolution that still provides those conditions of international
legitimacy that ensure the right of the Palestinian Arab people
to sovereignty and national independence.
By stages, the occupation of Palestine and parts of other
6
Arab territories by Israeli forces, the willed dispossession and
expulsion from their ancestral homes of the majority of
Palestine’s civilian inhabitants was achieved by organized ter-
ror: Those Palestinians who remained, as a vestige subjugated
in its homeland, were persecuted and forced to endure the
destruction of their national life.
Thus were principles of international legitimacy violated;
thus were the Charter of the United Nations and its resolutions
disfigured, for they had recognized the Palestinian Arab peo-
ple’s national rights, including the right of return, the right to
independence, the right to sovereignty over territory and
homeland.
In Palestine and on its perimeters, in exile distant and near,
the Palestinian Arab people never faltered and never aban-
doned its conviction in its right of return and independence.
Occupation, massacres and dispersion achieved no gain in the
unabated Palestinian consciousness of self and political identi-
ty, as Palestinians went forward with their destiny, undeterred
and unbowed. And from out of the long years of trial in ever-
mounting struggle, the Palestinian political identity emerged
further consolidated and confirmed. And the collective
Palestinian national will forged for itself a political embodi-
ment, the Palestine Liberation Organization, its sole legitimate
representative, recognized by the world community as a whole,
as well as by related regional and international institutions.
Standing on the very rock of conviction in the Palestinian
people’s inalienable rights, and on the grounds of Arab na-
tional consensus, and of international legitimacy, the PLO led
the campaigns of its people, molded into unity and powerful
resolve, one and indivisible in its triumphs, even as it suffered
massacres and confinement within and without its home. And
so Palestinian resistance was clarified and raised into the
forefront of Arab and world awareness, as the struggle of the
Palestinian Arab people achieved unique prominence among
the world’s liberation movements in the modern era.
The massive national uprising, the ‘intifada’, now intensify-
ing in cumulative scope and power on occupied Palestinian
territories, as well as the unflinching resistance of the refugee
camps outside the homeland, have elevated consciousness of
the Palestinian truth and right into still higher realms of com-
prehension and actuality. Now, at last, the curtain has been
dropped around a whole epoch of prevarication and negation.
The intifada has set siege to the mind of official: Israel, which
has for too long relied exclusively upon myth and terror to
deny Palestinian existence altogether. Because of the intifada
and its revolutionary irreversible impulse, the history of
Palestine has therefore arrived at a decisive juncture.
Whereas the Palestinian people reaffirms most definitely its
inalienable rights in the land of its patrimony:
- now by virtue of national rights, and the exercise of those
historical and legal rights and the sacrifices of successive
generations who gave themselves in defense of the freedom,
and independence of their homeland; - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 31
- تاريخ
- ديسمبر ١٩٨٨
- المنشئ
- الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين
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