Category: Archives

My Palestinian Mother-in-Law, and the Generation of Survivors

They succeeded in raising successive generations of Palestinians that remain attached to their land, to their culture, to their national identity. This is the real legacy of the Nakba survivors, the fact that their great-grandchildren are still fighting for, and dreaming of, a Free Palestine.

First published in Mondoweiss (by Marion Kawas)

My mother-in-law recently passed away at age 97 surrounded by her extended family. Her generation, and their important historical legacy, is quickly leaving us. Any efforts we can make at recording their stories, in whatever format, will contribute to keeping this part of Palestinian history alive. In that spirit, here are glimpses into the story of Jamileh.

She was the one who introduced me to Palestinian family life and culture. I first met her in Beirut in 1974 who she came to visit her two sons, one of whom I was about to marry. She brought home-made date and walnut maamouls, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and that was the beginning of a long relationship.

She typified most Palestinians of her generation and was twice displaced by the Zionist forces, first during the Nakba from Jaffa and then economically forced to leave the West Bank after the Naksa in 1967. She had 8 kids, multiple grandchildren and great grandchildren, scattered throughout many countries; and although she herself never received much formal education, she was adamant that her children all be properly educated.

The greatest tragedy for all Palestinians in exile is that they are denied the right to be buried in the soil of Palestine, and not allowed to die with dignity in their own homeland.

Born in 1926, her first horrific experience with the Zionist colonizers was during the ethnic cleansing in Jaffa in 1948, prior to the establishment of the Israeli state (while Palestinians were supposedly still under British Mandate “protection”). She was there with my father-in-law due to his work schedule; when the Zionist militias attacked, she was heavily pregnant at the time and remembered fleeing with bullets flying over their heads.

According to Salman Abu Sitta, the renowned Palestinian historian, in his article: Massacres as a weapon of ethnic cleansing during the Nakba :

“From the 1st of April to May 14, 1948, before the settlers’ state was declared and before the British left and before any Arab soldier entered Palestine to save it, the Zionist Invasion essentially conquered Palestine. Its declaration on May 14 was the crowning conclusion of this invasion.”

 “In Jaffa area (Region 4), there was a heavy concentration of atrocities in Jaffa city (8) and around Jaffa (6) in Beit Dajan…Jaffa city, which was designated to be in the ‘Arab State’, was depopulated in addition to twenty two villages in the district.”

The young couple then settled into life in Bethlehem, in the ancestral home. They raised their eight children and like all Palestinians, did their best to build some semblance of a normal family environment.

But Zionism had other plans.

With the 1967 military aggression and the subsequent Israeli military and economic pressure, the family joined the line of refugees crossing the bridge into Jordan. Those pictures you may have seen of young and old on the “Allenby” bridge, carrying young kids and clutching belongings…that was their lived experience.

Jordan brought different stresses for the Palestinian refugee population, as happened throughout the diaspora. Although many Palestinians in Jordan did receive citizenship and constitute a significant portion of the country’s population, this did not necessarily translate into effective support for the Palestinian struggle. Arab regimes had little interest in promoting a progressive liberation struggle, that inherently carried threats to their own dictatorial powers; in fact, many of these regimes actively aided the Zionist cause.

The Black September massacre by Jordanian forces on the Palestinian resistance in 1970-71 was just one example, an aggression that again touched my mother-in-law. She was wounded in the neck during that period, while travelling with her 7-year-old daughter trying to visit relatives.

Her generation faced incredible trauma and dispossession. With little to no support, abandoned by Arab regimes and the international community, they nonetheless persevered. They succeeded in raising successive generations of Palestinians that remain attached to their land, to their culture, to their national identity. This is the real legacy of the Nakba survivors, the fact that their great-grandchildren are still fighting for, and dreaming of, a Free Palestine.

Boycotting Israeli Products has a long history in Vancouver

In the late 1980s, Canada Palestine Association launched their first targeted consumer boycott of Achva Halva bars. Previous calls to boycott Israel had been more general and this campaign was to be the first of many consumer boycott initiatives. The campaign met with some success as several small businesses in the popular Commercial Drive area agreed to no longer carry the Halva bars, produced in an illegal Israeli settlement “industrial zone”. Famous Foods on Kingsway, however, insisted on stocking the product, despite repeated attempts to engage with them.

At that time, the bars were made in the Barkan settlement. According to Who Profits, the factory was moved to the Ariel settlement in 2017, and the company is no longer open about where the products are manufactured. In the late 1980s, as you can see in the pictures from one of our members, Achva was not shy in showing that their bars were the result of war crimes “pillaging”.

Ahdut Factory for Tehina Halva and Sweets (Ahdut – Achva) – whoprofits

Achva Factory, Ariel (via Who Profits)

Sabra and Shatila massacre: a scar that won’t heal

There are certain profound events in a nation’s history that leave an indelible mark on all its people. The massacre in two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Sabra and Shatila, on September 16, 1982 stands as one of those events.

Taking place during the course of the Lebanese civil war, Israeli forces shot flares into the night sky, lighting the way for far-right Lebanese militias to carryout the systematic killing of up to 3500 Palestinian and Lebanese men, women and children. The massacre lasted 48 hours.

Sabra and Shatila signalled the end of an era for the Palestinian resistance movement. An era that grew from the refugee camps in Lebanon and honored Palestinian refugees and their right of return; an era that did not question the value of armed struggle in national liberation; an era that nurtured some of the best of Palestinian cultural and political life; an era that restored Palestinian dignity after the harrowing years that followed the Nakba.

In 1982, the U.S. administration betrayed the written guarantees they had given to the PLO to protect Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps. An article by Palestinian academic Rashid Khalidi in 2017 titled “The United States was responsible for the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Beirut” studied what guarantees were given by U.S. officials and what they knew at the time. Khalidi also noted in his conclusion that the “ill-considered and morally flawed decisions about the 1982 war that were made by American policy-makers” continue to this day, with the same dangerous repercussions.

Nonetheless, a decade later, the Palestinian leadership agreed to the Oslo Accords, which we now know did immense damage to the Palestinian struggle. Where would the Palestinians stand now if the Oslo Accords had never been ratified, if the First Intifada had continued, if the PLO still inspired unity and stood for all the concepts encompassed in its name?

In 2007, on the 25th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, I wrote a commentary that was presented on the Voice of Palestine radio show in Vancouver. Sadly, its words still ring true; we are still waiting for justice, not only for the victims and survivors of Sabra and Shatila but for all Palestinians.

“It was September 1982. The summer had been brutal, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon being the issue we lived with, woke up to, and went to bed with. There was no internet, and our days were consumed with obtaining even the smallest slivers of news about the Palestinian and Lebanese casualties of the war, that numbered in the tens of thousands. We organized rallies, raised money for humanitarian aid, but none of it could erase or even reduce the emotional turmoil we constantly faced.

And then, as we all debated how and why the PLO forces left Beirut with supposed U.S. guarantees for the safety of civilians, we began to receive the flickering images on our TV screens of piled up and disfigured bodies from Sabra and Shatila. At first, the full horror of it was not immediately realized, and again, it took some time before all the details emerged. At least 3000 civilians (bodies were dumped in mass graves so figures are at best conservative) butchered and mutilated by Lebanese fascist forces with the full support of the occupying Israeli army in manners almost too gruesome to think about. And all of this with American guarantees for civilian safety.

We were like people in shock, numbly going ahead with plans for large protests but knowing at some deeper level, that the tragedy here would take a long time to process.

Many events happened in the aftermath but none brought the smallest amount of justice to the Sabra and Shatila victims. Ariel Sharon was found complicit even by Israeli institutions, but then returned as prime minister some years later. The victims tried to receive some modicum of accountability with their lawsuit in Belgian courts, which was then squashed by pressure from U.S. and other governments. Once again, the massacre of Palestinians was an inconvenient reality, and the memory of it even more inconvenient.”

Perhaps the new normalization/weapons agreements that have just been signed at the White House, one day before the Sabra and Shatila anniversary, will be looked back on by future analysts as marking the end of another era. The era of U.S. hegemony, destruction, and disregard for the lives and livelihood of the Palestinian and Arab peoples. And only then will the scars of the Sabra and Shatila massacre truly begin to heal.

by Marion Kawas
Pubished Sept. 17, 2020 in Mondoweiss

Why We Oppose Zionism and Anti-Semitism

The progressive Palestinian movement has always maintained that Zionism… Read more

The progressive Palestinian movement has always maintained that Zionism and anti-Semitism are two faces of the same coin and that they often feed off each other. Opposition to both is based on opposition to racism and on a principled and solid belief that human rights should be applied equally and universally to all human beings regardless of their nationality, color or religion. As part of that movement, we have a long record of challenging both, no matter the source, be it from Canadian federal politicians such as Jason Kenney and John Baird, provincial politicians such as Carole James or Canadian mayors such as Gregor Robertson, and even from Jews such as Gilad Atzmon.

From the early inception of Zionism, its founder Theodor Herzl recognized this connection and described anti-Semitism as a “propelling force” and declared: “Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow, and so do I”. He also stated: “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.” And as early as the first Zionist Congress (1897), Zionists collaborated with anti-Semites to achieve their common goal: ejecting Jews from their respective countries and in-gathering them in the new Ghetto in Palestine.

We also consider those who promote anti-Semitism as our enemies, not just because they are Zionism’s “propelling force” but also because they promote hatred against a religious group.

Without anti-Semitism, there would have been no Israel; without anti-Semitism, Zionism would have never convinced its “cannon fodder” to adopt its settler colonialist ideology.

Since its founding 120 years ago, Zionism has always claimed that it represents all Jews and that Israel is the “Jewish homeland”. The recent Israeli “Nation-State” law is the clear manifestation of this ideology, which was hidden from the world for the past seventy years under the Israeli slogan “the only democracy in the M.E.”. This law is also meant to redefine anti-Semitism by claiming that since Israel represents the Jews, any criticism, repudiation or hatred of Israeli brutal, racist and genocidal policies is considered anti-Semitism.

The Dimitri Lascaris “tweet”
Earlier this month, the major Canadian political parties that rarely agree on any subject in favour of the Canadian people, came out in an unprecedented show of unity and solidarity with Israel and Zionism.

This was in response to this tweet by pro-Palestinian activist and lawyer Dimitri Lascaris:
“Apparently Liberal MPs Anthony Housefather and Michael Levitt are more devoted to apartheid Israel than to their own prime minister and colleagues in the Liberal caucus.”
The backstory here was that Lascaris had exposed the racist nature of several B’nai Brith Canada supporters who were inciting violence against Canadian politicians and called “for the Death Penalty for Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and Liberal Muslim MPs”. He had called for political leaders to condemn this outrage but the silence at that point was deafening.(For background info on the story see Yves Engler article, Dimitri Lascaris’s response to Justin Trudeau, Independent Jewish Voices position on libelling Lascaris and a follow-up Engler article.)

And as usual, the Zionists employed the 3 D’s of Israeli hasbara: diversions, distortions and defamations. Diverted the attention from the Zionist supporters’ racism and their call to violence and murder, distorted what Lascaris was saying and then defamed him as an anti-Semite.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) stated in a tweet that Larcaris’ statement fits the “literal definition of #antisemitism” and asked the organization, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East CJPME, (of which he is Chair of the Board) to “publicly retract & apologize for this antisemitic smear”.
And then those same Canadian politicians that had absolutely no comment earlier, took their cue from CIJA and parroted its accusations and slander.
Canadian Prime minster Justin Trudeau went so far as to say in a tweet that Lascaris’ statement was a “Vile anti-Semitic smear”.
The Leader of Canada’s Conservative Party(CPC), Andrew Scheer, in the name of the CPC caucus, tweeted: “It’s shameful to see two MPs subjected to such anti-Semitism”.
The NDP leader Jagmeet Singh also tweeted:
“Antisemitism has no place in Canada”. And the NDP foreign critic Hélène Laverdière tweeted: “I condemn the anti-Semitic comments directed against them”
Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party also jumped on the band wagon and tweeted addressing the two Zionist MP’s (the alleged “victims”): “So unacceptable. Your loyalty to Canada is unquestioned.”
Even the organization CJPME, although taking great pains to point out that Lascaris’ tweet was personal and had nothing to do with them, nonetheless felt compelled to legitimize this Zionist definition of anti-Semitism by saying in their email statement: “The Jewish community is sensitive to allegations of divided loyalties … CJPME agrees that it is unnecessary to invoke questions of loyalty to Canada.”

The above quotes show clearly how the Zionist lobby has succeeded in hijacking the truth and the agenda by imposing its narrative on the vast majority of Canadian politicians, media and even some civil society groups, be they Jewish or non-Jewish.
Shockingly, a recent revelation made by Adalah noted: “The Israeli government declared that ‘the Knesset [is permitted] to legislate laws everywhere in the world’ and that it is authorized ‘to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries via legislation that would be applied to events occurring in their territories,’ in legal materials it recently submitted to the Israeli Supreme Court.”

Once upon a time, there were leaders in Canada who cared about truth, fairness, equality and dignity of all peoples. In 1935, the national leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation CCF (the NDP’s predecessor) J. S. Woodsworth, predicted the dangers of the Zionist Movement. He stated, referring to Zionism, that “if nationalism was ‘over-emphasized’ it would call forth a counter-nationalism that [would] be very disadvantageous.” He also said “the promotion of the interest of a sectional group tends to provoke a certain reaction in other sections of the population, and thus defeat the very object in view.”
Also, in 1938, when Woodsworth was approached to get CCF support for the Zionist settler project, he was quoted as saying: “It was easy for Canadians, Americans and the British to agree to a Jewish colony, as long as it was somewhere else. Why ‘pick on the Arabs’ other than for ‘strategic’ and ‘imperialistic’ consideration…” (Canada and the birth of Israel, David J. Bercuson, page 18, page 19).
Mr. Jagmeet Singh and Ms. Hélène Laverdière, please take note.

Zionists’ loyalty has always been to Zionism and its settler colonialist project
The claim that Zionism represents THE Jews is false and in itself promotes anti-Semitism. Those who believe that Zionism represents the Jews, including Canadian politicians, are either Zionists, anti-Semites or are promoters of it.
As the True Torah Jews put it: “…there are, generally, two types of people who conflate Judaism with Zionism: Zionists who try to legitimize Zionism, or anti-Semites who try delegitimizing Judaism.”

In fact, Jews were the first to recognize these facts and were the first to oppose the settler colonialist ideology, ZIONISM.
* In 1897 on the occasion of the first Zionist Congress, the Executive Committee of the Association of Rabbis in Germany issued the anti-Zionist manifesto that stated: “Judaism obligates its adherents to serve with all devotion the Fatherland to which they belong, and to further its national interests with all their heart and strength.” (Unease in Zion, Ehud Ben Ezer, Page 22)
* The strongest opposition to the Balfour Declaration within the British Government came from its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, who wrote: “Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom…I assert that there is not a Jewish nation…When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens…”
Also, more recently 40+ Jewish organizations from all over the world declared: “This conflation undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and the global struggle against antisemitism. It also serves to shield Israel from being held accountable to universal standards of human rights and international law.”

Zionism and its adherents seem to care less about the well being of the Jews, and more about the survival of the Zionist settler colonialist project. In 1938, the Zionist leader and later the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, stated: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”
This tradition continues today as Israel and the Zionist lobby openly collaborate with extreme anti-Semites and racists as long as they are pro-Israel.

Canadian Zionists showed their true “loyalty” to Canada when they broke the Canadian law and the U.N. embargo on war material and manpower to the region in 1948: ”The (Canadian) government was reluctant to draw attention to this matter (the Zionist volunteers) and refused to invoke the Foreign Enlistment Act (a law passed to discourage Canadians from fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War) … More than 300 Canadians eventually joined the Israeli forces while tons of military equipment, from Harvard training aircraft to radio sets, were smuggled out of Canadian ports. The recruiting of volunteers and the smuggling of arms were done with the active knowledge and assistance of leaders of the United Zionist Council…” (Canada and the birth of Israel, David J. Bercuson, page191.)

Why this Alliance between Zionism and Colonialism and Imperialism?
The real reason behind the support western colonialist and imperial countries have been giving to Zionism is that it serves their interests in the Arab region. It is not because of any Western love for Jews or even Zionists for that matter. The Zionist movement realized all of this in the early stages and quickly exploited it.

Theodore Herzl wrote in his book “The Jewish State”: “There we shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
Another Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, who was a close friend of the South African Apartheid leader Jan Smuts, also stated: “We had long pointed out to the British, and I repeated it again in my interview with Lord Cecil, that a Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England, in particular in respect to the Suez Canal.”

The support of Western powers to the Zionist project makes them complicit in Israeli war crimes, and by their support they are enabling Israel to carry on with the crimes of genocide and Apartheid against the Palestinian people.
We also should realize that their support to Israel and Zionism will continue only as long as Western imperial interests are being served. We could speculate further that their pretense of being “controlled” by the Zionist lobby helps to set the necessary exit strategy when Israel becomes a liability to those interests, and we know all too well who will be the target of any future backlash. Imperialism and settler colonialism have no morality nor conscience.

Trudeau and Canadian politicians are objectively promoting racism!
Mr. Trudeau, what falls under the category of “Vile anti-Semitic smears” is your support for the Zionist claim that it represents the Jews; by tarnishing the Jews with the war crimes that the Zionist state is committing against the Palestinian people and against humanity, you are the one objectively promoting anti-Semitism, not Mr. Lascaris. What constitutes “Vile anti-Semitic smears” is your support for the supremacist ideology of Zionism that uprooted and stole the land of the Semitic indigenous people of Palestine.
If you ever wake up one day with a conscience, how about implementing what Sir Edwin Montagu suggested in 1917 to the British Government:
“I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest.”

Unfortunately, we live in an era where supremacist, colonialist and imperialist forces control the world from the barrel of a gun. For peace, justice and dignity to prevail, it is incumbent on all of us to fight against all forms of racism and the hegemonic designs of those imperial powers, wherever they manifest. Otherwise, humanity is doomed.

Hanna Kawas,
Chair, Canada Palestine Association