We came to this country, which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish, state here. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you because the geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, but the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul, Kibbutz Gevat in the place of Jibta, Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis, and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shummam. There is no single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
Moshe Dayan -- Then Israeli Defense Minister
Haaretz, April 4, 1969
It is not that there were a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.
Golda Meir -- Then Israeli Prime Minister
London Sunday Times, June 7, 1969
The most fundamental myth created and advanced by the Zionist movement in its attempt to establish a pure Jewish state in Palestine has been its systematic denial of the existence of the Palestinian people. Palestine was “a land without people for people without land”, goes the Zionist argument. The fact is that the native Arab people of Palestine aspiring for their own independence and self-determination had populated the country for centuries. The inevitable clash between the Zionist movement and the national aspirations of the Arab people of Palestine resulted in turning the majority of them into refugees, who number about five million today, the destruction of more than five hundred of their towns and villages and building new Jewish settlements on their ruins. In its resolution 194, the UN asserted the immediate return of the refugees to their homes and insisted that the acceptance of the state among its members would be pending the implementation of the resolution 194. After more than half a century, Israel still enjoys full membership of the UN along with its systematic denial of the Palestinian refugee’s right of return.
The second myth created by the Zionist propaganda is Israel’s claim for being a Western democracy. The common practice among Western political leaders is the tendency to single it out as the exception in a region otherwise lacking in democratic and representative regimes. It is a strange hypocrisy for Israel to claim itself as a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time, when on top of that it was established on the ruins of another people. Unlike many ethnic minorities living in Western societies, the Palestinians in Israel did not immigrate to the new system; rather, the system was imposed on them resulting in the destruction of their society and the disposition of the rest of their people.
Today, the Palestinians in Israel live as second-class citizens in a colonial-apartheid regime that does not lose any opportunity to marginalize, exploit, and manipulate their collective identity and existence according to the needs of the Jewish majority. Although a clear analogy can be made between the Israeli regime and the Apartheid regime of South Africa with regard to the status of the Palestinians in Israel, one must remember that while the entire native population of South Africa remained in their homeland, the native Palestinians have been literally forced into exile leaving a small minority of them behind. To drive the point home, it is suffice to remember the fact that the state of Israel does not have a constitution. As a colonial entity claiming to represent the national aspirations of the world Jewry, the Jewish state in Palestine has been unable to draft a constitution, which would simultaneously define its relationship with its non-Jewish Palestinian citizens and non-citizen Jews, around the world, let alone the Palestinian refugees insisting on their right to return to their homeland.
Instead, Israel has what is called “basic laws”, some of which illustrate the essence of its Apartheid structure. For an exmple, the “law of return” applies only to Jews, according to which any Jewish person all over the world, by religious-ethnic definition, is entitled to immigrate to the state of Israel and acquire its citizenship. The same right is prevented from Palestinian refugees who were expelled from the territory on which Israel was established in 1948.
Second, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which was established by the Zionist movement before the creation of Israel itself, is the authority in charge of most of the land, and not the government. Again, by definition, only Jews can buy, own or lease land from the JNF, a right, which is denied to the Palestinians who are citizens of the same Israel. Within this state of affairs, the struggle to maintain their Palestinian national identity without compromising their human and civil rights and equal opportunities has been the core issue for the Palestinians in Israel.
Israel’s systematic discrimination against its Arab-Palestinian citizens takes a wide range of forms and manifestations. As reposted by the Human Rights Watch (2001) Palestinian schools in Israel suffer from systematic discrimination in budget, school building, support services, teacher qualifications and much more. There is no single Arab university in Israel despite the fact that Arab Palestinians constitute 20% of the populations. Many of the indigenous Arab-Palestinian villages (especially in the Naqab) are not recognized by the government and consequently are denied basic services such as water and electricity. Budget for Palestinian local municipalities is incomparable to Jewish towns of identical size.
Abna’a al-Balad (People of the Homeland Movement) was founded as a grassroots movement in 1969, with the goal to preserve the collective national identity of the Arab Palestinians in Israel, link their struggle to that of the rest of their exiled brethren (especially the refugees right of return) and continue the struggle for the human rights and equality within the state which was imposed on them. It is the progressive voice of the masses against the global conspiracy of imperialism and against colonial sabotage of the Arab homeland and against the subjugation of the working classes and the poor. Through its grassroots organization, Abna’a al-Balad is working mainly towards building the institutions of civil society among the Palestinian masses and raising national awareness and collective consciousness.
Abna’a al-Balad, rejects any normalizing of relations with the Jewish state in Palestine through a firm boycott of the Zionist electoral process and refusing to be involved in this useless attempt to reform this system from within only giving it legitimacy and acceptance by the Arab voter. A system that demands of any elected official to its Knesset to subscribe to the law revised in 1984 through section 7 (A): that any member of the Zionist Knesset must accept the fact that the state is: “ A State for the Jewish People”. Realizing the racist connotations and dangerous implications of this precondition, Abna’a al-Balad asks the boycott of those pseudo-elections who call for a state for its “Jewish People.” Abna’a al-Balad will not pay this price to enter the Knesset and will not sacrifice its moral and ideological commitments to the masses and the progressive international movement for the gold of the world.
The new world order that we understand well, will want to dominate the markets of the region, to transform the development and unification programs of the Arab and Third World obsolete, substituting development programs by consumer societies for exploitation and domination. We realize this imperialist and Zionist program has not reformed itself and has not changed, we are not fooled like some of the others have been fooled. Our duty has been and continues to be to confront all attempts working to realize it and to accept it. To combat all attempts to introduce the internalization of defeat to the Palestinian masses, Arab people, and the progressive movement.
Abna’a al-Balad is an integral part of the Palestinian National Movement that functions on the Palestinian and national Arab fronts representing ideologically and in practice the interests of the working classes Arabs or Jews, working to create a democratic society away from ethnic bigotry, racism, and to the evolution and progression of all regardless of ethnicity, race, or religious affiliation.
Abna’a al-Balad realizes the dire consequences of the current racist and class oriented structure that result in poverty, misery and unemployment for the masses of Arabs in 1948 Palestine because of their class situation and/or their ethnicity and national cause.
Abna’a al-Balad works restlessly in addition to increasing class-consciousness and political realization of our masses to combat the Zionist system, it also works hard to find alternative social and economic structures and establishments that help support the dire situation Arabs must suffer under the current Zionist structure.
Abna’a al-Balad callas for the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes and lands, end the Israeli occupation and Zionist apartheid and the establishment a democratic secular state in Palestine as the ultimate solution to the Arab-Zionist conflict.
Abna’a al-Balad’s commitment to developing programs that aim to build independent political, economic, and intellectual institutions fall into a program to create self-sufficiency and independence to those removed from the wealth and opportunities of the Zionist class and race structure. It is a program for empowerment, independence, and liberation. We in Abna’a al-Balad believe that our state of relative deprivation and oppression on one hand and our national strategic cause are intertwined and the only way to work on them simultaneously is by a grassroots program that involves the masses and empowers them to take charge of their lives rather than accept the Zionist Knesset as the only channel to ask for our civil rights.
Abna’a al-Balad understands that it is not enough to assert the Arab-Palestinian nature of the collective identity of the Palestinian people in 1948. In order to counter the Isralization process, which has intensified most recently (especially after Oslo) in its attempt to eradicate our national identity, we need a systematic and a well-developed national educational campaign. Our goal is to develop and implement a comprehensive national educational campaign aiming at developing, asserting and maintaining the Arab-Palestinian national identity among our masses. This requires an active rather than a reactive program to raise and enhance national awareness through empowering the masses, informal educational activities, community centers, literacy programs, youth activities, and the development of academic research programs to guide our understanding of this old/new process of internal colonization.
Finally, in its revolutionary program for the popular classes movement Abna’a al-Balad places itself in the human context, where it aspires for nations and people of different backgrounds to learn to speak work and respect one another on equal standing and away from the master-slave relationship the current status quo and the new world order wishes to enforce.