O Palestine!

ALLAHU AKBAR!

Five days ago – November 29 – the UN General Assembly voted to grant “non-member observer State” status to Palestine. A resounding affirmation -- 138 in favour to nine against – led by the US and Israeli, but of course, with 41 abstentions – of the legitimacy of Palestine as a state, no matter its denial by a few bullies in the family of nations.

“We did not come here seeking to delegitimize a State established years ago, and that is Israel; rather we came to affirm the legitimacy of the State that must now achieve its independence, and that is Palestine,” the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Assembly before the vote.

Abbas noted that the world was being asked today to undertake a significant step in the process of rectifying the “unprecedented historical injustice” inflicted on the Palestinian people since 1948.

“Your support for our endeavour today,” he said, “will send a promising message – to millions of Palestinians on the land of Palestine, in the refugee camps both in the homeland and the Diaspora, and to the prisoners struggling for freedom in Israel’s prisons – that justice is possible and that there is a reason to be hopeful and that the peoples of the world do not accept the continuation of the occupation.”

Serendipitously, the UN recognition came on the very day of the annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People established in 1977 to  mark the date in 1947 when the Assembly adopted a resolution partitioning then-mandated Palestine into two States, one Jewish and one Arab.

But sadly, birthed only one state – that of Israel, Palestine still at its embryonic stage until this time, ever-threatened with abortion.

It is good that the Philippines stood tall – this time – in favour of the Palestinian state.

“The Philippines supports Palestine’s quest for self-rule and self-determination, and we hope that one day an independent Palestine may live side by side in peace with its neighbors.” So was Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Raul Hernandez quoted as saying.

The Philippine vote, in a sense, served as a rectification of that monumental error committed in 1947.

Sometime in 1989, there was lobbying for the Philippines to recognize the Palestinian state. Here is something dug out of my files of that period finding relevance again – from my Offline column in Headline: Manila, September 19, 1989.   

IF ONLY to expiate for the historical error it committed in the partition vote at the UN on November 29, 1947 that effected the creation of the State of Israel and consequently rejected and ejected the then 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs from the land they nurtured for seven centuries, the Philippines should grant immediate recognition of the Palestinian state.

Of that period, here is what Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre wrote in their monumental book O Palestine:

“During that crucial interlude (i.e. when the pro-partition votes were endangered) four nations opposed to partition, Greece, Haiti, Liberia and the Philippines were subjected to a deluge of diplomatic pressures and menaces. The United States, again acting on the instigation of the White House, threw the full impact of its tremendous prestige behind the Jewish cause. Two justices of the United States Supreme Court personally cabled Philippine President Manuel A. Roxas warning that the ‘Philippines will isolate millions and millions of American friends and supporters if they continue in their efforts to vote against partition.’ Twenty six senators cabled Roxas and urged him to change his nation’s vote. The Philippine ambassador was summoned to a blunt but intensive briefing at the White House. Finally, Roxas ordered his delegation ‘in the higher national interest’ to switch its vote from against to for partition.”        

There lies the Philippines’ role as an accomplice in an international crime against a people who are up to now suffering from that “monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of crime they had not commited.” 

The Palestinians were made to suffer for the crimes against the Jews by white supremacist Adolf Hitler. Now they suffer under the Jews, who have taken practically even their very birthright.

Rather than now question Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani’s meeting with Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, government must increase its efforts to work for the recognition of Palestine as a number of nations in the Third World and in the Non-Aligned Movement has done.

Israeli and American propaganda has invariably imaged the Palestinians as blood-thirsty terrorists – amply amplified by local running dogs of the CIA and the Mossad. In the Middle Easter context however, who are the real terrorists?

News reports on the almost two-year intifada show Palestinian “terror” stones matched against the Jews’ “righteous bullets.” The number of casualties: less than a score among the Jews, some victimized by stray bullets from their own kind; hundreds of Palestinians dead, thousands maimed and tens of thousands rendered homeless. He who kills and maims more is the source, not the recipient, of terror. That is natural law.

In the history of terrorism, Libya’s Moammar Qadaffi, US-pictured as the ultimate terrorist, would look like a boy scout ranged with former Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the latter’s Irgun days.

Headed by Begin, Irgun and its offshoot, the Stern Gang were composed of desperadoes whose creed for the establishment of Israel started and ended with the gun, as imprinted in their escutcheon of a rifle thrust aloft by a clenched fist ringed with the motto “Only Thus.”

Some of the tamer activities of Irgun were the killing of more than 300 mostly innocent victims, according to Collins-Lapierre, “like the 90 Arabs, Jews and Britons they had killed…in the destruction of a wing of the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946.”

Continued the account: “they had shocked the world and outraged their fellow Jews by hanging two British sergeants, then booby-trapping their bodies, in reprisal for the execution of one of their members.”

The terrorism imputed on the Palestinians is but a concrete manifestation of nationalist aspirations no less different than those that laundhed the Philippine, even the American, Revolutions. That which is being done to them by the Jews is not simply a political praxis of the biblical “eye for an eye” but an Israeli national policy of aggression fully backed by the United States, the international patron of fascist reaction to all nationalist uprisings in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa, and in Palestine.

ALLAHU AKBAR!

In 1987, I was among a select group of Pampanga mediamen inducted into an International Solidarity for the Liberation of Palestine by the group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by George Habash, a rival of Arafat.

In fitting ceremonies, of prayers and expressions of brotherhood, we were inducted into the hattah, the Palestinian headscarf, as a symbol of that very solidarity – “as you wear the hattah, you are one with us in our struggles as we are one with you in yours…” Taking those words to heart, I have worn the hattah ever since, in all its colorful variations in the Arabian kaffiyeh even. 

So in solidarity with my Palestinian brethren, I find cause for celebration in Palestine: non-member observer State at the UN.

But the struggle continues until...insha’Allah, the independent Republic of Palestine comes into being.