Eminent Analyst Edward Said
To the everlasting credit of the PLO in the years between 1968 and 1982, its emergence made it possible for all Palestinians to identify themselves as belonging to one people, in effect a nation, albeit one in exile and dispossessed. And during the Intifada that sense of proudly belonging to an identity bravely fighting for its own preservation against efforts made to extinguish or deny it spread everywhere ... To be a Palestinian in revolt against Israeli occupation soldiers was in effect to give greater depth and meaning to the struggle against racial discrimination. It is surely one of the ironies of history that the Palestinian people's greatest historical enemy – the Zionist movement and its more militant ideologists – was energized precisely by the same idea, that one can strongly assume one's identity as a Jew rather than quietly submit to assimilation as a Polish, Russian, American or British citizen.,
Identity by choice is a political commitment to be Palestinian as an active commitment not just to the establishment of a separate state, but to the more significant cause of ending injustice and liberating Palestinians into a new secular identity able to take its place within contemporary history. The pressures against making that choice today are increasing on an hourly basis. One of the principal objectives of the Oslo process is a paradoxical one since it implicitly accepts (and then annuls) the notion that Palestinian identity is in principle an identity based on more than narrow nationalist grounds ... The very idea of Palestinian identity signifies far more than a simple ethnic nationalism. It means acting against the forces of religious obscurantism, gender discrimination, economic inequality and the like.
... Oslo was designed in part to break the back of his larger notion of identity, to drive Palestinians back into their Gaza and West Bank towns, villages, clans where hey could be encircled, confined, cut down to size both by Israel and the US on the one hand and, most lamentably, by their own national authority. That effort and aspect of Oslo has succeeded, but the centre of attention has now shifted to the 4.5 million Palestinians who still remain in exile, and whose persistent stubbornness in expressing their identity by choice is symbolized by the right of return they continue to maintain.
This is not merely a geographical wish or demand. It is at least five things more. It is the right to have one's own abode. It is the right to remain there. It is the right to repatriation. It is the right to compensation and restitution. It is the collective right of association(we want to be Palestinian where we want to be) and of residence. It is the right to coexist on an equal footing with Israeli Jews. Quite clearly the Palestinian Authority symbolizes the defeat and abridgement of most of these rights. The burden for the rest of us ... is to resist the attempt to cut us and our ideas down merely to matters of birth and actual residence whose final arbiter is Israel. Thus current ""international" plans to resettle the vast majority of refugees include sending them to places like Iraq, Canada, the US, even Jordan, as well as pressuring countries that have large Palestinian communities (e.g. Lebanon) into giving Palestinians citizenship and residence where they already reside.
Although official Palestinian rhetoric today insists on the right of return, the Authority's past performances on matters of stated principle does not provide a convincing precedent. Besides, Israel's position since its inception in 1948 has been flatly to deny Palestinians anything like a right of return while insisting on the absolute right of any Jew anywhere both to "return" and to unconditional Israeli citizenship .. , What we ask for as Palestinians is the right to be citizens and not just numbers in the ultimately losing game being played by the Oslo participants ... In a decade there will be demographic parity between Jews and Arabs in historical Palestine. Better that we accommodate to each other sooner rather than later as full members of a bi-national secular state than to go on fighting what has been demeaningly called a shepherd's war between. Feuding tribes ... (Source: The Greater Kashmir, 31 October, 1999)
Plea for Indo-Pakistan Dialogue
[A Colloquium on "Peace Imperatives to Resume India-Pakistan Dialogue" was organised by the Pakistan-India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy in New Delhi on February 1, 2000, attended by Afrasiab Khattak (Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan) and Ifteqar-ul Haq (General Secretary of the Pakistan Chapter of the Forum). It was inaugurated by Nirmala Deshpande, MP and the Keynote address was delivered by Admiral A.L. Ramdas. Other speakers included Justice Rajindar Sachar, Prof. Manorajan Mohanty, Kuldip Nayar, Dr. Syeda S. Hameed and Ved Bhasin. Extracts from the Resolution adopted follow - Editor]
... The Pakistan-India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy ... recognises the dangerous implications of the absence of a dialogue and the state of hostility between our two neighbouring countries on our domestic politics and our civil societies ...
We, therefore, urge the governments of India and Pakistan to resume dialogue at the earliest on all mattes of concern including Kashmir to ensure peace in the sub-continent. In parallel with the initiation of talks, free exchange of people, goods and information must be allowed to start immediately.
