Obama and Netanyahu offer Palestinians more of the same

By Kim Bullimore
Direct Action, Issue 13, July 2009

The much anticipated speeches on the Middle East “peace process” by US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month have been touted by the international corporate media as significant steps toward resolving conflict in the region. However, neither speech was a step forward. They simply regurgitated the long-held positions of both Washington and Tel Aviv, which have sought to ensure the ongoing subjugation and colonial oppression of the Palestinian people.



In his June 14 speech at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu repeated the Zionist position that “no preconditions” can be imposed on Israel in relation to negotiations. He then went on to demand that a raft of preconditions be met by the Palestinian Authority before Israel would consider recognising a Palestinian state. Veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar noted in Haaretz the day after the speech : “Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a patriarchal, colonialist address in the best neoconservative tradition: The Arabs are the bad guys, or at best ungrateful terrorists; the Jews, of course, are the good guys, rational people who need to raise and care for their children,” Eldar observed that the purpose of the speech had nothing to do with the Palestinians or peace; instead it was to “appease Tzipi Hotovely, the settler Likud lawmaker, and make it possible to live peaceably with the settler foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman”.
New Israeli preconditions

According to Netanyahu, “a fundamental prerequisite for ending the conflict is a public, binding and unequivocal Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people”. Netanyahu’s second precondition for a Palestinian state was that it must be “demilitarised”. Throughout, Netanyahu also made it clear that Israel had no intention of dismantling its illegal settlements, that Palestinian refugees forcibly exiled by Zionist terrorists in 1948 would have no right of return, that Israel wouldn’t define its borders until the “final peace agreement” and that Jerusalem would be the “united” capital of Israel and therefore not the capital of any future Palestinian state.

Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as “a Jewish state” is relatively new, having first been formally advocated by then prime minister Ehud Olmert at Annapolis in 2007. Prior to 2007, the key demand was the acknowledgement that Israel had the “right to exist in peace and security”. This demand, for example, was stated in a 1967 speech by Abba Eban, Israel’s then foreign minister, to the United Nations in the wake of the Six Day War, in which Israel captured and occupied the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Eban said repeatedly that the key to the conflict was the failure of the Arab states and peoples to accept Israel’s “right to exist” (not as a “Jewish state”) and that this right meant accepting “Israel’s rights to peace, security, sovereignty, economic development and maritime freedom”. From 1967 until 2007, this remained the key Israeli demand in relation to the Arab world.

The right of Israel to “live in peace and security” was recognised by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1988 in a political statement accompanying the PLO Declaration of Independence. The statement recognised UN Security Council Resolution 242, which stated in part that there should be “respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries free from acts of force”. Yasser Arafat further confirmed the PLO’s position in a September 1993 letter to Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, stating that he recognised “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security”. The letter also stated that “the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence”.


Arafat's 1993 letter to Rabin

However, Israel offered no commitment to end its violence and state terrorism against the Palestinian people or to recognise the right of the Palestinians to a state or their right to live in peace and security. Instead, it only “recognise[d] the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinian people” and agreed to begin negotiations. The demand that the Palestinians now recognise Israel as a “Jewish state” is the latest ploy to ensure that a Palestinian state doesn’t come into existence in the near future, so that Israel can continue to expand its illegal settlements and create “facts on the ground”.


Demilitarisation

Netanyahu’s demand that any Palestinian state be completely demilitarised and under Israeli military sovereignty also runs counter to previous negotiations. Resolution 242 called for the establishment of “demilitarised zones” between Israel and an independent Palestine state, not the latter’s demilitarisation. While the issue of possible “demilitarisation” was raised as part of a speech given by then US president Bill Clinton in 2000, it was in a vastly different context. In his December 2000 speech, Clinton noted that while Israel wanted a future Palestinian state to be defined as “demilitarised”, the Palestinians had proposed “a state with limited arms”. As a compromise, Clinton suggested that a Palestinian state would be “non-militarised” but would have “a strong Palestinian security force”, “an international force for border security and deterrence purposes” and “sovereignty over its airspace”

This is vastly different from what Netanyahu demanded in his Bar-Ilan speech. According to Netanyahu, any “territory controlled by the Palestinians will be demilitarised — namely, without an army, without control of its airspace, and with effective security measures to prevent weapons smuggling into the territory; real monitoring, and not what occurs in Gaza today. And obviously, the Palestinians will not be able to forge military pacts.”



Clinton had also called for the evacuation of 80% of settlers from the West Bank and Gaza, for joint control of Jerusalem’s holy places and the “acknowledg[ment of] the moral and material suffering caused to the Palestinian people as a result of the 1948 war”. Clinton called for any agreement on refugees not to “negate the aspiration of the Palestinian people to return to the area”. Netanyahu rejected all of this in his speech. As Eldar noted in his Haaretz article, “The difference between these documents and the Bar-Ilan address is not only that the former recognise the Palestinians’ full rights to the West Bank and East Jerusalem”; “the real difference lies in the tone — in the degrading and disrespectful nature of Netanyahu’s remarks”. This is “not how one brings down a wall of enmity between two nations, that’s not how trust is built”.

Obama’s advice

Netanyahu’s speech was hailed by Obama and the international corporate media as a “step in the right direction”. This is unsurprising given the tone and nature of Obama’s Cairo speech 10 days earlier. Obama’s June 4 speech revealed that Washington also has no real interest in advancing the “peace process”. Stripped of its flowery prose and flourishing references to the Koran, Obama’s speech revealed that Washington’s current Middle East policy is little different from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Rather than advocating a real change in policy, Obama reconfirmed the “unbreakable” bonds between Israel and the United States, while demanding that the “Palestinians must abandon violence”. He made no demand that Israel put an end to its state violence, which has resulted in four times more Palestinian civilians killed than Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian resistance fighters. Obama, like Bush, continued to perpetrate the myth that “Palestinian violence” exists in a vacuum, separate from the greater violence of Israel’s brutal occupation.

Obama also failed to mention, even once, the word “occupation” and failed to call for the dismantling of Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, instead calling, as Bush did, simply for an end to settlement expansion. Obama also made it clear that he had no intention of cutting military or economic aid to Israel if Netanyahu failed to stop the expansions.



Instead, as respected commentator Jennifer Loewenstein noted in a June 5 Counterpunch article, Obama “sent Benjamin Netanyahu the message he most seeks, whether Netanyahu recognizes it or not: continue your colonial-settler project as you have been doing; just change the vocabulary you use to describe it. Then nobody will get upset or notice that the status quo … persists”. Netanyahu’s speech two weeks later revealed that he had heard Obama’s message loud and clear.

All the hearts of the people are my identity: the life and death of a poet

Mahmoud Darwish - the voice of a dispossessed people

By Kim Bullimore, September 2008
www.directaction.org.au


In 1964, a 22-year-old Palestinian poet named Mahmoud Darwish shared the struggle of his people with the world, writing: “Record!/ I am an Arab/ And my identity card is number fifty thousand/ I have eight children/ And the ninth is coming after a summer/ Will you be angry? … Record! I am an Arab/ I have a name without a title/ ... My roots/ Were entrenched before the birth of time/ And before the opening of the eras/ Before the pines, and the olive trees/ And before the grass grew ... Record!/ I am an Arab/ You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors/ And the land which I cultivated/ Along with my children/ And you left nothing for us/ Except for these rocks./ ... Record on the top of the first page: I do not hate people/ Nor do I encroach/ But if I become hungry/ The usurper’s flesh will be my food/ Beware/ Beware/ Of my hunger/ And my anger!”

The poem, “Identity Card”, was to become one of Darwish’s most famous, a symbol of cultural and political resistance to Israel’s forced dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their homeland. Darwish’s poetry, filled with Arab romanticism, political insight and protest, and often transformed into song, spoke to millions of Palestinians and Arabs around the world, resulting in him becoming the most well known and loved of Palestinian poets.

Darwish died in Houston, Texas, on August 9, age 67, as a result of complications from heart surgery. Like many of his generation, he was not a spectator but an active participant in the modern history of Palestine. His poetry recorded the losses of the Palestinian people as well as their resistance and refusal to bow to the calamity that befell them in 1948. His death therefore has come as a shock to millions of Palestinians worldwide. More than 10,000 turned out to pay their respects to their poet on August 14, when his body was brought home to be buried within the grounds of Ramallah Cultural Palace in the Occupied West Bank.
Refugee childhood

Born in 1941 in the village of al-Birwa in northern Palestine, Darwish became a refugee in 1948, when his family was forced to flee Zionist terror gangs that attacked and destroyed their village. In 1949, Darwish and his family returned from Lebanon to live “illegally” as “internally displaced” refugees in the new Israeli state. In an interview with the British Guardian daily in 2002, he recounted: “We lived again as refugees, this time in our own country. It’s a collective experience. This wound I’ll never forget.”



Along with more than 150,000 other internally displaced Palestinians, Darwish experienced the harshness of Israeli military rule from 1948 to 1966. Palestinians with Israeli residency or citizenship endured harsh restrictions on their movements, including being forced to obtain special permits to travel to and from their villages, limitations on where they could work, restrictions on their political and civil rights to freedom of speech and to organise politically. During this period, more than 80% of Palestinian-owned land within Israel was confiscated and placed under exclusive Jewish control and use.

In 1960, at the age of 19, Darwish published his first collection of poems, Asafir Bil Ajniha (Wingless Birds). The following year, he joined the Israeli Communist Party and began to publish his poetry in a range of leftist newspapers. In 1964, his second anthology of poetry, Awraq Al Zaytun (Leaves of Olives) was published; it included the celebrated “Identity Card”. As a result of his poetry and political activity from 1961 to 1970, Darwish was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned. When “Identity Card” was transformed into a protest song in 1967, becoming a collective cry of defiance against the Israeli oppressor, Darwish was again arrested.
First intifada

In 1970, he travelled to the USSR to study political economy. A year later, however, he left Moscow for Egypt. In 1973, he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation, resulting in Israel banning him from re-entering his homeland for more than 26 years. Darwish served on the PLO executive committee from 1987 to 1993 and wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which was announced by Yasser Arafat in Algeria.

In 1988, at the height of the first Palestinian intifada, Darwish wrote a poem that shook Israeli society to its core. The poem, “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words”, aimed at Israel’s occupation army, which was violently putting down the unarmed Palestinian intifada. It was direct and uncompromising: “O those who pass between fleeting words/ Carry your names, and be gone/ Rid our time of your hours, and be gone/ Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea/ And the sand of memory/ Take what pictures you will, so that you understand/ That which you never will:/ How a stone from our land builds the ceiling of our sky/”

Darwish concluded: “It is time for you to be gone/ Live wherever you like, but do not live among us/ It is time for you to be gone/ Die wherever you like, but do not die among us/ For we have work to do on our land/ We have a past here/ We have the first cry of life/ We the present, the present and a future/ We have the world here and the hereafter/ So leave our country/ Our land, our sea/ Our wheat, our salt, our wounds/ Everything, and leave/ The memories of memory/ Those who pass between fleeting words!”

Although Darwish was later to say the poem was not one of his best, he was amazed at the fear the poem aroused in both the Israeli “left” and those in control of the Zionist state. In the grip of the intifada, Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, quoted the poem in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) to “prove” that the PLO posed a threat to existence of the Zionist state. In response, Darwish said that he found it “difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem”.
Oslo

The first intifada forced Israel to the negotiating table. However, the resultant Oslo Accords signed by PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 1993 caused Darwish to resign from the PLO executive committee in protest. In the 2002 interview with the Guardian, he stated that with the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian people “woke up to find that they had no past”. Oslo, Darwish believed, would do little to bring justice, peace or a national homeland to the Palestinian people. In the wake of the failure of the accords, Darwish later said: “I hoped I was wrong. I am very sad that I was right!”

He returned to live in his homeland finally in the late 1990s, continuing to be a voice of his people, giving expression to their pain, yearnings and joys. The words within his 30 collections of poetry and prose, published in 35 languages, reflected the experience of millions of his countrymen and women and were their collective memory.

When Darwish wrote in the poem “Passport” that he carried within his identity, “All the wheat fields/ All the prisons/ All the white tombstones/ All the barbed boundaries/ All the waving handkerchiefs” and that “all the hearts of the people are my identity”, he spoke in the collective voice of his people. And while death has claimed him, his words of struggle and resistance will live on among his people, giving them a voice that can never be taken from them.

To listen to Mahmoud Darwish reading his poetry visit his official website at:
http://www.mahmouddarwish.com/english/audio.htm

This article was first published in Direct Action No 4 (September 2008) at www.directaction.org.au

Taking back the land: joint, non-violent resistance against Israeli occupation and apartheid

24 April, 2008

Today, for a few hours, Palestinians took control over an illegal Israeli settler outpost on the outskirts of Ramallah. Replacing Israeli flags with Palestinian ones, Mohammed Al-Khattib and other members of the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall, accompanied by Israeli anti-occupation activists from Anarchists Against the Wall and international activists from the International Solidarity Movement and the International Women's Peace Service, non-violently took over the site for more than 3 hours.

The illegal settler outpost, which is made up of a number of cargo containers, was set up two months ago on privately owned Palestinian land which straddles Area A and Area C of the Occupied West Bank, when Israel occupation forces withdraw from a checkpoint on the land to a nearby military based. Area A is supposedly territory fully controlled by the Palestinian Authority (including full security control), while Area C, except for its Palestinian civilians, falls under the control of the Israeli military.

The military checkpoint had been set up at the beginning of the Al Aqsa intifada in 2000. In place of the military checkpoint, the Israeli occupation forces installed permanent road blocks which prevented Palestinians from using the road which connects the Palestinian village of Ein-Qinyah and Ramallah. Prior to taking control of the illegal outpost, the Palestinians, Israeli and international activists were able to use a bulldozer to successful remove the illegal road block which prevent Palestinians from using the road.

Once on the site, Palestinian activists were able to erect at least a dozen Palestinian flags signaling that Palestinians had reclaimed a section of Palestinian land occupied by the illegal settlers. It was a full hour before the Israeli military in the nearby military outpost realised that Palestinians had successfully taken back their land. Once they realised what had occurred, Israeli occupation soldiers advanced on the unarmed demonstrators and began firing live rounds from the road between the military base and the illegal outpost.

When the occupation soldiers arrived at the illegal outpost, once again firing indiscriminately on the unarmed demonstration, the Israeli anti-occupation activists and internationals moved to the front calling in Hebrew and English for the military to remain calm and non-violent. The Israeli occupation forces, however, continued to fire on the unarmed demonstrators hitting a journalist's car when protestors attempted to find cover from the military aggression.

The occupation soldiers quickly moved to remove the Palestinian flag from the main cargo container, however, in an act of defiance it was quickly replaced once again with a Palestinian flag by the Palestinian non-violent activists.



For the next hour, the non-violent demonstrators continue to remain in control of the land, despite the presence of the Israeli military. When armed illegal Israeli settlers from the nearby illegal settlement began to arrive and attempted to intimidate the non-violent demonstrators, Israeli ISM activist, Neta Golan and Mohammed Al- Khattib stepped in front of them, non-violently preventing them from continuing to harass the other non-violent demonstrators.

In an attempt to remove the non-violent, peaceful protestors from the reclaimed land, the Israeli occupation forces declared the area a Closed Military Zone (CMZ). Declaring an area a CMZ is a regular tactic used by the Israeli occupation forces in order to increase their attempts of martial control over an area. Anyone in such an area is deemed illegal and can be arrested. However, as was the case today, the Israeli military apply this martial control selectively, applying it only to Palestinians, Israeli and international anti-occupation activists, not to illegal Israeli settlers. As one international activist wryly noted today, while the Israeli occupation forces frequently use rubber bullets, live ammunition and tear gas to try and intimidate Palestinian, Israeli and international anti-occupation activists and enforce a CMZ, their preferred tactic in relation to illegal settlers seems to be to try and "scare" them with handshakes.

Despite the area being declared a CMZ, the non-violent anti-occupation activists remained in the area, moving to the section of the illegal outpost which was located in Palestinian Authority controlled Area A, where supposedly the Israeli military has no security jurisdiction. Illegal Israeli settlers, who were armed, continued to physically intimidate the non-violent, unarmed demonstrators. When Israeli ISM activist, Neta Golan attempted to prevent the continued harassment, she was violently arrested by the Israeli occupation forces who attacks the non-violent demonstrators with rifle butts and batons*

In the third hour of the protest, the Israeli military called in an armoured bulldozer to re-install the road block which had been successfully removed earlier in the day by the demonstrators. The Palestinians, Israeli anti-occupation activists and internationals attempted to block the movement of the armed bulldozer by standing and later sitting in front of the bulldozer as it attempted to make its way up the road located in Palestinian Authority controlled Area A. The non-violent demonstrators were able to block the bulldozer for approximately 45 minutes before being violently dispersed by the Israeli occupation forces. One Palestinian activist, Adeeb Abu Rahme from the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall was arrested*



Protestors remained on the scene for another hour in an attempt to gain the release of the two detained activists. During this time, more armed illegal settlers began to illegally amass in the CMZ but were not arrested or violently harassed by the Israeli military, as the unarmed Palestinian, Israeli and international anti-occupation activists had been. The Israeli occupation forces then escorted the large group of illegal settlers up the hill to where the non-violent demonstrators had been sitting peacefully, allowing the illegal settlers to abuse and physically intimidate the anti-occupation activists. The armed illegal settlers, including settler children between the ages of 12 and 16 years of age, attempted to intimidate the Israeli anti-occupation and international activists by verbally threatening them, while also attempting to physically attack the Palestinian non-violent activists. The unarmed demonstrators, however, refused to be intimidated and stood their ground demanding that the Israeli military remove the illegal settlers. After 30 minutes realising that the Palestinian, Israeli and international anti-occupation activists would not be intimidated and would not leave, the Israeli military finally began to try and politely convince the armed, aggressive settlers to leave. When the illegal settlers finally began to disperse, the unarmed demonstrators voluntarily decided to end the demonstration.

Mohammad Al – Khattib said the demonstration symbolised the refusal of Palestinians to accept the illegal Israeli policy of road closures and separating Palestinians from their lands. During the action, speaking to both local and international media, Khattib called on all Palestinians to begin to mobilise to open the illegal closed road, calling for "resistance to barriers, settlements and the apartheid wall". Similarly Abdullah Abu Rahman from the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall said that the idea of the action was "to send a message to the Israeli army and settlers, this land is our and [we] will never leave".

* Neta and Adeeb were released by the Israeli military later in the day, after being taken to an illegal Israeli settlement police station.

The Life and Death of Naji al-Ali: voice of a nation

24 July, 2007



It has now been 20 years since reknown Palestinian cartoonist Naji Salim al-Ali was shot in London on July 22, 1987 by an unknown assassin. He lapsed into a coma and died five weeks later on August 29, 1987.

During his life time, al-Ali drew more than 40,000 cartoons and was know for his sharp political wit and criticism of not only Israel, the US but also the Arab states. In his work, he campaigned tirelessly for the rights of the Palestinian refugees, Palestinian self-determination and against the absence of democracy, corruption and inequality in the Arab world. His work was often censored and he frequently received death threats. al-Ali was also detained and jailed in various countries and expelled from others for his political commentary.

At 10 years of age, al-Ali and his family were forced to flee Palestine to Lebanon, when Israel invaded and seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, he like thousands of others Palestinians, were forced to live in poor and over crowded refugee camps. This experience gave birth to his most famous creation, Handala (sometimes spelt Hanthala or Hanzala).

The cartoonist christened his 10 year-old boy creation, who never spoke but was the guardian of the Palestinian cause, after a short bitter bush which can be found throughout all of Palestine. The bush although weak, if cut, has the reputation of growing back, time and time again.



Handala, dressed in rags and bare foot, according to al-Ali, represented him at the age of 10 years when he was forced to flee Palestine.

“The young, barefoot Handala was a symbol of my childhood. He was the age I was when I had left Palestine and, in a sense, I am still that age today. Even though this all happened 35 years ago, the details of that phase in my life are still fully present to my mind. I feel that I can recall and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every tree I passed when I was a child in Palestine”.

Handala, explained al-Ali is “a child who is not beautiful; his hair is like the hair of a hedgehog who uses his thorns as a weapon. Handala is not a fat, happy, relaxed, or pampered child. He is barefooted like the refugee camp children, and he is an icon that protects me from making mistakes. Even though he is rough, he smells of amber. His hands are clasped behind his back as a sign of rejection at a time when solutions are presented to us the American way”.

“Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old. At that age, I left my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him. He is unique. Things will become normal again when the homeland returns”

“I presented him to the poor and named him Handala as a symbol of bitterness. At first, he was a Palestinian child, but his consciousness developed to have a national and then a global and human horizon. He is a simple yet tough child, and this is why people adopted him and felt that he represents their consciousness."



According to al Ali, Handala “protected” his soul when he felt weary and prevented him from ignoring his duty to his people and their struggle:

“That child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow of the compass, pointing steadily towards Palestine. Not just Palestine in geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense - the symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or South Africa. I am from Ain Al-Helwa, a camp like any other camp. The people of the camps were the people of the land in Palestine. They were not merchants or landowners. They were farmers. When they lost their land, they lost their lives. The bourgeoisie never had to live in the camps, whose inhabitants were exposed to hunger, to every degradation and to every form of oppression. Entire families died in our camps. Those are the Palestinians who remain in my mind, even when my work takes me away from the camp”.



In 1982, al-Ali once again experienced first hand the military might of the Israeli Zionist state. Back in Ain Al Helwa refugee camp in Lebanon, he and his family and thousands of others were forced to flee from the camp. He and many others were taken prisoner by the invading Israeli army.

He recounted once he and his family were freed five days later, they sought to return to the refugee camp:

“We travelled by day. The corpses of the victims still lay in the streets. The burnt-out hulks of Israeli tanks still stood at the entrances to the camps. The Israelis had not removed them yet. From my inquiries into the circumstances of the resistance, I learned that it consisted of a group of no more than 40 or 50 youths. The Israeli army had burned the camp while the women and children were still inside their shelters. Israeli missiles had penetrated deep inside the camp, claiming the lives of hundreds of children in the camp in Saida. The young men in the resistance group had spontaneously taken an oath to one another that they would die before they ever surrendered. And, in fact, the Israelis never captured a single one of them. In daylight, the Israeli forces would attack. At night, the resistors would strike. This is what happened in Ain Al-Helwa, as I saw for myself. But I also know that there were other forms of resistance in the camps of Sur, Al-Burj Al-Shamal, Al-Bass and Al-Rashidi”.

The subsequent butchery of Palestinian refugees in the camps shocked al-Ali to the core, none more so than the infamous massacre at Sabra and Shatila camps. For two days the IDF surrounded the camp, closing off all routes of escape and than sat and listened as their allies, the Lebanese Christian Phalangists, carried out the dirty work of murdering 3000 unarmed Palestinian men, women and children. (Israeli Defence Minister - who was later to become Prime Minister - Ariel Sharon was found personally responsible by an Israeli commission for the massacre, while the Israeli military personnel were found indirectly responsible because they knew the massacre was happening and did nothing to stop it)



In response, Handala’s 10 year-old hands become more animated, raised in anger and against oppression: sometimes holding a Palestinian flag or throwing a stone as a sign of resistance but always in condemnation of those who betrayed the justice of the Palestinian cause.

His untimely death came just five short years later. Ten months after his death, Scotland Yard arrested a Palestinian student who turned out to be a Mossad agent. According to the agent, Israel were well aware in advance of the assasination attempt. Israel, however, refused to pass on any information they had on al-Ali assasination. In response, Britain expelled two Israeli diplomates and closed down Mossad’s last base.

Despite his death, al-Ali’s legacy continues to live on, even now 20 years later. He once remarked that Handala, "this being that I have invented will certainly not cease to exist after me, and perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that I will live on with him after my death".

al-Ali words continue to ring true and since his death, his creation continues to speak out, in deafening silence, for Palestinian self determination. Handala, the small refugee boy, dressed in rags, silent in defiance and strong in resistance can be found everywhere throughout Palestine.

And while his image is prolific, he is of course found most at home in the Palestinian refugee camps - the place of his birth - where he continues to remains a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance and defiance against all odds.

Samples of Naji al-Ali's cartoons can be found at: http://www.najialali.com/