Speech -

This was a speech given at Westminster Cathedral for a Palestinian Remebrance service, on Saturday May 2, 1998. It is an eloquent speech that shows how many Palestinians feel about Al-Nakba.

50 Years On - Time for justice
Palestinian Remembrance service

Westminster Cathedral
Saturday May 2, 1998

Children of a Lesser God?

Victims of the victims of European history, we the Palestinian people, Muslims and Christians alike, we were constantly denied our legitimate share of sympathy, solidarity and support. Our massive expulsion from our ancestral homeland, a revolting process of ethnic cleansing, was watched with either indifference or was welcomed with applause as “ a miraculous simplification” of the difficult problem of the birth of a Jewish State in a country where there was an obvious overwhelming Arab majority.

To add insult to the many injuries inflicted, while our society was taking care of our collective and individual scars, admiring voices were raised around the globe about trees and forests being planted.

Yet, yet, yet nobody ever bothered to explain according to what value systems the planting of a tree justified the uprooting value systems the planting of a of a human being, according to which moral philosophy the planting of forests justified the uprooting of an entire people.

Israel was supposed to be the answer to what was then known as result we became a question - “the Jewish question”. As a the question of Palestine - awaiting still , in 1998, an equitable,adequate, satisfactory answer.

(In the first few days of the events, some refugees made shelters made from branches)

50 Years On - it is time for justice.

Throughout the last five decades, what has it meant to be a Palestinian?

For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant belonging to a family that was shattered and scattered to the 4 corners of the earth.

For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant to have lost one’s plot of land, one’s home, one’s homeland.

(The trauma of displacement. Over 800,000 Palestinians found themselves in this situation as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars.)

For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant to be displaced by force, time after time, from one place, one country to another, and under conditions of complete destitution.

For 50 years, to be a Palestinian has meant to be stateless having no identity papers like the other inhabitants of our world, it has meant administrative complications throughout one’s life, from womb to tomb, from birth to death.

For those of us who had succeeded in staying in what had become the State of Israel, to be a Palestinian has meant, for 50 endless years, to be democratically degraded to the status of a third class citizen daily subjected to humiliation, harassment, and discrimination.

For those of us who were ejected to the periphery, to be a Palestinian has meant, for 50 endless years, a miserable life in sub-human conditions in refugee camps clinging to a hope that still awaits fulfillment.

For those of us in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 30 long years of military occupation, the longest military occupation in modern times, meant the gradual and rapid alteration of the demographic composition and mutilation of the architectural and physical landscape of what should become our State and that, in total defiance of International law and the international will.

To be a Palestinian is to endure a constant denial of the tragedy that befell us, a denial of our sufferings which like all other denials is politically abominable and morally disturbing.

To be a Palestinian means, at best, to repeatedly listen to the banalization of our pain.

418 villages leveled to the ground in 1948 so as to make sure that the ejected and rejected would not return. Massacres: Deir Yassin, Ramle, AlLid, Kafar Kassem, Kibia, Sabra and Shatila ... thousand and thousands and thousands of martyrs, mostly civilians. Prisoners, tortured prisoners, thousands and thousands and thousands of prisoners on the long road towards freedom out of captivity and bondage.

How does one measure pain? What are the criteria for the measurement of suffering? When is enough really enough?

I was brought up at home, at school and in church to believe in universal principles, in universal values, to believe in one mankind in one humankind, only to discover that in the real world, in Realpolitik, there are, alas, not one humankind but different kinds of men and women.

(Palestinian school children and their teacher run for shelter during the bombing of Al-Rashidiyeh Refugee Camp, near Sur. The life of displaced children offered little hope for stability. 21,668 refugees live in the camp today.)

I was brought up to believe that God has created us after his own image only to learn, the hard way, that those who chose to oppress us have created a God after their own image.

Up to now, Palestinian and Arab victims have been treated as though we were simply figures, just numbers who often go unmentioned as though we were faceless, nameless, fatherless, motherless, childless .... worthless.

Oh God! Are we children of a lesser God?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Your presence here today in Westminster Cathedral shows that our tears, that our blood, that our pain, that our suffering, that our aspirations do also count.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am fully confident that Palestine will soon rise again and as you know, we in Palestine, we in Jerusalem, we have had some previous experience in ... Resurrection.

Afif Safieh
The Palestinian General Delegate
to the United Kingdom

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Source of the photos are from the UNRWA photo album.