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A Word from the Executive Committee
Over 50
years after the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, a group of Palestinian intellectuals,
academics, and activists from different fields and political viewpoints has
undertaken an effort to draft a consensual statement of a collective vision
that Palestinian citizens in Israel
articulate about themselves. The statement, known as “The Haifa Declaration,”
is a project begun in 2002 under the auspices of Mada al-Carmel—Arab Center
for Applied Social Research, in Haifa.
The project sought to create a forum for Palestinian Arab citizens from as
broad a social and political base as possible, a forum in which we could go
beyond the boundaries of power politics and the limitations imposed on
political parties’ discourse to freely discuss our vision of the past, present,
and future—specifically, our collective future and status in our homeland, the
major challenges facing our society, our relationship with our people, nation,
and the state of Israel.
The project
brought together individuals with a wide range of viewpoints. The Haifa
Declaration is the product of the group’s extensive deliberations and
discussions over a number of years, both amongst themselves and, at times, with
others outside the group.
The General
Assembly, which included all the group members, met as a plenary about a dozen
times. Sometimes, we invited outside speakers, including Knesset members from
Arab parties. The plenary established four working groups that focused on:
- internal
social issues
- the
relationship between the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the State of Israel
- the
relationship with our Palestinian people and our Arab nation—our national
identity
The working
groups met repeatedly, organized roundtables and workshops, discussed
controversial issues and brought their drafts to the General Assembly. The
General Assembly discussed the drafts numerous times before they were submitted
to a drafting committee that consisted of the project’s Executive Committee
members, the four working groups’ facilitators, and one additional member who
helped in drafting the language. The General Assembly discussed numerous
versions of the draft until it settled upon the final version.
We
stated from the outset that the goal of our efforts was not only achieving a
document but also making possible a free and open public debate, both amongst
ourselves as a community, and between us and the state and the Jewish citizens,
on our vision for our place and status in our homeland. We are proud that the
Haifa Declaration project has already achieved many of its goals, and we hope
that the process initiated by the launch of the Haifa Declaration project a few
years ago and the numerous activities that Mada al-Carmel has organized around
it over the years have contributed to the various efforts that emerged to
discuss these and related issues.
In
addition to the Haifa Declaration, two other related documents have recently
been published: the Future Vision, which was developed under the auspices of
the Committee of Arab Mayors in Israel,
and the Democratic Constitution, which was developed by Adalah—The Legal Center
for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
We see the publications of all three complementary documents as a strong
indicator that the community is at a stage to clearly articulate its collective
vision and make its voice heard.
We
aspire that the Haifa Declaration, the Future Vision, and the Democratic
Constitution serve as foundational texts for institutions and members of the
Palestinian minority, in their effort to assert their national identity,
national rights, and their right to democracy and equal citizenship. We also
aspire that the Declaration can spark a democratic, open, and constructive
dialogue within our society and with the Israeli-Jewish society, one that might
enable us to work together towards building a better future between our
peoples. This, we believe, might lay the foundations for creating a society
based on justice and equality for all citizens and inhabitants of the state of Israel.
Professor
Nadim Rouhana, General Director, Mada al-Carmel, Advocate Hassan Jabareen, and
Professor Ramzi Suleiman initiated this project. They comprised the Project’s
Executive Committee that led the project. Professor Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia and
Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian joined the Executive Committee in 2006.
We
are grateful to the General Assembly members, the project coordinators, and the
facilitators of the various working groups, whose names are listed at the end
of the Declaration, for their enormous effort to complete this project
successfully. We are also grateful to Mada’s staff and to the many additional
people who contributed in various ways to the success of this effort. For
information about the conferences, workshops, meetings, and related
publications, and for a list of additional people who endorse this Declaration,
please visit Mada’s website at www.mada-research.org.
The
Executive Committee: Professor
Nadim N. Rouhana Advocate Hassan Jabareen Professor Ramzi Suleiman Professor
Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
The
Haifa
Declaration
We,
sons and daughters of the Palestinian Arab people who remained in our
homeland despite the Nakba, who were forcibly made a minority in the
State of Israel after its establishment in 1948 on the greater part of the
Palestinian homeland; do hereby affirm in this Declaration the foundations of
our identity and belonging, and put forth a vision of our collective future,
one which gives voice to our concerns and aspirations and lays the foundations
for a frank dialogue among ourselves and between ourselves and other peoples.
In this Declaration, we also set forth our own reading of our history, as well
as our conception of our citizenship and our relationship with the other parts
of the Palestinian people, with the Arab nation, and with the State of Israel.
We further present our vision for achieving a dignified life in our homeland
and building a democratic society founded upon justice, freedom, equality, and
mutual respect between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews in Israel. We also
put forward our conception of the preconditions for an historic reconciliation
between the Palestinian people and the Israeli Jewish people, and of the future
to which we aspire as regards the relationship between the two peoples.
Our
national identity is grounded in human values and civilization, in the Arabic
language and culture, and in a collective memory derived from our Palestinian
and Arab history and Arab and Islamic civilization. It is an identity that
grows ever more firm through active and continuous interaction with these
values. It is continuously nourished by our uninterrupted relationship to our
land and homeland, by the experience of our constant and mounting struggle to
affirm our right to remain in our land and 8homeland and to safeguard
them, and by our continued connection to the other sons and daughters of the
Palestinian people and the Arab nation.
Despite
the setback to our national project and our relative isolation from the rest of
our Palestinian people and our Arab nation since the Nakba; despite all
the attempts made to keep us in ignorance of our Palestinian and Arab history;
despite attempts to splinter us into sectarian groups and to truncate our
identity into a misshapen “Israeli Arab” one, we have spared no effort to
preserve our Palestinian identity and national dignity and to fortify it. In
this regard, we reaffirm our attachment to our Palestinian homeland and people,
to our Arab nation, with its language, history, and culture, as we reaffirm
also our right to remain in our homeland and to safeguard it.
Our
close affinities with the rest of the Palestinian people and with the Arab
nation are
in fact a form of connection to ourselves. They are our natural space, of which
we were deprived following the Nakba, and this connection is the
embodiment of the complete Self. It is a human need and a natural and universal
right of individuals and groups, which cannot be circumscribed by the existence
of political agreements among states. It is also enshrined in international
conventions pertaining to human rights.
We
strive to give substance to our Palestinian and Arab affinities at all levels,
including contacts between family members, relatives, and friends, as well as
free and continuous contacts with cultural and intellectual centers in the Arab
world. We aspire to deepen and expand these contacts on the political,
economic, and institutional levels.
We
view with pride the many luminous milestones traversed in our collective
journey,
which served to strengthen our identity. We value the role of continual
political, civic, and cultural activism, aimed at holding on to our land and
homeland and protecting and consolidating all the elements of our national
identity. We also look with pride on the resistance to the military regime put
up by our people and its national leadership, and the creativity our people has
displayed in the realms of thought and culture, which have contributed to the
preservation and enrichment of our identity. We greatly admire what they have
produced in terms of our illustrious national days, the most prominent of which
are Land Day in March 1976 and the Jerusalem and al-Aqsa Day in October 2000,
as well as the historical landmarks along our path of self-organization, most
significantly the founding of the High Follow-up Committee for the Arab
Citizens of Israel, the Land Defense Committee, and the Arab Students’ Union
and Committees.
We
bear our responsibility, as a society, as individuals, and as active
organizations, for our social problems. Our society has been, and to a large
extent remains, subject to social, family, sectarian, and local structures that
curtail individual freedoms. We respect family ties, as well as individual
rights to free worship, faith, and creed, provided no creed or loyalty is
exploited to impair individual freedoms, dignity, or rights. We reject
sectarian zeal and all forms of prejudice, which at times reach the extreme of
physical violence and which obstruct the opportunities of wider social
solidarity and the construction of a national identity. Adherence to these
social structures together with the prejudices thus engendered has made it
easier for Israeli governments to exploit the divisions and tensions within our
society in order to subjugate our people through numerous means. Thus these
governments have attempted to strip groups away from our community through a
policy of “divide and rule”, which reinforced a discourse of sectarian, tribal,
familial, and regional bigotry among us. Furthermore, Israel imposed
compulsory military service upon the Druze youth of our people, and sought to
enlist other Arab youths by exploiting occasional tensions between sectors of
our society, and pursuing enticement policies through the offer of individual
benefits. Israel
has also appointed and supported Arab leaders loyal to these policies and has
striven to create a subordinate Arab society indifferent to its own public good
and to impede its political, cultural, and economic progress.
Our
society must strengthen its rejection of all these phenomena, and must develop
ways to resist them. It must also put forth a political and social agenda that
highlights human and national identity, restores respect for the value of
political, nationalist action, sets as its goal the building of a credible
political authority, and strives to develop the institutions and economy of our
society. Rallying around and supporting this political and social agenda will
guarantee the rise of an alternative consciousness and a different culture,
with the ability to change the prevailing social structures and to establish
moral standards to guide collective action, and govern the dealings between the
national parties and the civil and community institutions in our society.
Despite
the progress achieved in the status of women and the rise in awareness of and
popular and feminist support for women’s equality, most women in our society—especially
the economically disadvantaged women—are still subject to multifaceted
oppression: class, national, social, and gendered. It is our duty to endeavor
to bring an end to the marginalization of women and discrimination against them
in the private and public spheres in various fields, the most important of
which are labor and education, and to resist attempts to deny them their right to
total mastery over their fate. We must also resist all forms of violence,
abuse, and exploitation exercised upon many of them, occasionally reaching the
point of murder, in the name of what is known as “family honor”. It is our duty
to strive to put an end to all forms of discrimination against women and to
protect their rights on the basis of the principles of equality, justice, and
affirmative action.
Discrimination
and oppression in our society are not confined, however, to women, but also
affect the elderly, children, and those with special needs. These groups suffer
from social marginalization and from the infringement of their status, rights,
and dignity, which necessitate the defense of their rights and the rights of
all social groups that suffer from discrimination. Therefore, we call for the
formulation of a national, progressive, and democratic plan to build a society
based on social solidarity among all its members, which respects the freedom of
the individual and his or her right to dissent and to differ, and which is
based on the principles of justice, equality, and pluralism.
Our
presence in our homeland is an extension of a perpetual historical renewal which has accompanied
the eras and events that the Arab East has known during its rise and decline,
its awakening and its liberation, and its resistance to invasion, occupation,
and colonialism. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Zionist movement
initiated its colonial-settler project in Palestine.
Subsequently, in concert with world imperialism and with the collusion of the
Arab reactionary powers, it succeeded in carrying out its project, which aimed
at occupying our homeland and transforming it into a state for the Jews. In
1948, the year of the Nakba of the Palestinian people, the Zionist
movement committed massacres against our people, turned most of us into
refugees, totally erased hundreds of our villages, and drove out most
inhabitants out of our cities. Later, the State of Israel prevented the return
of the Palestinian refugees to their homeland in defiance of United Nations
General Assembly Resolution 194, and the UN’s successive resolutions in this
same regard. Although we were made citizens of the State of Israel, the state
nevertheless continued to pursue its uprooting and evacuation operations after
its establishment, with the result that many of us were displaced from our
towns and villages, becoming refugees in our homeland. Against us, Israel has
pursued policies of repression, which at times reached the level of killing, as
in the case of the massacre of Kufr Qassem in October 1956. Upon us, it imposed
a military regime, which remained in place until 1966. It has prevented the
return of the internal refugees (internally displaced persons) to their towns
and villages, and to this very day it refuses to recognize dozens of Arab
villages in the Naqab, where it follows policies of land dispossession. The
State of Israel enacted racist land, immigration, and citizenship laws, and
other laws that have allowed for the confiscation of our land and the property
of the refugees and internally displaced persons. Israel further sought to distort
the identity of our sons and daughters through educational curricula that aim
at educating them in accordance with the Zionist narrative and leaving them
ignorant of their own national narrative. It has spread an atmosphere of fear
through the Arab educational system, which is supervised by the security
services. The state has exercised against us institutional discrimination in
various fields of life such as housing, employment, education, development, and
allocation of resources.
In
1967, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem,
in addition to Egyptian and Syrian territories. Throughout the occupation of
the Palestinian territories, which has lasted to the present day making it one
of the longest periods of occupation since World War II,
Israel carried out policies
of subjugation and oppression in excess of those of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In the Occupied Territories,
Israel
has perpetrated war crimes against Palestinians, killed and expelled thousands,
assassinated leaders, jailed tens of thousands—many through military and
administrative order—inflicted physical and psychological torture, and bulldozed
thousands of houses. Israel
has also, in violation of International Humanitarian Law, employed a policy of
collective punishment, such as military sieges and curfews imposed on cities
and towns. It has splintered the Occupied
Territories by constructing
hundreds of barriers and imposing restrictions on freedom of movement between
Palestinian towns, villages, and refugee camps. It has further confiscated
land, uprooted trees, destroyed orchards, separated families, enacted racist
military laws preventing family unification, and denied residents in Occupied
Arab Jerusalem the right to live in their own city. Israel has also exploited private
and public Palestinian resources, such as land and water, in order to construct
settlements and build roads for Jewish settlers’ use. It has erected the racist
Separation Wall, which has divided villages and split up families in the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem. These Israeli policies and
practices in the Occupied
Territories affect the lives
and dignity of every single Palestinian, and gravely violate his or her
freedoms and fundamental rights.
Our
citizenship and our relationship to the State of Israel are defined, to a
great extent, by a formative event, the Nakba, which befell the Arab
Palestinian people in 1948 as a result of the creation of the State of Israel.
This was the event through which we—who remained from among the original
inhabitants of our homeland—were made citizens without the genuine constituents
of citizenship, especially equality. As we are a homeland minority whose people
was driven out of their homeland, and who has suffered historical injustice,
the principle of equality—the bedrock of democratic citizenship—must be based
on justice and the righting of wrongs, and on the recognition of our narrative
and our history in this homeland. This democratic citizenship that we seek is
the only arrangement that guarantees individual and collective equality for the
Palestinians in Israel.
We
believe that the policies that require us to perform “civil service” and the
steps that could lead to our involvement in Israeli militarism and the
distribution of the spoils of wars are incompatible in our case with the
principle of equality, because they disfigure our identity and disregard
historical injustices.
We
look towards a future in which we can reach historic reconciliation between the Jewish
Israeli people and the Arab Palestinian people. This reconciliation requires
the State of Israel to recognize the historical injustice that it committed
against the Palestinian people through its establishment, to accept
responsibility for the Nakba, which befell all parts of the Palestinian
people, and also for the war crimes and crimes of occupation that it has
committed in the Occupied
Territories. Reconciliation
also requires recognizing the Right of Return and acting to implement it in
accordance with United Nations Resolution 194, ending the Occupation and
removing the settlements from all Arab territory occupied since 1967,
recognizing the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to an
independent and sovereign state, and recognizing the rights of Palestinian
citizens in Israel, which derive from being a homeland minority. Furthermore,
such an historical reconciliation between the two peoples must be part of a
comprehensive change in Israeli policy, whereby Israel abandons its destructive
role towards the peoples of the region, especially in the context of a
hegemonic U.S. policy which supports certain Arab regimes in oppressing their citizens,
stripping them of their resources, obstructing their development, and impeding
the democratic process in the Arab world.
This
historic reconciliation also requires us, Palestinians and Arabs, to recognize
the right of the Israeli Jewish people to self-determination and to life in
peace, dignity, and security with the Palestinian and the other peoples of the
region.
We
are aware of the tragic history of the Jews in Europe,
which reached its peak in one of the most horrific human crimes in the Holocaust
perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews, and we are fully cognizant of the
tragedies that the survivors have lived through. We sympathize with the victims
of the Holocaust, those who perished and those who survived.
We
believe that exploiting this tragedy and its consequences in order to
legitimize the right of the Jews to establish a state at the expense of the
Palestinian people serves to belittle universal, human, and moral lessons to be
learned from this catastrophic event, which concerns the whole of humanity.
Our
vision for the future relations between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews in
this country is to create a democratic state founded on equality between the
two national groups. This solution would guarantee the rights of the two groups in
a just and equitable manner. This would require a change in the constitutional
structure and a change in the definition of the State of Israel from a Jewish
state to a democratic state established on national and civil equality between
the two national groups, and enshrining the principles of banning
discrimination and of equality between all of its citizens and residents. In
practice, this means annulling all laws that discriminate directly or
indirectly on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, or religion—first and
foremost the laws of immigration and citizenship—and enacting laws rooted in
the principles of justice and equality. It also means the application of
equality between the Arabic and Hebrew languages as two official languages of
equal status in the country; ensuring the principle of multiculturalism for all
groups; securing the effective participation of the Palestinian minority in
government and in decision making; guaranteeing the Palestinian citizens in
Israel the right of veto in all matters that concern their status and rights;
guaranteeing their right to cultural autonomy, which includes the rights to
develop policies for and to administer their own cultural and educational
affairs; and distributing resources in accordance with the principles of
distributive and corrective justice. It is these principles that can guarantee
our right to self-determination as a homeland minority.
We are confident that
in such a democratic state, responsibilities of all citizens and residents—Jews,
Arabs, and others—would grow as they strive to build a democratic and
multicultural society, one which abolishes all forms of discrimination,
safeguards the freedoms and rights of individuals, and guarantees social and
economic rights—especially the rights to education, health care, and social
welfare, and labor rights—for all.
We firmly believe that the fulfillment
of all the conditions for a reconciliation between the two peoples, the Jewish
Israeli and Arab Palestinian, which requires the recognition of the right of
the Palestinian people to self-determination, and the realization of the rights
of the Palestinians in Israel as a homeland minority, will create political
circumstances that will enable the creation of confidence, cooperation, and
mutual respect between two independent and democratic states: the State of
Palestine and the State of Israel. We further hope that this will open up new
horizons in which agreements and treaties will be concluded between them in the
economic, scientific, and cultural fields that guarantee free and reciprocal
movement, mobility, residence, and employment for the citizens and residents of
the two states.
May 15, 2007 Haifa
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