 I'm Nimmer Sultani, I teach at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. This is the conference on the Palestinian Rite of Return, the 72nd anniversary of the UNGA Resolution 194. I will say a brief introductory remarks and then introduce the panel. The conference is convened with a sense of urgency. The Oslo Accords created a process that permanently deferred the so-called permanent status issues, such as the question of the refugees, which is at the heart of the question of Palestine. Because if there is any meaning to the slogan justice for Palestine, then it has to include justice for the Palestinians and two thirds of these Palestinians are stateless refugees. The Oslo Accords created a situation in which the Palestinian Authority sidelined the PLO, thereby marginalizing the refugees, most of whom are not part of the constituency of the Palestinian Authority, and do not reside in the territories it controls. The authorities' attempts to acquire recognition as a state in the UN further undermined the PLO as a political structure that historically included refugee voices and represented their interest, and then came along the Trump administration. The United States pro-Israel bias is well known, with the US exercising the veto power in the Security Council 43 times to shield Israel from accountability. Yet the Trump administration sought to outbid previous administrations in a severe setback for the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination. It was a three-pronged attack on the status of the right of return, Jerusalem, and the Israeli colonies in the West Bank. In December 2017, the US President Donald Trump announced that his administration recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and in 2018, the US relocated its embassy to Jerusalem. In August 2018, the US administration decided to terminate its funding for UNRWA, thereby crippling the UN agency that provides social and educational services for Palestinian refugees. The US Ambassador to the UN indicated that this move is part of the Trump's administration view that the right of return should be removed, quote, off the table, unquote. In November 2019, the US Secretary of State Pompeo announced a reversal in US official policy by declaring that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are not per se inconsistent with international law, unquote. In undertaking these three positions, the US administration emboldened the Israeli government in flouting dominant understandings of international law that prohibits the acquisition of territory by force, that reject the legal validity of any changes that Israel imposed on the Palestinian territories, and that consider the annexation of Jerusalem a violation of international law, and that call for dismantling the settlements and reaffirm the Palestinians right to return to their homes and property in Palestine. The so-called deal of the century and recent peace deals with Arab states seek to further codify these attacks on any meaningful sense of Palestinian self-determination. In addition to these attacks, in the past few years we have witnessed a concerted campaign that seeks to renew attempts to redefine anti-Semitism so that it would include anti-Zionism and impose these definitions on universities in the UK. In particular, these attempts portray any opposition to Zionism as a colonial movement that uprooted the Palestinians and transformed most of them into stateless refugees as anti-Semitic denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination. But self-determination does not include the right to ethnically cleanse the natives, take their lands and prevent their return in order to maintain an ethnically exclusivist and territorially expansionist state, and it cannot silence the demand to comply with the rights such as the right of return. Thus, the importance of this conference is three forms. First, it asserts the academic and political freedom to discuss the issues that these campaigns seek to silence. Second, it brings together a group of experts who discuss these issues with the seriousness they deserve. Thus, it provides a counterweight to the sorry state of much of the public discussion in mainstream circles. Third, the conference seeks to maintain a space for developing the analytical frameworks and the political outlook for studying the question of Palestine critically and in order to achieve and realize the Palestinian rights. And further, to highlight the evolving academic corpus that seeks to do these things. I would like to thank the participants in this conference, all of our speakers in the three panels, and I look forward to hearing their presentations. Unfortunately, I just learned that Professor Karma Nablusi is not feeling well today and won't be able to join us for the opening remarks. We wish her a speedy recovery. Professor Nablusi asked me to pass along her warm greetings to this conference and to salute the next generations holding the torch for our cause and our people so boldly and steadfast, one that radiates such light and shows that victory is inevitable. And she expressed how proud she is about that, and also proud of the exceptionally strong scholarship today, which also follows a great Palestinian tradition. Thank you Karma, we wish you the best. In terms of the plan for today, please note that we have three sessions with separate links. Each session will last for about one hour 45 minutes. Each speaker will have around 20 minutes or so, and then we can have a Q&A session for which the audience can submit questions or comments in the Q&A box. This conference will be recorded via Facebook live streaming and thus will be available for later viewing. I'm delighted to moderate the first panel entitled Past and Present, Origins and Context. Our first speaker will be Professor Abdul Razak Takreti, who is the Associate Professor and Arab American Educational Foundation Chair in modern Arab history at the University of Houston. He is the author of Monson Revolution, Republicans, Sultans and Empires in Oman, and the co-curator alongside Professor Karman Abulsey of a digital teaching resource on the Palestinian Revolution for which they both won the Mesa undergraduate teaching award. Abed, I turn it to you. Thank you for being with us. Thank you very much, Nimor. And I would like to add that, of course, this is an international collaboration that brings together universities both in Palestine, in the UK, and in the US. And it makes sense for it to be an international collaboration because assault on the right of return takes place at the moment at a global level. Assault on the Palestinian people from the very beginning of the colonization of Palestine was globally coordinated. Some people might think that I'm being hyperbolic, but I hope to convince you during this talk that I'm not. This is actually a matter of establishing the historical record. I'm going to start with the story of Mustafa Radeh Dabagh. Most Palestinians would know that this is somebody who wrote a book, a fantastic book called Biladuna Palestine, Our Homeland Palestine. This book is a compendium of geographic, historical, geological and other forms of knowledge relating to Palestine. The author studied every district of Palestine, every sub-district of Palestine and accounted for most of its villages and towns and even the smallest handlets were included in his analysis and description. By 1947, he had collected more than he had written more than 6000 pages on the history of Palestine. Perhaps he was driven by the feeling that Palestine was under threat, that there is a possibility that all what he saw and all what he recorded was going to increasingly diminish with time. And with the influx of more and more colonists and with the building of more colonies and with the increasing arming of these colonies and the increasing disarming of the indigenous population. From the very beginning, that was the essence of the colonial project in Palestine. Now sometimes people when they study the colonial project they talk a lot about the early Jewish settlements of the late 19th century, and they situate the history of Palestine in that context. But really, we should focus on the fact that the real threat to the Palestinian population came when Britain took control of the territory invaded it by force and subjected its people to its will. This was a conquered people. And this was as Mustafa Murad Dabagh and others were to note, people that did not have the capacity to stop this invasion by the world's biggest empire at the time. Mustafa talked a lot about British violence talked a lot about British Colonials and talked a lot about the impact of the British policy of the Balfour policy, which was to establish a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, and which meant in turn the denial of the political, social and economic rights of the Palestinian people. And that it entailed the denial of the Palestinian people's existence itself. That's why our people were never officially recognized in any real form or meaningful form throughout the mandate period. And even when they established structures to recognize themselves, those structures were often undermined, and many eventually dismantled and sent into exile. In April 1948, Dabagh was carrying the manuscript of his book. It was 6000 pages. Dabagh was besieged in his house in Yaffa. The gangs of ethnic cleansing that they sometimes refer to as the Haganah and the Angoon and the Stern. These were not just militias, they were gangs oriented towards a particular goal, expelling the Palestinian people. And then entered Yaffa, besieged entire neighborhoods. Manchiye fell at the end of April 1948, major neighborhood. The rest of the city was under a lot of pressure. And Bell was sitting in his home, hungry, bread ran out. There was no electricity. Everything around him was falling apart, heavy shelling. The cousin of his come to his house, begging him to leave. His cousin managed to find a boat from Egypt that would be willing to take the family. And he would not leave the best house until he agreed to come with him. Earlier a few weeks before Dabagh had already sent his wife and kids abroad because he was worried about the shelling, he was worried about the siege. But he of course wanted to stay until everything was sorted out and until they could come back. These plans were foiled by the advancing colonial forces of ethnic cleansing. He entered into the boat carrying with him, only one thing, that 6000 page manuscript, that 6000 page manuscript that contained the entirety of the history and geography of Palestine. A truly astonishing compendium. It was truly incredible work of scholarly knowledge. There were too many people packed into the boat people were rushing rushing to the port. And all these boats that were lined up there family after family after family. There wasn't enough space on these boats. And when the back came in with his heavy suitcase which contain the manuscript. A sailor had to throw it into the sea, because there was no space. He thought for a second that the history that he compiled the history of Palestine had been lost. Over the years afterwards to come and reassemble the information re gather and re issue this work that we have with us today. This is one story out of hundreds of thousands of stories that we have from the world of the expelled people that we sometimes refer to as Palestinian refugees. It's comfortable of course with the term in the legal sense refugee, but historically and conceptually it doesn't convey exactly what these people were, these were not just victims of war. These were not just people fleeing conflict. These were not just people that were being expelled from their homeland for the purpose of the establishment of a homeland for another people coming from Europe. Now, a few weeks after the bus tragic departure tragic loss of his history and geographical compendium. The Palestinian woman from Nazareth captured the feelings of countless Palestinians. When she exclaimed. Oh my God, what happened. How could it be that our people will never attacked anyone. Nor did any harm to anyone. How and why all of a sudden, in one day, have all the nations of the world suddenly become our enemies. This woman's shock erupted to the background of the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaigns or driving Palestinians out of their lands. But also, it was, they came against the background of the increasing announcements of support for the establishment of the state of Israel, one great power after the next and indicated that they're going to recognize that state as a major or de facto. And that meant in essence, in the context of that state being established on the rubble of Palestinian homes and lands on the rubble of the home homes of people like Mustafa Murad and others. There was an assault on the Palestinian people, a colonial assault on the Palestinian people. The Nazarene woman could not understand why the great powers of the world combined would decide to destroy a people that never attacked him. There was a bit of naivety perhaps in her way of thinking but there was also an elegance to it. She got to the right to the heart of the matter. Why would states that have nothing to do with Palestine. People that had never been impringed impringed upon by Palestine. And decide that they're going to set up a global settler colony in Palestine. There was a bit of uniqueness to the population, to the situation as well usually settler colonies were established by one major colonial power that took control. It might bring people from different parts of the world like the French did in Algeria with the PNR. It was a certain effort. A huge amount of investment into this project that we still see going on to this very day. But of course, Britain played the central role in orchestrating this project. In March 6 1921. Palestine's leading newspapers Philistine was asking similar questions to those posed by the Nazarene woman. But those questions were particularly directed at Britain and its role. The front page editorial reflected upon the project of political and demographic erasure imposed upon the Palestinian people. The decision of Britain and its allies in the Great War to render Palestine quote, a homeland for a powerful entrance from abroad that was crowding out its weak son, contesting within it his right to life. At that time, the native daughters and sons of Palestine had constituted a huge, huge majority of the population. As we're quote, lowered the signs of despair evident on their faces, condemned as they were to humiliation and wretchedness is an element of fear in pieces from the time like this one, a fear of time, a fear of what time will bring because the writing on the wall was evident to everybody. If the colonial power that took control of Palestine decided to sponsor the settler colonization of the territory. That was a justifiably scary prospect. That's why the Palestinians sent the delegation to England at the time to try to demand a more democratic solution. In August 1921, the Palestinian delegation landed in Dover and the Secretary of the delegation Shibley in German announced to the British newspaper the morning post that quote, we would like to announce again that we are not against Jews, but we would like to live like we once lived before loyal to our compatriots, the Jews of Palestine. A weak people like us object to is the Zionist project, which will enslave us and drive us out of our country. We say that we are weak people in relation to England, but we are able to defend ourselves against the Zionist as is well known. The nation's principal demand to the secretary of colonies Winston Churchill was the establishment in Palestine of a national government, answerable to a parliament elected by the inhabitants of Palestine Muslims Christians and Jews alike that lived there before the Great War. That demand was rejected. Reflecting upon this decision in a secret testimony to the appeal Commission Churchill noted that he was committed to the project of establishing Jewish national homeland in Palestine. And quite correctly, he did not believe that it was possible to pursue that project while, quote, handing the government of the country to the people who happened to live there at the moment. End of quote, interesting formulation, the people who happened to live there at the moment. Imagine me referring to the people of England. As the people who happened to live there at the moment for him. For Churchill. This was a question of British will and strength. The British had willed that the territory become Jewish. And it was understood after the war. Quote that it was not all going to be done by kindness. And of course, when he was setting up the Palestine mandate in 1922. He decided to go against the findings of the 1920 British military commission, which had noted the difficulties about immigration, I'm quoting them here the transfer of land and Arab fear of Jewish domination. Churchill rejected these findings as questioning British strength as a form of questioning British strength. Good friend argument is that England may not be strong enough and she cannot do it. And when he was questioned by a member of the pill commission remember he's giving this secret testimony about about this claim he noted that who contested that this was just a question of strength and and as Churchill you know could this be about a quote some competition about drowning out the Arabs year after year when they wanted to remain in their country. Churchill elaborated this vision of right after having stressed England's mind. And it's worth for us to pause at this vision. I often refer to this quote I've been referring to it for years. But I feel that we must always recall it. This is the man that set up the mandate. This was the secretary of the colonies this was the major colonialist that decreed the fate of our people. He says, I do not agree that the dog in a manger as the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America, or to the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the red Indians had any right to say the American continent belongs to us, and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in. We are not the right, nor have they the power. So when people come and tell you Palestine is not a colonial question. Or when they come and try to detach the right of return, which is really about the right to return is not just some international legal formulation. It's about refugees being able to go back to their homeland. In the case of Palestine. It is about whether the Palestinians will be able to have Palestine or not will be able to live in their country or not. And it was against the colonial backdrop that we should understand the expulsion of the Palestinian people and the British Empire. Of course, played the key role in that expulsion, due to setting up the mandate in the way etc, due to the fact that it facilitated the coming of settler colonists. They use the misnomer immigration. It's not immigration. This is colonization. So we need we have to be very cognizant of the terminology even in scholarship. I know there's a lot of historians attending this conference. Be careful about not adopting the languages of the colonists. Palestinians always refer to it as a form of a stamina. They were not only bringing in settler colonists, but they were arming in, they created a diplomatic formula to accommodate them. They promoted their project worldwide. They wanted to transfer the Palestinian population inhabiting the land, as you can see in the Hill Commission report. Now some people tell you, oh, this is not nuanced. There were multiple British policies, they changed their minds and there were different governments and there were white papers and papers that cancel the white papers and black papers and they want you to get caught in the details. You see it as Edward Said once noted Palestine was colonized by detail, but what that takes us away from is the actual framework to which Palestine was colonized. And when you look at the policy that was established at the central moments, the milestone moments, you see that there was no illusion as to the fact that the population currently living in Palestine would have to leave it if this project of a Jewish national homeland and later on of a Jewish state were to be achieved. Now, the complicity with this project is evident globally. 1948 when you had the United States Soviet Union the European powers and the settler colonial formations great and small that the European settler colonial formations great and small that forced that project into reality. When they decreed the establishment of a state for newly arrived settler colonists in the so called partition resolution of 1947. I say so called partition resolution because this was not actually about partitioning the territory into two states as is often presented in the literature. We can be more actually analytically daring and think of it in more serious ways. Partition took place in places like India and Pakistan, where all the inhabitants in the territory belong to the territory that lived there for centuries have been around there these are the towns and villages to communities divide as tragic as that partition was same could be said for Greece and Turkey, I'm mentioning these, by the way, because they're often examples that are used to justify what took place in Palestine. In 2007 partition resolution was not comparable to these instances. This was about the authorization of the establishment of a colonist state in Palestine, a colonist state a state of colonists that had just arrived. A good chunk of them, the huge number had literally arrived a couple of years before, you know, within within one decade before. The project was normalized through this legal language of partition. It was its implications moral and political were sanitized through this language of partition, and it was clear to everybody what it would mean. And it became clear for those that didn't know what it meant in the following months. The Haganah gangs and the stern gang and Ergun gang started going around every Palestinian village and town in the environs of this decreed set their colonial state and began to expel the people or created conditions that were so intolerable that the people were forced to leave. Since then, we have been grappling with the question of the Nakaba. Since then, the Palestinians were not allowed to talk of what took place. But more importantly, they were not allowed to strive for returning to their homeland. They're not allowed to talk politically about the territories that were colonized in 1948. This, as far as the great powers was concerned was a finished subject. It's a done deal. That's now going to be the Jewish state. The small number of Palestinians that got left in it. They lived with that and live under the sovereignty of the settler colonists. Those became the 1948 Palestinians. The rest of the Palestinian people should not talk about return to that territory in a serious way. There is the UN General Assembly resolution that was passed in 1994 that we're marking the anniversary of at the moment in this conference. But that resolution was trying to give some legality to the situation on the ground. They didn't want to create a situation where the whole world was contradicting the new legal order that had constructed their own refugees. They didn't want to establish a precedent where it's okay to come and conquer a territory and then expel its people. So they had to give some rhetorical acknowledgement of what took place to the Palestinian people and talk about their right to return to their homes and lands. But it was also a toothless resolution you should recall. The great powers did not pass it in the Security Council. So yes, the moral principle was established, but they did not create a mechanism for its enforcement. The Palestinian people have suffered ever since for that. In actual practice, they were combated whenever they spoke of return. And immediately after their expulsion, they began to organize themselves calling for return. There were a series of mobilizations that took place from 1948 onwards inside all the neighboring states. They were demanding return. In fact, the demand for return was the main engine for the organization of the Palestinian people at the time. Every refugee camp, every town and village in which Palestinians were to be found was mobilized whenever you had an American envoy come to the region talking about resettlement of refugees. Or whenever you had a circulation of news of Syria or Egypt or any other state striking a deal with the Israelis over the fate of the refugees. You had huge demonstrations on the part of refugees demanding that they be armed, that they be trained, that they be allowed to join militaries. There were a huge amount of clandestine activities that were taking place on the part of refugees. We're beginning to see the need to revolt against the political situation around them, a political situation that was preventing them from acting upon their need to go back home. Of course, return was always tied to liberation. And that is a point that is very important to note here. Refugees did not just want to go back home and be subjected to the mercy and wins of the settler colonists that had expelled them, and that have shown no mercy and no justice throughout their time in Palestine. All what Palestinians have seen from the Zionist movement is cruelty and dispossession. What Palestinians were proposing was a democratic solution for the situation in Palestine. Many of them, especially by the 1960s, had established a formula that would allow for liberation and return through a democratic solution. We're going back to the old principles that we had formulated from the beginning of the mandate, and that I referred to earlier, the demands that were submitted by the Palestinian delegation, 1921, a democratic representative government that includes all inhabitants of that space. Now, we have a situation now whereby we're not allowed to talk about this. And listening to this talk today could come and say, oh, this is absolutely outrageous. How can anybody speak like that? Because Palestinians are regularly silenced. We're not allowed to talk about our rights. We're not allowed to talk about what happened to us. And that's where the IHRA definition that Nimr referred to in his opening remarks. That's where it's so dangerous. It's one added method of suppression of the Palestinian people. We've had so many ways of suppressing the Palestinian people, their ability to express themselves, their ability to represent themselves, their ability to gain their rights has been constantly, constantly suppressed, especially in the countries that matter, those colonial countries or neocolonial countries that have power over the Middle East. That had power back then and continue to have a lot of power now, although of course who's leading change. You know, back then it was Britain, now it's the United States. A series of rhetorical conceits are utilized to justify the cruel facts that I'm just referring to. And the number of frameworks allow perfectly decent people to criminalize Palestinians and those in solidarity with them for demanding that right take precedence over mine. I'm going to end my presentation by referring to those rhetorical strategies that we have to be very cognizant of when we're talking about that right turn and I'm sure you will encounter them today in all the sessions. One is legalism. You know, people tell you well, there was the international community stated what should happen in Palestine through its UN resolution 181, its partition plan, the Arabs rejected the Jewish state, the Jewish colonists agreed to the Jewish state. Well, therefore the Arabs are to blame to besides legalism we're dealing with denialism. The scenes whenever expelled, or minimalization, which is by the way, part of denialism, but in a different form. Well, what's the big deal. A few hundred thousand people leaving. So what. Okay, we're subjected to that regularly. So third rhetorical strategy that we face depoliticization. There's a lot of people that turn the question of the Palestinian refugees into a humanitarian or human rights issue, and not a political issue. These even include people who claim to be in sympathy with Palestinian refugees. There's a lot of researchers in the field that do this today. They open with you. They come and pit Palestinian, the Palestinian people against Palestinian rights and against Palestinian resistance. They tell you Palestinian resistance has sold false hopes to these refugees it mobilized them entirely into, you know, talking about the right to return and by doing so it was shackling them in their daily lives. These are the pitfalls of humanitarian logic. Of course, it's such an a historical approach, the Palestinian resistance emanated from the refugee camps, anybody who studied the Palestinian Revolution knows this. That's where it started. That's where the flame was kept alive. The politicization of the issue is very is is is tantamount to indulge in the indulgence in the colonial logic that continues to dominate our people. Then you have the transaction list arguments that that's a fourth strategy. This was just a kind of an exchange taking place. Arab states got Palestinian refugees. Israel got Jewish Arab refugees, as if there was ever an Arab colonization program in Jewish areas. As if the exit of the Jews of Arab countries, which was a horrific tragedy was not facilitated sponsored and encouraged by the Jewish agency itself. And by the state of Israel later on, as if the colonization of Palestine had nothing to do with that reality. Arab refugees are responsible for the decisions of Arab states and governments, states and governments that they do not elect that they have no role in selecting, and they have nothing to do with fifth rhetorical challenge that we deal with both And really, I sometimes feel uncomfortable around the world where the Palestinian narrative. I know that a lot of great Palestinian scholars introduced it into the discussion in the 70s and 80s when you weren't even allowed to say the word Palestine. Narrative is a word that allowed access to a certain audience when we spoke about Palestine. But sometimes, you know narrative can be misused and turned into a reduction to a point of view that what took place. Oh, this is the Palestinian point of view what took place. And then there's of course in Israeli narrative and there's a British narrative and there's dozens of narratives out there because everybody has a narrative. And what we are dealing with when with this narrative framework. Therefore is both side is and a failure to establish facts. The expulsion of the Palestinians is not a narrative. It is a fact. We were expelled from our lands. And when you have people trying to question that and call it a narrative. Then we're dealing with a problem here. Okay, this is not a narrative. Besides this both side is a narrative approach we have criminalization. And I'm sorry that karma couldn't join us today. So karma has actually played a key role in elaborating the fact that one of the biggest problems with the entirety of the Oslo process was the criminalization of the Palestinian refugees. Of course it's a long tradition but we saw it big time during Oslo and its aftermath that they are an obstacle to peace. You know, if only Palestinians would accept giving away the right to return. You know, it's just one bargaining chip amongst others if they put that on the side then we can reach a deal as if it's the deal that matters, not the people, the people come first, not the deal. And I hate using that Trumpian word, but believe me Israeli governments have been using it long before and the American governments backing them have long used it. They always talk about deals, but we don't want deals. We want anti colonialism. We want the demolition of the colonial order that has destroyed our people that has shackled them and that continues to shackle them to this very day. This obstacle to peace narrative is something that we still grapple with when we're talking about the return and it has to be exposed its violence and its form as a macro aggression against the Palestinian people has to be exposed. And finally last but not least you have the discursive suppression, which we're seeing now. The Palestinians now started that strategy or renewed that strategy. After the BDS movement and the solidarity movement with Palestine grew after you started seeing major political figures rising to important positions with backgrounds in Palestine solidarity that had to be the conversation had to be ended. And now who called it and if you follow this I want you all to Google this delegitimize the delegitimizers put it out delegitimize the delegitimizers look at all the meetings that he had and conferences that he had an official announcements that he had that this is going to be our strategy. Long before you know Jeremy Corbyn and long before you had the Ilhan Omar and and Bernie Sanders. There was already the stock of we have to delegitimize the delegitimizers delegitimizers means people who support the Palestinian people. Because if you support the indigenous population them by default you're delegitimizing the colonist state, the settler colonial state. And now has clarity around this can't have it both ways and discursive suppression is what is what we are facing with today at a great cost to the Palestinian people but also at a great cost to democracy worldwide. This conference was organized in that context. Now for a wave of discursive suppression. And I hope that it will contribute to elaborating the factual record that is being suppressed. And the moral. Most importantly, vision that is being suppressed a vision of anti colonial liberation at the heart of which is the return of the Palestinian people to their land. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Abed for this powerful talk. Next speaker is Professor Osama Makdisi was the Arab American Education Foundation Professor in Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston is the author of several books including artillery of heaven American missionaries and the Middle East, and more recently, the age of coexistence, the ecumenical ecumenical frame, and the making of the modern Arab world. Please go ahead. Thank you. And thank you to before me. Thank you to the Center for Palestine studies at so as the Arab American Educational Foundation for Arab Studies at the University of Houston and the Institute of Law and beers a university for organizing this conference. I'm honored and I'm delighted to be here. I would like to speak about a subject that is is clearly crucial powerful and urgent. There are I'd like to begin by just by pointing out that there apparently if if one didn't know better there are two rights of return. When it comes to Palestine, there is the Palestinian one that Abed referred to, and that this conference intends to discuss a right of return based on the modern dispossession of home and land within living memory. A right of return enshrined in international law, and based on new and resolution one line for that was passed as we just heard after the neck above 1948. Exactly. I think yesterday 72 years ago. So a different so called right of return, by which I mean the supremely ideological idea of return that contributed to the network directly in the first instance. And I'm referring of course to the self proclaimed Zionist right of a theological return in quotation marks of European Jews to multi religious Palestine to reconstitute this Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state. The Zionist claim of an inherent Jewish right to Palestine emerged as most of us know in Europe in the 19th century. In other words, the Zionist movement, a modern political nationalist movement in response to all sorts of things going on in Europe. And so on. This Zionist claim enjoyed three decades of crucial British colonial support between 1917 and 1947 and since then, of course, this ideological right has become an essential aspect of the state of Israel itself, with its own so current, which was first passed in 1950. As most of you know this Israeli law allows quote, every Jew and quote, to settle in Palestine by virtue of their Jewishness. So that my Palestinian mother who was born in Jerusalem in 1940 cannot return to the land of her birth because she is Palestinian. She was actually ambassador to the United States who was born in 1971 in Florida, I think, where his father was mayor of Miami Beach, if I'm not mistaken, has been able, because he is Jewish to become an Israeli citizen. He is a uniquely Zionist, the political self proclaimed right to build and maintain an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine unfolded, as we just heard, and still unfolds of course, directly at the expense of Palestine's indigenous population. Indeed, it is always unfolded at the expense of this native population. It is not just the political or we could think of it as a theological colonial self proclaimed right to Palestine, moreover, assumed and still assumes a notion of fantasy of super historical indigeneity. This was first proposed by European Ashkenazi Jewish Zionist intellectuals and and activists in Russia, Poland, Austria and England, and their Protestant liberal and evangelical supporters in the West was rooted in a nationalist sanctification of one of their own peoples, allegedly eternal relationship to Palestine. This notion of a super historical indigeneity mixed Old Testament narratives fragments of ancient history with modern European nationalism, romanticism, racism, and colonialism. And that implacably rejected the reality of a multi religious and ecumenical Palestine that the first Zionist colonists discovered when they arrived in Palestine in the late Ottoman era. And from the data the Balfour Declaration of November, November 1917, which marked the collapse of Ottoman sovereignty over Palestine and the beginnings, as I've been mentioned of British colonial rule. The Zionism openly weaponized this idea of a super historical indigeneity against the actual centuries old non Western Arab rooted indigeneity of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived in Palestine. And of course, against their millions of descendants, including those who are today scattered in their own diaspora. The profound bias against the humanity and the history of a self evident Arab indigeneity, in turn remains at the heart of Western support, both liberal and conservative of Zionism. And it remains as well at the heart of an adamant, I would say aggressive collective Israeli and Western rejection of the legal, political and moral Palestinian right of return. The conference knows of course that the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 denied the political and historical salience of the Palestinians. It referred to the native Palestinian population as negatively as sectarian quote non Jewish communities. And quote, whose inferior religious historical and political standing in Western eyes in Balfour's eyes contrasted with a valorized standing of the quote Jewish people so you have non Jewish communities set against the Jewish people. The ecumenical Palestinian presence had an obviousness in bodies and in materiality and informs in churches mosques synagogues in the villages and towns and buildings and orange growth and soap factories that the British and Zionist colonists did not initially deny it nevertheless carried no weight in Western eyes, at least no more weight than that of Native Americans, in other words indigeneity of Native Americans, black South Africans, Australian Aboriginal communities and all other peoples without history to use the anthropologist Eric wolf, formulation. This is exactly the point that Winston Churchill himself underscored in habits, the quotation that I would just just read to us, when he testified in camera to the British colonial appeal commission of 1937. The quotation that I would read about not admitting that a dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have been there for a very long time. And what Churchill said in private to fellow Englishman whom he knew supported his basic racist anti Arab anti black and anti Native view of the world. Chaim Weitzman, the leader of the Zionist movement in the 1920s, had put in public, though in politer terms, almost two decades before. It was in 1918 in British occupied Jerusalem, when Weitzman probably calmly and certainly disingenuously assured an assembly of Muslim and Christian Arab and Armenian dignitaries at the House of the British military governor of Palestine that or Jerusalem that the Zionist project meant no harm to the Arabs. Weitzman talked about coexistence. And he admitted that though he was not born in Palestine, he confessed that he was quote born and bred in the remote North. He insisted that he was not a stranger. These are his words to this country. For he said he was returning to Palestine, based on what he claimed was an inviolable inviolable right that drew on an ancient birthright. Weitzman drew confidence of course from British imperial support from the Balfour Declaration, and for its call for the establishment of a Jewish national home. And he would soon become more emboldened by the political and legal structures of the British mandate itself. The Charter of the British mandate encapsulated its foundational Zionist nature and mission in 1922. And again, as was the case with the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians, the majority of the population in other words, were not referred to as Arabs, as Palestinians, as Muslims, or as Christians, and certainly not as a people entitled to self determination. They were not referred to by what they were not as non Jews, as an obstacle in the way of the fulfillment of the theopolitical and now clearly the colonial right of European Jews to return, quote unquote to Palestine, a process that would be seen as the mandate Charter specified by a Zionist Jewish agency to be created to facilitate the building of a Jewish national home and to organize Jewish colonization of Palestine. The mandate of Palestine was, I don't know how many of you know this but the mandate of Palestine was the one so called class a mandate created by the racist of course League of Nations that did not even pretend to fulfill the terms of article 22 of the League of Nations Charter. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, were all created as mandates at the same time as Palestine, but whereas these mandates, in other words Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. Mesopotamia were explicitly premised on a provisional recognition of their independence subject of course the colonial domination oversight. The mandate was specifically set up to fulfill the theological aspirations of European Zionism, and not the independence, provisional or otherwise, of the Palestinian native majority. The neck about in other words was already implied in the terms of the mandate. From a Jewish colonial perspective, the primary and absolute duty and obligation of the mandate was to create the conditions and facilitate the conditions for a Jewish state in Palestine, or what they called initially a Jewish national home, and only secondary less important mandate for them was to do as little harm as possible to the native majority. During the revolt of 1936, the British pretended through constant relentless prevarication that there was no inherent contradiction between the settler colonial project of Zionism Palestine, and the well being rights of the Palestinian majority. In the decades of the British mandate, British officials ignored or dismissed countless protests, petitions, please, marches to affirm the right of self determination. It mattered little whether these calls for self determination were made by the Muslim Christian associations that were set up in 1918, or by Palestinian parties, or by women's organizations, or by the Supreme Muslim Council, or by the Arab Higher Committee. Instead, as you know the British administration resorted to deliberately evasive language, such as quote the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine, and encouraged the self segregating sectarian structures of colonial Zionism, in other words separate education, separate colonies and so on and so forth. Thus, the Theo colonial Zionist right of return consistently trumped the Arab, quote unquote problem of Zionism and the British mandates on making the problem of Arab bodies in the wrong place. As far as Zionism and British colonialism were concerned. In other words, the native majority was an obstacle. Finally, in 1936. As I just alluded to the Palestinians launched a massive revolt, as their Syrian brethren had done in 1925. Although seldom acknowledged as such these two major revolts constituted as far as I'm aware the largest anti colonial uprisings of the interwar period. The Palestinians were met, just as the Syrians had been by mass repression intimidation state terror and racism. But unlike the French in Syria, who at least eventually modified some of the most egregious sectarian policies of their mandate in Syria. The Palestinians were confronted by an even stronger British insistence on the the geopolitical Jewish right to Palestine. So to return to the 1937 British Peel Commission of inquiry, which was charged by Britain to investigate the anti colonial revolt what the Commission referred to as disturbances. The commission was sympathetic to Zionism from the outset. The commissioners listened eagerly to Weitzman, no less than five times I believe, but were far less attentive to Arab testimony. They thought the Arabs were quote hectoring rather than, quote, moderate and were unmoved by the grand mufti of Palestine has Emily Hussain these initial boycott of their commission. Additionally, the Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine, in which the Arab majority were to be compelled to give up their homes and lands to make way for the largely European Jewish minority, and their Jewish state. It justified this repudiation of two decades of British pledges, not to harm the Arabs of Palestine by resorting to again extreme disingenuousness. The report acknowledged that the partition of Palestine was inherently prejudicial to the Arab majority, who after all were being asked the commissioners acknowledged to give up their homes and lands, and we're expected to be forcibly removed to allow for the creation of a Jewish state. The report hoped that the great tradition of what it called Arab generosity would provide some balm to Arab wounds, wounds, especially because of the knowledge that those soon to be displaced Arabs, quote, who had some sacrifice could help to solve that problem, i.e. What the what the committee referred to as the Western Jewish problem would earn the gratitude not of the Jews alone, but of the whole of the Western world in other words the Arabs are generous so therefore they'll give up their homes and lands to solve Europe's problem of anti semitism. In other words, ethnic cleansing was disguised as Arab nobility. Here in 1947, the Communist Soviet Union voted with the liberal West to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This from an Arab perspective infamous vote in November 1947 for UN resolution 181 at the newly created UN revealed more than the workings of power politics, or the dogged determination of the Zionists to create their state. It was termed once again but also paradoxically for the last time. The Western view that colonized populations of what we today refer to as the global south were entirely dispensable. The UN vote legitimated. I think it's important to note the last settler colonial state to be established in a world on the cusp of decolonization. It's not a coincidence that the United States and Australia voted for partition, or that the newly independent state of India, several Arab independent states, and Iran, all voted against the Western dominated UN partition vote sealed the fate of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were soon uprooted to make way for this Jewish state. The individual UN special committee on Palestine on scope formulated a partition plan of 1947. That was the subject of the vote with the pretense of equity. It created a Jewish state that would be built on Arab land, and an Arab state that will be built on what was left of Palestine. As Ansqab admitted, the quote Arab state will organize a substantial majority of Arabs and Palestine into a political body containing an insignificant minority of Jews. But in the Jewish state there will be a considerable minority of Arabs. This is the de-narrate of the scheme. Such a minority is inevitable in any feasible plan, which does not place the whole of Palestine under the present majority of the Arabs end quote. Once again, we have obfuscation on a grand scale. Note the language present majority of the Arabs. The Arab minority would have constituted in fact 50% of the population of the Jewish state that was contemplated by the UN. It was their land that was going to be taken away to create a Jewish state. But their right to be a minority on their own land will solemnly upheld by those who while proclaiming their belief in the principle of secular democracy, in fact rejected it because Palestinians constituted a quote present majority. And to justify this inherently prejudicial partition, Ansqab again fell back on the mantra that because both Arabs and Jews were quote semites, they might well cooperate after partition. Add delusion in other words to prevarication on a grand scale. The Ansqab plan was written as I just indicated with the pretense of objectivity. It weighed the merits of both the Arab and Jewish cases and of course note as a side of the parenthetical point, Arabs and Jews become and become antonyms, antithetical in this period, because of the British mandate. Much as the appeal commission upon which Ansqab heavily replied relied had done a decade before. But underlying this attention to resolving an immediate political problem was a continuing, unyielding commitment to the legitimacy of a theological Jewish Zionist right to be in Palestine. In the end of course Palestine was not only partitioned. It was destroyed. Zionist forces ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homes and lands to make way of course for the Jewish state. The minority Jewish community made itself a majority in a new state that through the force of arms and colonialism established itself at the expense of the majority. And this old majority was turned into a despised minority on its own land. And the Palestinians were scattered as stateless refugees into the neighboring countries. The establishment of Israel in 1948 in other words, dominated by European Jewish settlers constituted the last great triumph of a particular form of Eurocentrism in a world on the cusp of decolonization. The challenge of UN resolution 194 in December 1948, which quote resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date. And that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return, and for the loss or damage to property. The resolution strikes me as the first attempt to grapple or one of the earliest attempts to grapple with the consequences of this anachronism of creating a settler colonial state on the eve of the colonization, but also raises the crucial question of who frames international law, who enforces it. And if not the great powers, then who will enforce it, and how will a right of return ever be accomplished. Because actually enforcing the newly created refugees right of return was never seriously contemplated by the major Western power. Personally the Western states had no intention of grappling with their moral and political culpability for the devastation visited upon the Palestinian people, let alone reverse the terrible injustice in which they were, and remain deeply implicated. Thank you. Thank you very much, Osama, for this excellent presentation. Our third speaker is Dr. Anne Irfan, who is the departmental lecturer in forced migration at the refugee studies center at Oxford University. She is currently the principal investigator on the British Academy funded research project Borders Global Governance and the refugee, examining the historical origins of the global refugee regime. And is the author of several articles including a recent one in the Journal of Palestine Studies entitled Palestine at the UN, the PLO and on the war in the 1970s. And the floor is yours. Nimad, I'm just going to share my screen, my screen if I can. Nimad is saying I host disabled attendee screen sharing are you able to give me permission to share my screen. Thank you. Okay. First of all, good afternoon and good morning and good evening to everyone, depending on the variant time zones. Thank you very much to so many people giving up their Saturdays to be here. And in particular thank you so much to Nimad and to Aki for all of their hard work in organizing today's conference on such an important and critical topic at a time when we're seeing unfortunately increasing threats to the fundamental and recognized nature of the Palestinian right of return. Of course, this first panel of today's conference is designed to take something of a long view of the Palestinian refugee issue as we see from the title referencing past and present origins in context. It has become very clear from my two co-panelists excellent presentations, it is really impossible to think in terms of the long historical view on the Palestinian refugee question without speaking in terms of colonialism and colonial legacies which continue to drive the political dynamics of this subject today. So while my co-panelists have talked about the colonial framework of both the British mandate period over Palestine, and then later the Israeli policy in terms of denying Palestinian rights to self determination. What I'm going to do is wrap up this panel of talks by focusing on what we might consider perhaps a third branch of the apparatus that oversees Palestinian lives and rights in the form of the so called international community as it is embodied in the United Nations and specifically in the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees, more often known by its acronym of UNRWA, UNRWA or UNRWA. Now, I would imagine that the vast majority of this audience will be aware and familiar with the key fundamental points about the UNRWA regime so I will only very briefly state them here. UNRWA has operated almost since the very beginning of Palestinian refugee history and it has been functional since 1950. So for almost as long as there have been Palestinian refugees, there has been UNRWA and this alone, if nothing else is one reason why I would argue, we cannot exclude consideration of UNRWA's role and UNRWA's mandate from bigger discussions of Palestinian refugee history since the last one was in the October given that the two have been so entwined. In geographical terms, having covered the time I also want to cover the space element and again as I'm sure many of this audience will be aware. UNRWA has a geographically restricted mandate in terms of operations, this in itself is problematic on numerous levels that we can perhaps discuss more in the Q&A. UNRWA had only to operate in what is usually described as the five fields of operation indicated on this map. So these five fields consist of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Now importantly, and I will return to this later, UNRWA was initially also active within Israel itself. UNRWA began operations, it provided services not only to Palestinian refugees, but also to Jewish people who've been living in Palestine and who'd been displaced in 1948. UNRWA only discontinued these services to Jewish refugees within Israel at the request of the Israeli government. The reason I am mentioning this is because it's a very early indication of the essentially flawed and erroneous nature of many of the claims being made about UNRWA around supposedly it being exclusive or giving Palestinian refugees unfair rights. As I'm sure many of you will have predicted I'm going to, for which I apologize briefly now talk about someone who I'm sure we'd all rather forget. Trump, who has gone very definitively on the offensive against both UNRWA and Palestinian refugee rights over the period of his presidency. So, despite, as I've just indicated, despite the fact that UNRWA has been so intimately involved with the Palestinian refugees and despite the longevity of UNRWA's operations. It actually held a remarkably low profile over the decades. So, for much of the second half of the 20th century and even the first couple of decades of the 21st century. This generally did not receive a huge amount of attention or discussion, even really in discussions around Palestinian refugee rights, with a few exceptions. This all changed at the beginning of 2018 with the Trump administration's abrupt announcements seen here via Twitter, but it would be defunding UNRWA and in the process putting an end to decades of US financial and diplomatic support for the agency. And very critically for the purposes of our discussion today, this defunding was not solely framed in fiscal terms. It went hand in hand with accompanying political attacks, as at the same time as withdrawing more than 50% of UNRWA's funding. The Trump administration also called for UNRWA to be dissolved completely. So this was part of an existential attack on UNRWA. In fact, a few months after Trump put out these tweets that you see here in which he attacks the Palestinians. Foreign Policy magazine published a leaked email from Jared Kushner, which Kushner had sent out just a few days after these Trump tweets to very senior figures in the administration, including the Secretary of State and the US ambassador to the UN. And in the email, he wrote, it is very important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA. This as an UNRWA perpetuates a status quo is corrupt, inefficient and doesn't help peace. Now, why does it really matter what Kushner or what Trump said nearly three years ago? Well, I would really highlight that what's significant here is the degree to which the Trump administration sought to fuse UNRWA's role and UNRWA's work with Palestinian refugee rights themselves or with the Palestinian cause itself. The strategy here was for them to try and conflate UNRWA and Palestinian rights in order to first undermine UNRWA's work and then ultimately further marginalize Palestinian refugees themselves. I would flag up, we can also see some evidence of this conflation in the Trump tweets where he talks, even though here he's talking about defunding UNRWA, he actually doesn't mention the agency once, which is quite telling. In fact, instead he says that he's going to withdraw funding to the Palestinians, essentially as a response, an angry response to their refusal to capitulate to his proposed plan for the region. What we see here is the treatment of UNRWA, the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority, all as one singular entity. And this is certainly no accident, it's a very deliberate strategy around going back to what Abid talked about de-legitimization. Now of course you might wonder why any of this matters and why I'm spending so much time talking about the Trump administration when all going to plan that they will be out of office next month. And what's more, there are some hopefully positive reports that the incoming Biden administration plans to restore funding to UNRWA and thus reverse the Trump policy on this on this front. In this case of course we might question why any of the events of the last few years under the Trump administration matter. Well, unfortunately I would argue that it would be foolish of us to treat these attacks on UNRWA and by extension these attacks on Palestinian refugee rights as something that started with Trump. So although UNRWA has had a relatively low profile over the decades, this line of attack has actually been around and has been active albeit at a lower level for quite a while. It's not something that started with the Trump administration and unfortunately it will not end with the Trump administration. It is even worse after years of the world's most powerful government using its very prolific voice to promote this view this damage to UNRWA and Palestinian refugee rights, it will be that much harder to undo it. So to put it another way, even if Biden does act to restore US funding to UNRWA. It will not necessarily reverse the critical threat or remove the critical threat that we are now seeing being posed to Palestinian refugee rights. And it's with all of this in mind that I want to spend the rest of my presentation today examining the relationship or the dynamics between this setup of the Palestinian refugee population, Palestinian rights and the UNRWA regime. Specifically what I'd like us to think about is how these attacks on UNRWA's work and UNRWA's role might look if we examine the agency through the lens of Palestinian refugee experiences since the Nakba. Or to put it another way, what is really the truth about the intersection between UNRWA and Palestinian rights, what does UNRWA's role actually mean for these rights including primarily the right of return. Now, according to critics like Trump, of course, they argue that UNRWA's work perpetuates what they refer to as the false idea that there continues to be a Palestinian refugee population. They claim that in propping this up UNRWA is supporting the idea of the right of return and perpetuating all of the problems which they say comes with that. In fact, you will be surprised to hear that if we take a historical perspective on this question, the exact opposite is true. So not only is it not the case that UNRWA was created to perpetuate ideas of the right of return, but in fact contrary to the claims of those in the Trump administration and those who speak from an anti-Palestinian perspective, UNRWA was not established to preserve the Palestinian refugee issue quite the opposite. UNRWA was established in 1949 with the aim of permanently resettling refugees from Palestine. This meant either resettling the Jewish refugees who I mentioned earlier within the new state of Israel, or more significantly for our purposes today, it meant permanently resettling Palestinian refugees in the Arab host states, so Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. And of course this is a polar odds with the with the Palestinian rights of return. Now specifically UNRWA sought to facilitate this permanent resettlement of the refugees in the Arab host states by way of a jobs program across the region. And in fact we can glean a lot here from the simple fact of UNRWA's name. As I mentioned at the outset, this is the UN Relief and Works Agency, and it was set up with largely two strands to its operations. So the first strand in fairly straightforward welfare and aid terms was to provide emergency relief for hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees, primarily in the form of things like food aid, as you can see in the picture in the first picture here of a food distribution center in Gaza in the early 1950s. But the other early strand of UNRWA's work was the works of its title. This referred to its plan to encourage the Palestinian refugees full and total integration into labor markets in the Arab host states as a way of essentially facilitating their permanent resettlement outside of Palestine. Now this is actually quite unsurprising when we consider the fact that UNRWA was created at the behest of the US and the UK, who went on to provide the bulk of UNRWA's funding, at least until 2018. Both states were and are, of course, strong allies of the state of Israel and both illicitly behind the scenes supported the opposition to the Palestinian right of return despite UN recognition of this in Resolution 194. And what's more, both the US and the UK saw UNRWA's work as a key element of the trajectory that they wanted to promote in Palestine, Israel, the Levant and the Middle East more broadly. In fact, the US and the UK had such strong support for UNRWA in this early period that the UK even acted as UNRWA's chief fundraiser. So in the early 1950s, UNRWA wrote through the UK Foreign Office wrote to a series of other governments around the world appealing to them to contribute as much as they possibly could in funding to the agency. So we've included here just one example of an archival document from the British National Archives as evidence of this. This was the first page of a brief that the UK Foreign Office sent to the Sri Lankan government in 1950. We've included the first page page here in terms of because of space but actually elsewhere in the document later on, the UK explicitly frames its calls for funding UNRWA in very directly political terms. So UNRWA talks about sorry the UK Foreign Office talks about how they need to support UNRWA as a way of promoting political stability and promoting democratic interests in the Middle East. They also talk about UNRWA as a way of preventing the rise of communism in the Arab world. So in other words, UNRWA was set up with a political purpose that that purpose was the exact opposite of what Trump and his allies are alleging. In fact, as the US and the UK saw it at the time, UNRWA was there to help dissolve the Palestinian refugees so-called question by resettling Palestinians permanently with jobs in the host state labor markets. Of course, we all know that this didn't work. In fact, UNRWA's jobs program was more or less a disaster by the end of the 1950s. It had been pretty much quietly dispensed with and was replaced with a new priority on education, although the works remains in UNRWA's title to this day. Importantly, the fact that UNRWA's jobs program was ultimately unsuccessful was due in part to the refusal of Palestinians themselves to cooperate with it. So the Palestinians recognized very early on that the aim of this project was to facilitate their permanent resettlement away from their homes to undermine their return and as such, very large numbers of Palestinians simply refused to cooperate with the program. Instead, they demanded that UNRWA prioritize the protection and pursuit of their rights and crucially this included their political rights and not simply the socioeconomic rights. In fact, a really long running theme in the relationship between Palestinian refugee communities and UNRWA is this pressure from Palestinian refugee groups but UNRWA to speak explicitly in terms of rights rather than charity. And this is how they have regularly framed UNRWA's work. And again, I want to just share a few examples from the archives to give a sense of this. I don't have the picture here because this is from a closed archive but just a quotation. This was taken from a letter from the chair of the Damascus branch of the general union of Palestine students. Writing in 1961 to the UNRWA director in Syria and in it the chair says very explicitly it is the duty of UNRWA to alleviate the pains of the Palestine refugees. The responsible persons in UNRWA are called not to forget that the people of Palestine have been wronged and oppressed. It is the duty of humanity which caused this oppression to secure for this people, i Palestine refugees, the means of tranquility and ease. A couple of things to observe here. Firstly, UNRWA's work is being framed by the author very explicitly as duty and not charity. But secondly, the author is also tying this and this complements what the previous speakers have said, the author is tying this explicitly to the fact that UNRWA is in some ways, you know, a product or an embodiment of the so-called international community. So he says it is the duty of humanity which caused this oppression. In other words, the so-called international community dominated by certain Western powers in the global north, bare responsibility for the dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian people. And as such, you have responsibilities to these people in terms of their rights. Well, while this is obviously only one letter, I should emphasize that these kind of themes really come up continuously in refugee communications with UNRWA. So just to give a couple more examples, the previous year in 1960, a group calling itself the badge of the Arab Palestine youth, which was based in Lebanon, issued a statement to UNRWA in which they said the services of our agency are our rights and not favours or charities. So we get much more explicit than that. And then nearly two decades later, a muhtar from a camp in the West Bank, so we're seeing here a spread across space as well as time, wrote a letter to the UNRWA Commissioner General, in which he wrote again pretty explicitly, we are your responsibility and you should provide us with relief care and services. Now, to bring all this back to the present day, one reason I'm flagging this up is because I want to emphasise that the regular scenes of protest we see from Palestinian refugee camps today outside in our offices, the refugee calls for a reform and democratisation. While they are often in response to specific acts or specific policies, they are not themselves completely new or completely coming out of nowhere. Scenes like this are really more the latest in a long thread of Palestinian agitation against UNRWA, in which, unlike the Trump administration, they do not want UNRWA to be dissolved but instead they want UNRWA to be reframed around rights and not simply aid. This really gets to the heart of the tensions that are inherent in UNRWA's mandate and in its work. We often hear talk of the sort of paradox of UNRWA's work in terms of temporality, so people talk about the fact that UNRWA is supposedly a relief agency operating in a setting of protracted long term displacement, or even more often people talk about the fact that UNRWA is a temporary agency that's been operating for 70 years now. I would argue there are actually other tensions that are even more fundamental and most primarily I would highlight the fact that UNRWA, the international agency that has primary responsibility for Palestinian refugees well being, has no mandate to protect their most fundamental right. And here I'm referring to what Hannah Arendt famously called the right to have rights as citizens of their own state. Now I want to wrap up here by briefly returning to the events of 2018 and the existential threat that was posed to UNRWA and by extension Palestinian refugee rights then. In response to Trump's defunding of UNRWA at the beginning of that year, UNRWA launched an urgent emergency fundraising campaign using the hashtag and the motto of dignity is priceless as you can see here. And in UNRWA's marketing campaigns this call for dignity was primarily framed in terms of immediate socio-economic needs, the fact that it needed funding for Palestinian refugees to be able to have urgently needed healthcare or food or schooling, all of which is of course very important. But for many, if not most, if not all Palestinian refugees, dignity means not only socio-economic support of this kind, but it also means the recognition and the realization of their political rights, including of course the right of return. And I would like to close by highlighting the fact that it is the international community's abject failure on this front and not the work or role of UNRWA that means the Palestinian refugee so-called question remains unresolved today. Thank you. Thank you very much, and for this excellent presentation. We have now about 10 minutes for Q&A. We haven't received many questions. But some of those we received, Baha Ibn Dar asks, do you think the colonial project would have been still established even without the British mandate taking over Palestine? And the second question by Baha as well, how do we articulate the question of Palestine beyond the discourse of nation states? Do you think this is possible in a global power structure that is rooted in nation states? Osama, would you like to start with maybe the first question? No, the mandate, I mean, yes, I'll try to answer the question. The question was, remind me of the question about the mandate, whether the British were essential. The question is, do you think the colonial project would have been possible without the British mandate? No, it would not have been possible. Of course, not in the form that it took, but I mean, the British were absolutely essential, British colonialism, British racism, British anti-Semitism. All these ideas were all sort of absolutely profoundly tied up and bound up in the mandate, and no, it would not have been possible. Thank you very much, Abid, and you would like to add to that? Yeah, sure. I think it's actually a really good question because it invites us to think about our priorities when we're talking about the Palestinian refugees today actually. Because once we understand that this is a global colonial project that was sponsored by large states. The realities of the Palestinian people often try to turn this into, this is a fight between Arabs and Jews. This is a fight between Palestinians and Israelis. An actual fact, this has always been about the colonial powers forcing their will against the Palestinian people. And I would invite the person who asked the question to go back into the original Zionist writings. Where they were very clear, especially in Theodor Herzl's Jewish state, that you cannot have a colonization program without complete support on the part of the major colonial powers. It's not possible. So as you know from the biography of Herzl, he spent most of his later career trying to convince governments to come and sponsor this project. Now, once you had the sponsorship established, then it became possible. I should note though, and I'm sure Asama would agree and Anne would agree that we cannot also absolve the responsibility, absolve other powers from the responsibility for took place. France was helpfully involved all the European countries that were at the League of Nations, and all the countries that were settler colonial European entities that were represented in the League of Nations were complicit. And they were pushing for this project to take this form. And the idea of the League of Nations also facilitated this project by this of course was was an illegitimate institution representing the colonial powers of the world. But it was masquerading as international law was masquerading as the will of the people of the world, it only represented the will of the colonial powers. And our own people were talking about it all the time back then. They were saying, you know, this is a global assault on us. We understood it as such. Thank you very much, Abed and Asama. Anne, would you like to address these questions? Otherwise, I have a question for you on Onorua, which is, you said you would be interested to talk a little bit about the question of the mandate of Onorua and whether it's narrow. And maybe also the question how Onorua defines refugee. Sure. Okay, so, Onorua's mandate is narrow in a few ways. Obviously, I already indicated in my talk that it is geographically restricted, which means that Palestinian refugees who live outside of those five fields where Onorua is mandated to operate are excluded from its services and from its recognition. This has particularly been a problem for Palestinian refugees in Egypt, historically, but that's obviously not the only community who is affected by this. It is also limited in terms of, as Nimor just indicated, its formal definition of a Palestinian refugee. So this is defined as someone who was living in Palestine continuously from 1946 to 1948, and who as a result of events in 1948, lost both their home and their livelihood. This was actually deliberately introduced when Onorua arrived on the scene as a way of trying to narrow the numbers of recognized Palestinian refugees under the UN system. There was an earlier agency that had operated, had used wider sets of criteria, but this obviously excludes all kinds of groups for example, anyone who was Palestinian but maybe was not there continuously in those two in those that two year period because perhaps they'd gone abroad for work or for study for some of that time. There were also of course Palestinians who were abroad when the NACPA happened and then suddenly found themselves completely dispossessed and stuck. So these groups are excluded and then of course also any Palestinians who were displaced subsequently and became refugees subsequently are not formally recognized, although there is a separate category for those who were displaced in 1967. The final thing I would flag about Onorua's mandate and probably the most important thing is that as I said in my talk it does not have any mandate for protection so it doesn't have any mandate to protect Palestinian refugee rights or to pursue what is known in international parlance as durable solutions to their plight. The reason this is so significant is because it places in odds with UNHCR, UNHCR is the UN agency responsible for all other refugees worldwide, and UNHCR does have those mandates. So this means Palestinian refugees are at a unique disadvantage in the UN system, there is no UN body for them that has a mandate to pursue their protection and durable solutions to their plight. Thank you very much. Actually we had a flood of questions now. We will not be able to address these given that we have only a few minutes. One of these questions is by Rivka Bernard. Thanks for the great presentations. My question comes from the context of advocacy for Palestinian rights. In recent years we have been we have seen advocacy efforts in the UK demanding or requesting from the UK government a fulfillment of the UK's colonial mandatory commitment to the well-being of the non-Jewish people in Palestine. Can the speakers comment on this strategy? Do they feel it is problematic to position demands from that angle given how it is embedded in the colonial perspective or is it tactically useful? Would anyone like to address this question please? Sure. So I don't think it's actually useful to engage in that kind of logic. It's important to note and to emphasize that Britain had created a situation whereby it committed to the so-called well-being or actually to be more precise in the language of the declaration. It committed that the civic and religious rights, but of course not the political rights of what they refer to as the non-Jewish populations, which is of course the indigenous Palestinian population on the land. So they committed to the protection of these rights as correct. But the point that we need to emphasize is that this was political from the very beginning. Any attempt to depoliticize what took place, any attempt to mask the coloniality of the project is problematic. There was no good faith on the part of Britain from the beginning. And there was no intention to actually establish Palestinian sovereignty over the land of Palestine. And this was actually a battle over popular sovereignty. They were saying we don't want democratic governance in this space because democratic governance means that we cannot impose a certain colonial community here. So the intention to protect Palestinian communities was non-existent actually. What you had was a series of British arguments through which they convinced themselves and justified to themselves what they were doing. You know, so this whole notion of yeah we're trying to balance Arab rights, Jewish rights was never real. In the same way that the US when it spoke about being and when it continues to, you know, sometimes US liberals continue to talk about having responsibilities to both sides or wanting to cater to both sides. That logic does not work. The only logic that will work is the logic of anti-colonialism. In South Africa, you couldn't have had the logic of wanting to satisfy both sides. It doesn't work that way. You had apartheid, apartheid needed to be dismantled. And people could have appealed to this notion of well the British had colonial responsibility in South Africa to protect the black population. But that wouldn't make sense. Okay, even if it was enshrined into the Balfour Declaration as a clause, you know what you need to do is expose the politics, the colonial politics behind all of these projects. So yeah, we have to liberate our minds from the colonial frameworks and from the notion of appealing to colonial authorities. Can I just jump in on this? Just jump in on this point. I would agree with Abid, most of what Abid said, the only points I would make that are slightly different. I mean, the question raises this really interesting point about we don't control the structures of international law, we don't control the structures of politics, that's quite clear. And the question I think is asking to what extent do we have to work within certain structures. Again, that we have no control over if it affords an opportunity to highlight the history of oppression, the dispossession of the Palestinians, even if we know that these structures are not going to end of themselves, we're talking about the mandate which is over now, whether these structures will actually help liberate the Palestinians. The point is I think to pursue a multi-pronged approach. I agree with Abid, there has to be an anti-colonial approach, first and foremost, but of course there has to be a multi-pronged approach, different contexts demand different strategies, I think, and tactics, that emphasise ultimately where we're going, which is liberation, at least one hopes for, liberation, justice, secular equality, and so on and so forth. And to go back to the earlier question about the British mandate, I was thinking I think it's important for everyone to understand that so long as the Ottoman Empire was in place, the Zionist project would, I don't think would ever have occurred or unfolded in the way that it required Western colonial support and specifically British colonial support. I think that's just incontestable. And of course there's a whole history about this and we can go back to the Ottomans, but that's really it. Thank you. Just to clarify quickly, I do agree with Professor Maktisi's statement that there should be multiple methods of engagement, levels of engagement, but that doesn't mean different strategies. The strategy has to be one unified anti-colonial strategy and then you can utilise different tactics. But when we're contesting logics and frameworks, we have to insist on the anti-colonial needs of our people. So just as a little, you know, follow up. And one final question for this panel is for you. What do you think about the inclusion of Palestinian refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention given their marginalised status under the UNRWA? Okay, thank you for the question. A bit of clarity. Palestinian refugees remained excluded from the 1951 Convention. Article 1D of the Convention, if you wish to look it up, stated that the Convention's provisions would not be applied to any refugees currently receiving services from another branch of the UN, which applied at the time to the Palestinians under the UNRWA. So the Palestinians are the only group in the world who remained excluded from the Refugee Convention, later the protocol of 1967 and to this day UNHCR. Thank you very much, Anne. Thank you, Samah. And thank you, Abid, for this excellent panel. Unfortunately, we have many questions but we will not be able to answer them given the fact that we need to break up this session in order to prepare for the next session. So I hope to see you all in 10 minutes in the next session. I would like to thank Aki al-Burzi from the Center for the Palestine Studies and the Middle East Institute at Sawas and the University of Houston staff, in particular, Fadiq al-Faiti, as well as our colleagues in the Institute of Law, at the University for all their help with organising this conference and this session as well. Thank you very much and I will see you in the next session.