 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to this really important talk, 75 years after the Nakba, but 75 years of continuous Nakba. I'm Dina Matar. I'm the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies. I won't talk about myself that much because I have more exciting speaker and also respondents. So we have Francesca Albanese, who was appointed the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 by the Human Rights Council at its 49th session in March 2022, and has taken up her function as of 1st of May, 2022. She is a lawyer by training specialized in human rights. Albanese is an affiliate scholar at the Institute of the Study of International Migration at Roachtown University, as well as senior advisor on migration and forced displacement for a think tank, which is called Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. She has widely published on the legal situation in Israel and the state of Palestine her book, Palestinian Refugees in International Law, co-authored with Lex Takenberg, is considered a milestone in refugee academic literature. She regularly teaches and lectures on the international law and forced displacement at universities in Europe and the Arab region. Ms. Albanese has also worked as human rights expert for the United Nations, including the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Francesca holds a low degree with honors from the University of PISA and then LLM in human rights from SOAS. So welcome back. She is currently completing her PhD in International Refugee Law at Amsterdam University Law Faculty. Our first respondent will be Professor Lynn Welchman, who is professor in the School of Law, where she convenes and teaches the International Human Rights Clinic and Gender Law and Society in the Middle East and North Africa, and has published widely. Her undergraduate degree was in Arabic and Persian at Cambridge University and her PhD from the School of Law at SOAS on Palestinian Family Law in the West Bank Sharia Courts. She went to Palestine in 1982 after a failed undergraduate attempt to twin Cambridge University with Beerset. She went on to work in human rights, notably with Al Haq, who she started working with in Ramallah in 1983, but also with other Palestinian NGOs. She has also worked with international human rights groups, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa region, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen, on fact-finding research and trial observation. She is a board member of the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the support of human rights defenders, and till recently the Open Society Foundation's MENA Office Advisory Board. In 2021, she was appointed to the UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic and her book Al Haq, A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, published by University of California Press in 2021, was a winner at the 2022 Memo Palestine Book Awards in London. Congrats. And our second respondent, Dr. Nimmer Sultani, is a reader in public law at SOAS. He holds a doctorate of a judicial science degree from Harvard Law School. He serves as the editor-in-chief of the Palestine Yearbook and International Law. Prior to joining SOAS, he practiced human rights law in Palestine and was the director of the Political Monitoring Project at Madel-Kermal, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research. He published extensively on constitutional theory, comparative constitutionalism, and Israel jurisprudence. His book Law and Revolution, Legitimacy and Constitutionalism after the Arab Spring, won the 2018 Book Prize awarded by the International Society of Public Law and the 2018 Peter Berg Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship awarded by the Society of Legal Scholars. So we have people who are very well-versed in the study of international law and the practice of international law, which is really very relevant to Palestine. Before we give a round of applause, may I remind you of a few things here in terms of how we're going to proceed tonight? Francesca will be speaking for about 30 to 40 minutes, and the respondents will be about five to 10 minutes each, and then we'll have question and answers. We would like to keep order and allow people to speak as they wish, but we will not really be very tolerant of anyone who attacks people personally. So without further ado, may I welcome Francesca and welcome all of you. Thank you for coming to commemorate this really important occasion, which is also at a very, very difficult and violent time against Palestinians. So welcome, everyone, and Francesca. Good evening, everyone, colleagues, friends, and distinguished guests. I'm deeply grateful to the University of SOAS and its Center for Palestine Studies for organizing this event and for inviting me. I'm grateful to my fellow panelists who agreed to share their insights tonight, Professor Welshman and Professor Soltani. And last but not least, Professor Haim Bresid, the prime matchmaker of this encounter. It is with great honor and the humbleness that I stand before you today at SOAS, a school that has profoundly shaped my academic and professional journey. It's here that I learned that the case of Palestine can and must be defended on and through legal grounds an approach that has become central to my work, including as a special rapporteur. And it's here that I learned to approach international law critically. And I'm glad to have Professor Katrina Drew here, as she was an enormous source of inspiration for me. Because she taught me to be always conscious of the original sin, it's not her word, it's mine, of international law, having it being used also as an instrument of surjugation and dispossession throughout history. And it has been epitomized by colonialism. And yet, with the colonization, the advancement of the human rights movement and the international codification of human rights law, we, the people, have gained a reign and transformed it into an instrument of justice, or at least it has showed its full potential. I'm very grateful to SOAS for instilling in my legal brain the conceptual and methodological equipment necessary to undertake the critical work that I'm doing, for example, today as a special rapporteur. And I'm honored to continue to carry SOAS legacy forward. We are gathered here today on the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, a tragically defining moment for the Palestinian people. And they're still ongoing dispossession. This year will stand in significance as for the first time, the United Nations has called for the commemoration of the Nakba, underscoring the importance of both the present and the past in order to move forward. Cognizant of the limited scope of my mandate, which is focused not on the entire situation that befell Palestine and its people over 100 years ago, and particularly as of the past 75 years. In the shadow of the never-heeled injustice that characterized that time, I think that it remains powerful and not a merely symbolic duty for me to be here on this particular day in the United Kingdom, a country which bears many responsibilities, along with other Western states for the Palestinian catastrophe. The United Kingdom, including some of its academic institutions, have a foundational responsibility in the dispossession of the Palestinians. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 issued by Lord Balfour as chancellor, a prestigious academic appointment, has planted the seeds of the Nakba as it paved the way for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, while denying the Palestinian people the opportunity to enjoy self-determination. In fact, the Balfour Declaration talks about Palestinian civil and religious rights deliberately omitting self-determination, even in the form of recognition of political rights. Lord Balfour acted as a dispossessor of the Palestinian people in his two-fold role as a statesman and as an academic representative, and his responsibility should be acknowledged, not only in the realm of international relations, but also in universities, a center of knowledge. As a result of the Declaration of Britain, not only advance its imperial interests in the region, but also facilitate the already ongoing migration of Jewish Europeans from Europe toward Palestine and their settlement into economically thriving colonies that trumped Palestinian economic development, and in fact, political Zionism or the Zionist movement that emerged from it, even dedicated a colony to Lord Balfour named Balfouria, when he visited Palestine for the first time in 1925, and inaugurated the Hebrew University wearing his University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh robes. We should remind ourselves that while many in the international community today struggle to accept the term apartheid to Israel, in the early 19th century, political Zionism precisely envisaged Palestine as the land to realize a Jewish state through colonization and denying the Palestinians right to self-determination. The term colonization was widely and confidently used among the founding fathers of modern-day Israel and not coincidentally, because colonialism was the normative mantra of European nations and leaders. The birth society of Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weisman, and Sef Jabotinsky, the patrons of the ideology that led to the creation of the state of Israel. And it was Jabotinsky who in 1923, relative to the Zionist project in Palestine, underscored that colonization cannot be carried on with the consent of the native population. The British mandate was strategic to the realization of this plan over 20 years, Britain dismantled local political apparatuses in Palestine and replaced them with new ones functional to its imperial administration. This development were underpinned by arbitrary arrest and detention, punitive home demolitions, and violent attacks as epitomized by the severe repression of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt. During its administration of mandatory Palestine, Britain not only favored the entrenchment of European Jews led colonization, but significantly crushed the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, predominantly New Zealand and Christian economically, politically, and militarily. This legacy continues to permeate the lives of Palestinians today through the military rule imposed by Israel on the people that it has occupied in what remains of historical Palestine, the West Bank, including its Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. So for 56 years, strikingly, Israel incorporated the British emergency regulations which can only be temporary and exceptional under international law into its permanent primary legislation made up of a maze of 2,500 military orders. This integration of colonial regulation into the legal framework of the administration of the occupied territory solidified Israel's control and adherence to its colonial modus operandi. These violations are at the roots of the present day situation in what remains of historical Palestine. In light of this, the United Kingdom's current role and responsibility, or irresponsibility, vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine and the disparaging state of affairs there, is goes for concern. A present that is intimately interconnected but also separated from the past. In fact, the present stance of the United Kingdom and international community regarding Israel-Palestine continues to violate Palestinian rights and international obligations. The occupied Palestinian territory today is a microcosm of human rights abuses where the prevailing climate is of generalised widespread and systemic violence. This is not violence that flares up in cycles, replaced by calm after such flares up subside. Rather, violence is a daily structural component of Palestinian life. It is embedded in the very nature of Israel's half a century old military occupation of the land that constituted the territorial unit for the Palestinians to exercise self-determination in the form of independent statehood. What's the origin of this structural violence? It traces back to the very nature of the regime that Israel established through the application of martial law and discriminatory measures against the Palestinian in order, and this is the crux of the meta, in order to protect and expand Jewish-only settlements that Israel has built in the occupied territory in blunt violation of international law. The colonies, as it's more appropriate to call them, constitute a war crime in and of itself. In order to sustain this colonial enterprise, Israel has secured a system of harsh control and surveillance made of physical, bureaucratic, and digital architectures that have transformed the occupied Palestinian territory into a high security panopticon, and this is what I have dedicated my second upcoming report to. Israel has perpetuated an anachronistic form of acquisition of territory by force that is now solidifying through 21st century mechanisms and technologies. But in fact, the occupation of the West Bank is Jerusalem and Gaza is underpinned by the intentional negation of the right of self-determination which the Palestinians are entitled to and which Israel violates in at least four ways. First, territorial sovereignty, which is an essential element for the exercise of the right of self-determination, which Israel violates by seizing, unnexing, and fragmenting the occupied Palestinian territory in banter stands of shuttered landscapes and lives and transferring its own civilian population into it. Second, sovereignty over natural resources, which are necessary to develop an independent Palestinian economy which Israel violates by extracting and exploiting Palestinian resources in order to generate profits benefiting third parties, including the settlers. Third, cultural existence of and as a people which Israel violates by appropriating, erasing, and suppressing symbols of Palestinian identity that range from banning the Palestinian flag or prohibiting a Palestinian school curriculum and by imposing a sanitized curriculum which eliminates Palestinian history and by apprehending, seizing, and converting Palestinian sites in Israeli cultural venues. Fourth, the formation and expression of the Palestinian polity, the beating heart of self-determination which Israel violates by interfering with the formation of political will and repressing political activity as epitomized by the draconian persecution of reputable Palestinian human rights organizations like Al-Hak. This has been accompanied by the logic of displace the Palestinian indigenous population under occupation to replace them with others, often foreign citizens. As epitomized by the 270 colonies created since 1967 and settlers who have grown from zero in 1967 to 750,000 and they are wrapped in bubbles of Israel's extraterritoriality. This is the hallmark of settler colonialism, of which the prolonged illegal occupation is the vehicle and apartheid is just an unavoidable consequence. The maintenance of these colonies has been the matrix of Israel's settler colonial project. For the Palestinians, this has meant physical confinement, land confiscation, forced evictions, home demolitions, discriminatory law enforcement, unabated violence in the possibility to protect themselves. In face of this, where do the Palestinian authorities stand? The Palestinian authorities, meaning the Palestinian authority in the West Bank and the de facto authorities in Gaza, have been unable or unwilling to oppose this system. Their own practices have in fact contributed to tightening the grip on Palestinians' fundamental rights and freedoms. While at times, this results in violation against the Palestinian people they themselves commit, including of academic freedom, freedom of association and expression, it must be underscored that the Palestinian authorities operate in captivity within the crevices of the Israeli occupation and with the significant limitation of authority it imposes. In light of this ever-deteriorating reality, the international communities insist on three almost exclusively dominant approaches. First, the political approach that frames the occupation as a conflict between opposing parties that can be resolved through negotiation. Second, the humanitarian approach, whereby the grave economic and humanitarian conditions generated by the occupation are addressed as a chronic humanitarian issue that needs to be managed rather than a political issue to be solved according to international law. So eventually, this humanitarian approach has a cosmetic effect, aiming to improve certain aspects of life under occupation without resolving the root causes. And lastly, the economic development approach that hinges on developing the Palestinian territory and artificially sustaining its economy without providing a political solution that again addresses the root causes, including the numerous violations of Palestinians' rights and freedoms. These siloed approaches have, without exceptions and unsurprisingly, failed. I say unsurprisingly because instead of challenging, again, the fact that the Israeli occupation operates outside what is permitted by international law, they have normalized it, conflating root causes and symptoms and focused on Israeli lack of compliance with international law as a siloed phenomenon. This is a violation of HL, this is a violation of human rights law, et cetera. In light of this, I've proposed a three-pronged paradigm shift premised on the application of international law and respect for history. The achievement of the right of self-determination, though, which is a peremptory norm of international law that cannot be violated, that cannot be derogated, must be a cardinal pillar of it. Firstly, a bird-eye holistic analysis should prevail, one that accounts for intentions behind the long-standing structural component of the prolonged disenfranchisement of the Palestinian under occupation, instead of a decontextualized and microscopic analysis of single violations here and there. Through these analytical lenses, it is evident that the way Palestine is framed, understood, and addressed, my must also change. This is not, as is too far, sorry, too often presented, an intractable conflict between two parties born of a reconcilable rivalry and an incompatible sense of identity. This is the result of a reality shaped by profound and protracted injustice where two peoples are trapped in a guardian knot, but one is the occupier and the other is the occupied, one is the colonizer and the other is the colonized. The narrative plays to the public, my must also mirror this sentiment and we are remiss to continue the conversation with an incorrect story. One phenomenon, however, stands in the way to change all of this. This is the censorship and also self-censorship that catches any attempt to denounce or to bring scrutiny over Israeli crimes and its settler colonial underpinnings or the apartheid regime that it has established by default. Even universities that should remain the agorah of education and for the exercise, the development and exercise of free thoughts are becoming more and more centers of obscurantism, a trend that has been registered not only in the UK but also elsewhere. This is connected to another layer of violence that I call epistemic violence and can be exerted through knowledge production and sharing. As Enrique Galbanal Varitz remind us, it is not only through the construction of exploitative economic links or the control of the political military apparatuses that domination is accomplished, but also, and most importantly, through the construction of epistemic frameworks that legitimize and then train those practices of domination. This is the flip side of the coin of anti-Palestinian racism, which rears its head as the one of the evils that Palestinians have to face. It is a form of racism geared towards silencing, excluding erasing, stereotyping, defaming and dehumanizing Palestinians and or their narratives. A blatant manifestation of this form of racism or discrimination is particularly significant today, is the denial of the Nakba, which in certain Western countries very close to here translates into the ban and violent repression of legitimate freedoms of expression and assembly. Secondly, it is necessary to establish the primacy of international rule of law, central to resolve the enduring reality in the occupied Palestinian territory, upon which the maintenance of international order is premised. The exceptionalist that has been demonstrated toward Israel not only undermines the effectiveness of international law, but also tarnishes the image, trustworthiness and role of the international community and the United Nations. In such a context, bilateral peace negotiation between two inequitable protagonists are doomed to fail, as they always did in the capacity to remedy or even acknowledge the subordinate status of the Palestinian people with the predictable consequence that they provide political cover for Israel to consolidate the occupation and what it carries. As a matter of law and the law governing state responsibility, the end of Israel's illegal occupation of the Palestinian territory cannot be made contingent upon negotiations. Instead, this dismantlement of the occupation of the Palestinian territory and the realization of the right of self-determination must be a sine qua non condition for a meaningful political conversation. This implies guarantees of non-repetitions and reparations, return of all land and resources from which the Palestinian people have been displaced and dispossessed since 1967. And I know that Palestinians, of course, advocate for more and different forms of reparations. In conjunction, a thorough, transparent and effective investigation into crimes as well as other violations of international law committed by all actors in the occupied Palestinian territory is necessary. While expecting an ICC investigation is only natural, this might go beyond the ICC role and extend to states universal jurisdiction and to a probe into the complicity of businesses and private actors in committing such violations. These recommendations, of course, are nothing new and they are very simple as they hinge on a universal approach that deploys international law as the regulatory and remedial compass to reorient politics and not as one amongst the many options in the conflict resolution toolbox. Meaningful progress in the Israel-Palestine situation must start with a new grammar that grasps the ongoing reality of domination, dispossession, and segregation, resulting from decades of undone colonial legacy and the current responsibilities toward the situation in Israel and Palestine as well as the inertia that the international community has demonstrated. The new discourse arising thereof should be anchored in equal application of international law for all, discarding the double standards that continue to shield Israel from accountability and breeding punitive. The materialization of this new approach starts with each of you here, with the education you seek out today and that I hope you continue to long for once you leave this auditorium, especially the very young among you take time as you walk out into the world to reflect and use this information to research more, to learn more, and on the basis of what you have learned, act righteously and courageously in the interest of the people without rights. In this case, as Professor Alon Confino, an Israeli historian of genocide and Holocaust studies says, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the people without rights are the Palestinians. I'm concerned for them, but I'm also concerned for the Israelis who are now in what Daniel Levy acutely referred to as the boomerang effect of colonization, epitomized by the extremism of the settler movement, then is now a leading force of the current Israel government. And I thank you. Are you leaving your laptop for us? Sorry, you can leave it. I'm not gonna open it. I promise, I promise I won't. Although it's rather nice. Good evening, everybody, and thank you very much indeed, Francesca, and it is nice to see you again. Like everybody else, I will say welcome back to SOAS, and congratulations on your appointment. And well done, really, for all the work you've done so far and that we eagerly anticipate for your next report and the others. Thanks to the SOAS Center for Palestine Studies for inviting me. It's one of those days and they are increasingly frequent, where it's really embarrassing to be British. So when I go to Palestine even when I started going to Palestine in 1982, and people would say to me in Arabic, I'm in way an inti, I would say, British, but I'm getting better, you know so. Because there is a feeling and it's extremely well established and of course justified about the British responsibility and what has happened to the Palestinian people since the last century, since the Nekbah, since Balfour. So my focus in going to Palestine was human rights and I'm going to talk about that a little bit in my five to seven minutes. Today, like many people around the world, I have received emails from Palestinian and human rights organizations that are well established, some that are less established, that are still being innovative in the tools they try to use to build resistance and maintain resistance. From inside Israel, from Gaza, from the West Bank, emails about the historical Nekbah and about the ongoing Nekbah. And there is a feeling across the Palestinian people, of course, also outside in the diaspora about what the Nekbah did and what the Nekbah is doing. I would say a couple of things Palestinian human rights groups have themselves significantly contributed to the idea and the development of norms and aspirations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law and to the processes. And I think not because they think human rights and international law is gonna, you know, it's gonna bring the results that we all want to see and that they actually in and of themselves will correct what Francesca has called in her last report, for example, the profound illegality of Israel's occupation. But I think they do this, from knowing many of them for many years, as collective acts of defiance. We will use this system. The system says it's there to protect us. It's there to protect our land, our children, our self-determination, our right to be a people, our right to rule ourselves. And we will make those claims. And I think that there are small daily acts of courage and larger ones of collective resistance which need to be recognized and valued for what they are. So there's not just acts of defiance to the immediate violence of Israel, but to the studied and steadfast inattention and inaction of powerful states, such as the UK, in the face of such threats to the very system on which they themselves base their legitimacy. And that's the key point, isn't it? We all know that Britain is very, very big, especially these days, on annexation, on the law of occupation, on legitimate means of warfare against civilian populations. But it has still not moved with regard to what Israel has been doing and is doing as we speak. So I think they're supposed to be a ceasefire at the moment, Twin Gaza. I'm not sure what happened since I left the office. So last thing to say really is that human rights groups in Palestine were always ahead of their time from establishing a human rights group in 1979, which was al-Haq, which was quite weird at the time. I mean, you're under occupation, why would you establish a human rights organization that's trying to call on the occupying power to obey its own laws? But it was, and it's gone on from there. The thing about al-Haq and other groups is that rather than being civil political, unlike nearly all international human rights groups, they started structurally. They could see what Francesca said about the fact that Israel's agenda has always been annexationist and predatory. It was there to take the land and the resources and preferably not to have Palestinians on it. And that very structural focus is then backed up by massive systems of arbitrary detention, torture, deportation, all of these also being illegal under humanitarian law, as well as the annexation itself. So you have, but this vision, understanding that that was the point, it wasn't ever going to be temporary, I think is something the Palestinian human rights movement voiced from the very beginning, and it took a while for them to get other people on board to recognize that that's what's going on. I mean, it's great, they did it, of course, and that is the structural focus of a settler colonial framework. It didn't stop it. But that's in a sense what I'm getting to. They were very good. They innovated all these things on retrieval systems, universal jurisdiction. In many of these things, the Palestinian human rights movement has been leaders in the field. They've not been taking the ideas from international organizations, and that's important to bear in mind. When we talk about human rights, we nearly always talk about the international groups, but the Palestinian groups, in particular, because of what they've been up against, have been really innovative and have set models, such as information retrieval, such as how to do documentation, such as often fact-finding, that have really been leaders in the field. So again, it may not, well, anyway. So this is all against the fact that the odds are truly against them. They're by no means naive. They are deeply aware of the odds stacked against them, the power that doesn't come with international law. It comes with those who are supposed to be the guarantors of it. As you will know, I think, five or six groups, including Al Haqq and Damir and DCI Palestine and Bishan were officially declared as terrorist organizations by Israel in 2019. That's because Israel recognizes the power, the soft power, if you like, or the threat of these organizations in putting the truth out there. So the antecedents, of course, the odds include the UK, the antecedents include the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British mandate that oversaw the transformation of the Palestinian way of life and Palestinians in their land. There is a historical responsibility for what Balfour and Al Haqq did to them, but Israel does this in the full view of everybody. The law doesn't restrain Israel. The law's guarantee, the law's guarantors collude and Palestinians and NGOs, still they claim to the apparent protections of the law. This is a remarkable act of resilience as well as resistance. The UK must know the impact that the UK's sustained failure to hold Israel to account is having and has had over years, decades, in the region and around the world. Doesn't go unnoticed and people say international law, people say, well, what international law? It hasn't come from nowhere. This has come because people see that Britain systematically does, and the others, systematically do not invoke the protections of international law to the defense of the Palestinians. And the Security Council, everything. So it goes on and on. So the last thing I would say, truly, about the remaining, if there's any remaining confidence in international law, it's protecting anyone who's not a friend of the powerful states. If Britain has a historical responsibility to the Palestinians, it might also start thinking about whether it can bring the system of international law of occupation back from the brink of obsolesion to where the refusal of the UK and others have pushed it. In the question of Palestine. I'm quite crossed about this, but... APPLAUSE Good evening. Thank you to Francesca for the presentation, as well as, if I may speak, on behalf of the Centre for Palestine Studies, for being strong in the face of smear campaigns. And you have our solidarity in the face of these campaigns. Hopefully, you stay strong despite all these attempts to discredit your work. I have no way to measure or compare between the different kind of rapporteurs who serve in this position. All of them have been subject to these kinds of smears. But you may be more visibly online, and therefore, you're attracting more kind of these kind of campaigns. But obviously, this is less about you or as much as about anyone who speaks on behalf of human rights and Palestinian basic rights as human beings who are entitled for equality and freedom like all other nations. So I thought I would contribute to the conversation today by saying a couple of things. One, about the question of history and politics, commemoration, and a political condemnation, mainly the question of Zionism, which was briefly touched upon in the beginning of the presentation by Francesca, and then say something about the agenda of enforcing international law when international law is itself complicit in the current situation. So today, as you may know, the United Nations for the first time is commemorating the Nakba for the first time. This is, of course, laudable, but when we commemorate the Nakba, we are also reaffirming our political opposition to Zionism, which is the cause of the Nakba and the reason for what transpired in the Nakba by committing an act of armed robbery of the Palestinian homeland. And now Zionism is trying to silence and erase history. There's a lot of revisionism and propaganda in recent years that seeks to portray Zionism as this kind of benign national liberation movement that was corrupted after 1967 rather than as a colonial movement from the get-go. But when Ben-Gurion gave a speech in New York City in 1915, he had no hesitation about describing his movement as engaged and a civilizing mission, like the English in North America or the Dutch migrants in South Africa, he said. The Zionist MP for labor for South Hackney, Herbert Morrison and the leader of the Labor Party in Britain, even went further than Ben-Gurion when he told the House of Commons on the 24th of November 1938 during the Arab Revolt, let the House be under no misapprehension. The Jews have proved to be first-class colonizers to have the real, good, old, empire-building kind of qualities to be really first-class colonial pioneers. So there is no denial of colonialism here. It's a first-class colonialism. And when Heim Weitzman was interviewed by UNESCO in 1947 before the partition plan decision, he portrayed the Jewish agency as a new version of the East India Charter Company. He too bragged that Zionism fairs better when compared to other colonizing activities of nations. This is what Zionism is. They knew that they are the aggressors and now they pretend otherwise. Consider, for example, what Ben-Gurion said in 1938. When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves, this is only half the truth. The fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically, we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. Literally, it is we who are on the defensive who have the upper hand, but in the political sphere, they, the Arabs, are superior, unquote. Although only 2.8% of the Israeli archives are open to researchers and to the public, today we know more about what transpired in the Nakba. For example, we have more documentation about the massacre in the village of El-Dewaimi where troops of the Eighth Brigade massacred about 120 people according to Israeli intelligence numbers. A soldier who witnessed the events described to Mappam officials what happened in 1948 at the time. Quote, there was no battle and no resistance. The first conquerors killed 80 to 100 Arab men, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks. There wasn't a house without people killed in it, unquote. Zionism is the ideology and the movement that required the depopulation of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. They knew that this is what is required and they did it anyway. Even those modern day Zionists like Benny Morris who helped document the expulsions, the massacres, the rapes, the poisoning of wells and the systematic and collective looting in 1948 justify the Zionist project that made these atrocities possible. This immoral position that acknowledges that Zionism and ethnic cleansing go hand in hand is also evident in a 2013 article that detailed the killings and the expulsion of the Lid population. The Israel journalist Ari Shavit who wrote the article concluded that the conquest of Lid and the expulsion of its population were no accident. Those events were the crucial face of the Zionist Revolution and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state. Lid is an integral and essential part of the story. And when I try to be honest about it, I see the choice as stark. Either reject Zionism because of Lid or accept Zionism along with Lid, unquote. Therefore, today we reaffirm the justness of the Palestinian cause and the reprehensible character of Zionism. The reason why Zionists have been trying to, for decades now, to make anti-Zionism synonymous with anti-Semitism is because they know that Zionism is indefensible. In his memoirs, the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldman, quotes Bingorian as follows. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but 2,000 years ago and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing. We have come here and stored in their country. Why should they accept that, unquote. Zionism is the enemy of peace and Zionism is racism. Now that mainstream human rights organizations like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and also UN Reporters and UN Human Rights Committee are adopting this discourse that Israel is practicing apartheid. It is insufficient for the UN to simply commemorate the Nakabay. It is time also to condemn Zionism politically in the same way they did in 1975. The second thing I wanted to say is that we should remember on this day that the UN and international law are complicit in the colonization of Palestine. It's not only the British. The main legal pillars of the question of Palestine till today are unjust to the Palestinians and are fundamentally objectionable. In the first instance, the Palestine mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration and denied the native population self-government. The UN General Assembly Resolution 181 codified settler colonialism against the wishes of the majority of the population and led to the ethnic cleansing of the natives. The partition resolution is defenseless not only because of the unjust and pro-Zionist territorial apportionment but also given the country's demographic transformation under foreign colonial rule, which is the British. Neither the 194 UNGA Resolution nor the UN Security Council Resolution 242 recognizes the Palestinians as stateless people with national rights but only as a humanitarian category of refugees. Moreover, 242 effectively codified previous Israeli acquisitions of territory by force. Today we will call them annexation when we talk about Ukraine and Russia. Annexations in violation of Resolution 181 and in violation of the Armistice Fire Agreements. And it also turned Palestine into a border dispute. As one Palestinian legal scholar argued decades ago, 242 was the formula designed to liquidate the Palestinian question and legitimate Israel's illicit territorial expansion. So these are the legally sanctioned root causes that the mainstream human rights discourse rarely confronts. In these major instances, the law is part of the problem because it sanctions Zionist colonization and tolerated even rewarded Zionist expansionism and aggression at crucial junctures. So an examination of these root causes that reduces the problem to simply lack of enforcement of 181 and 242 overlooks these kind of longstanding injustices and thus allows an artificial separation between the colonization in 1948 and the colonization in 1967. It also provides the basis for the two-state solution in which the Palestinians inside Israel are relegated to a second class citizenship. So without changing the structures of decision-making internationally, it is unlikely that accountability, let alone justice, will be realized. Thank you.