Pair call for ‘right of return’
By Kaplan Tuttlebaum
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Eitan Bronstein and Muhammad Jaradat, organizational leaders who support the Palestinian “right of return” to Israel, spoke at Reed College April 1 as part of a national tour to commemorate what they termed al-Nakbah (catastrophe), referring to the “Palestinian expulsion and dispossession” from Israel in 1948.
Bronstein, an Israeli Jew, is the founder and director of Zochrot, which seeks to educate Jewish Israelis about the Nakbah. Jaradat, born and raised in Hebron, is a co-founder of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, based in Bethlehem.
Bronstein emphasized the importance of “studying about Nakbah, remapping the land, building museums and commemorative sites, and acknowledging the right of return of Palestinian refugees” to achieve peace.
He screened a video depicting the work of Zochrot, which involves visiting the remains of towns and schools inhabited by Palestinians before 1948, holding commemorative ceremonies, publishing historical booklets in Hebrew and Arabic, and affixing Arabic signs to perpetuate the Palestinian identity of the sites.
For example, to commemorate the demolished Miske schoolhouse, he said, members of Zochrot collected a list of 30 men who had studied there and wrote their names on the stones in white paint.
“Israelis think (Palestinian) villages were destroyed in the war, but that’s not true,” he alleged. “The destruction was one of the political practices in order to not let Palestinians return to their homes.”
Jaradat addressed what he said is a frequently-asked question: “There has to be a Jewish state; why don’t you (Palestinians) want them to have it?”
He said, “Ethically and morally, I … will work not to have states based on ethnicity. … For example, the U.S. founding fathers refused to mention any religion the state would adopt. People have died to separate religion from state.”
He charged that civilization would lose “a great achievement” if a Jewish state were allowed to exist.
Jaradat said allowing the Palestinians to return and “building one democratic, secular state on this small piece of land would be a win-win solution.”
“We are proud that our (Palestinian) people is a mixture of three major religions and secularism also,” he said. “We are not anti-Judaism, but we are anti-Zionism…an expansionist colonial ideology based on race and religion. We are proud to be fighting against it, and we believe it is to the benefit of Israel to get rid of this stigma.”
He disputed the argument that there is not enough room in Israel to accommodate 9 million Palestinians. He also alleged that Jews would “never be in the majority” in Israel.
The talk, “Acknowledging the Past; Imagining the Future: Israelis and Palestinians on 1948 and the Right to Return,” was co-sponsored by Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, the American Friends Service Committee and eight other organizations.