It is 68 years since the Nakba of 1948. The one undemocratic state reality in Palestine – under exclusion of the 6 or 7 million Palestinians in exile – is intolerable. Every day sees new bad news from the ethnically-cleansed apartheid state of Israel. One Democratic State (ODS) in re-unified Palestine is a positive solution. Awad Abdelfattah and Karl Sabbagh – both with roots in the Galilee – are coming to London and Cambridge to speak about it.
12 May (Thursday), 18:30, SOAS Brunei Building, University of London Room B102, chaired by SOAS PhD student Ramzi Nasir.
15 May (Sunday, Nakba Day), 19:00, P21 Gallery, 21 Chalton Street, NW1 1JD London (just north of Euston Road one block west of the British Library), chaired by barrister Salma Karmi-Ayyoub
16 May (Monday), 19:30, Friends Meeting House, 12 Jesus Lane, CB5 8BA Cambridge, chaired by Ruba Salih, Reader at SOAS, University of London.
Admission is free but a £5 contribution would be appreciated.
Awad Abdelfattah is Secretary-General of the Israeli Arab political party Tajamoa (English National Democratic Assembly, Hebrew Balad – represented in the Knesset within the Joint List). His party supports “a state for all its citizens” and demands that Israel change into a liberal democracy. It has been repeatedly disqualified from Israeli elections on grounds that it does not recognize the state of Israel (bans then overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court). Awad has recently spoken before the South African parliament and written in blogs in support of One Democratic State.
Karl Sabbagh is a television producer and author whose ancestors were forced from their town of Safed in 1948. He supports the ODS vision which calls for the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees. Karl grew up in England and like earlier Palestinian thinkers George Antonius, Musa Alami and Tarif Khalidi, graduated from Cambridge University. In 2006 he authored Palestine: A Personal History and in 2012 Britain in Palestine, which provided the text for an exhibition of that name at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS. Both books are concise, excellent reads.
Tajamoa was co-founded by Dr Azmi Bishara, who committed the ‘crime’ of calling for Israel to become a modern, equal-rights-based state “for all its citizens” and paid for this with exile. Awad has decided to come out openly in support of ODS. He will speak moreover in general of the special role of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in the struggle for Palestinian rights. During his stay in England, together with his wife who is office manager of Adalah in Haifa, he will also appear before MPs in the Houses of Parliament, almost all of whom still advocate the two-state outcome.
(For more info visit: www.odspal.jimdo.com & www.palestinecampaign.org. Contact info: blakeley@bluewin.ch)
