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6 - Feeling Palestine in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2025

Noa Shaindlinger
Affiliation:
Worcester State University,Massachusetts
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Summary

Recognizing the historic injustice committed in 1948 and afterwards, Hoping for a better, cooperative future, We, Jews who live here, in Israel Call for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homeland, which is also our homeland. The return of the Palestinian refugees does not mean that others will be uprooted and destroyed. It is a shared vision of a just, egalitarian future that will be better for us all. Nor is the return only a dream or a hope, but a right recognized in UN Resolution 194. The Cape Town documents, which were prepared jointly by Jews and Palestinians, define the preconditions for the practical implementation of the return, based on the following principles: 1. Our shared land has enough room and sufficient resources to resettle and compensate those of its inhabitants who were exiled, without evicting anyone from their home. 2. The actual return will be preceded by a process of winning over all the communities affected. The process of healing past wounds will continue after the return begins, through ongoing community work. 3. After the return, the country will really and truly act according to principles of freedom, justice and peace. All its inhabitants will have equal rights. The country will ensure freedom of religion, education, conscience, language and culture and will protect the holy sites of all religions. After the refugees were exiled from their land they kept faith with it in all their diasporas, never ceasing to pray and hope to return to their homeland. We entreat the Palestinian refugees in the refugee camps and everywhere else: Return! We will join you to build the land. Come home!

‘Proclamation of Return’, Zochrot, read in Tel Aviv, 23 December 2012

In August and September 2013, Israeli media, pundits of all political colours, and keyboard activists on social media were embroiled in a public debate surrounding the planned Zochrot conference titled ‘From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of the Palestinian refugees’. The event, first of its kind in Israel, was to be held, strategically, in the Eretz-Israel museum in Tel Aviv, on the lands of Shaykh Muwannis, a Palestinian village depopulated in 1948. Indeed, the official invitation reclaimed the village's lands and its elided history by identifying the museum's location as Shaykh Muwannis.

Type
Chapter
Information
Displacement and Erasure in Palestine
The Politics of Hope
, pp. 151 - 182
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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