NIZAR, PICTURED, IS A HUMANITARIAN AID WORKER AND ACTIVIST FROM SWANSEA. HE HAS LONG BEEN INVOLVED IN THE PALESTINE SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT IN SOUTH WALES, BUT NOW WORKS WITH REFUGEES ACROSS THE WORLD. UP UNTIL TUESDAY HE WAS IN LEBANON, NEAR THE BORDER WITH PALESTINE, HELPING DISPLACED PALESTINIAN FAMILIES.
MANY OF THOSE HIS ORGANISATION ARE WORKING WITH ARE THIRD GENERATION REFUGEES LIVING IN LEBANON, AND THEIR STORY CAN BE TRACED BACK TO 1947/48, WHEN THE MODERN STATE OF ISRAEL WAS CREATED BY THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINAINS WHO HAD BEEN LIVING ON THE LAND FOR CENTURIES.
MANY ARE NOW STATELESS, EVEN THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN BORN IN LEBANON, AND HAVE VERY LITTLE RIGHTS.
HE SPOKE TO VOICE.WALES ABOUT THE SITUATION, HOW IT IS GETTING WORSE WITH MORE ILLEGAL SETTLEMENT BUILDING, THE RESISTANCE OF THE PALESTININS AND WHY SOLIDARITY AND PROTEST IS SO IMPORTANT.
Hi Nizar, thanks for talking to us. Maybe if you could just start off by explaining the kind of work you been involved with recently?
Okay, so I’m a humanitarian aid worker. I’ve been doing this kind of work for the last six and a half years. Prior to that I was very involved in political activism, and I still am.
In Lebanon, we work with Syrian refugees, but also with Palestinian refugees, many who’s families came over to Lebanon in 1947.
Thanks, and how long were you there for recently and what are some of the things that you came across?
I was there for the first ten days of Ramadan and then for the last ten days, and I just got back yesterday [Tuesday].
I saw the struggle of Palestinians and the effect, I guess, of being made refugees and being made to leave their homes, which is happening now across Palestine.
The Palestinian community in Lebanon are stateless, they don’t have access to work. 95% of the jobs available in the country, they’re not allowed to do. So even if they’ve got degrees or experience in top tier jobs, like medicine or accounting, they’re not allowed to work.
They’re only allowed to work in manual labour and the relief that they get from the UN has been cut, as we know, from what Donald Trump did a few years back. This has severely impacted them. They’re usually living in camps within a kind of war boundary. They don’t have any rights.
I mean, many can’t even feed their children. The main thing that we hear from most of the adults is that they don’t have the ability to feed their kids. They don’t have the ability to buy food. Now Eid is tomorrow, the end of Ramadan. People always buy clothes and gifts for their children. They said, ‘we can’t even put a meal on their plate.’ Children don’t understand this. And the younger generation are growing up witnessing this suffering not really knowing much about themselves or their identity or where they came from. And it’s sad to see that more and more of this is going to happen with what’s going on now.
When we ask them, can you go back to Palestine? They say they’d love to go back but they say, ‘if we do go back, what do we go back to?”
More and more people from Palestine are being forced from their homes and having to travel to places like Lebanon or Jordan, which is kind of, I think, the agenda behind all of these attacks. It’s ethnic cleansing.
What’s often missed in the reporting of Palestine in the West is what you mentioned there, about so many Palestinians being stateless. I think a lot of people have little idea how big the diaspora is and the effects of the ethnic cleansing that took place from 1947/48.
The majority of the people we work with are third generation Palestinian refugees, so their family left in 1947.
They were born in Lebanon but even the ones born there, they’re not citizens or they’re not treated as citizens. They don’t have the same rights as citizens.
But there’s more and more of an influx of people who have been affected by the impacts over the last ten to twenty years, on their homes and on their areas. They are being forced from their homes inside Palestine, and having nowhere else to go and because of the mistreatment. So their only option is to leave, go to the neighbouring countries which are Lebanon or Jordan
In terms of what is happening now, what do you think is behind the latest increase of violence from Israel?
When people are losing their homes in Palestine and the settlements are being put up, and people are being evicted, it’s an apartheid state.
So this is trying to force people to leave the country. So I think more and more Palestinians are gonna end up either internally displaced people in their own country, like in the Gaza Strip, you know, the largest open air prisons in the world, or they’re gonna have to flee to neighbouring countries in search of food. But sadly what’s waiting for them on the other side is just more suffering and struggle.
But sadly the international community allows this apartheid and the illegal occupation to continue, and they turn a blind eye to the settlements.
Then you have far right hate preachers like Donald Trump, and various other leaders in positions of power, who have actually legitimised what Israel is doing by declaring Jerusalem, which has always been Palestine, declaring it the capital of Israel.
This has emboldened Israel, and I guess, when they know there’s no consequences for their actions, why would they stop? They’ve killed many people, they’ve killed even American activists and European activists, but with no consequences. Nothing’s ever done. For them, I don’t think there’s a reason for them to stop until they achieve their ultimate goal which is to completely eradicate Arabs and Muslims from Palestine.
A lot of what we hear about in mainstream news reporting on this issue is framed as a conflict, with many politicians and figures condemning the armed resistance of Palestininas first and foremost. What are your thoughts on that?
In terms of armed struggle, firstly it’s important to say that we have to preserve and value all human life. Any loss of innocent life is wrong.
But when you look at what’s happening to the people of Palestine, the people of Gaza especially, and no one does anything, you can understand why they would react in the way that they’re reacting. They’ve been imprisoned there for God knows how many years, they’ve been invaded many times, regularly bombed by planes and by tanks. When they peacefully protested on the border, innocent people with stones were snipered and shot in the head, losing their eyes, and were grenaded and gassed.
So you know, you can understand. And again, we don’t justify any loss of any life, but you can expect that people that are being attacked like that will resort to anything.
I mean, people have lost their families, people have lost entire families. Yesterday, there was a video of a boy in Gaza who was crying and screaming, leading the funeral of his father, who was killed in an aerial attack on a building that had people in it and the whole building collapsed and everybody died.
This isn’t a war where there are two sides equally fighting against each other. This is an illegal occupation, this is the oppression of the Palestinian people.
When you look at this situation, you can’t expect them to just sit down and just be killed in silence, they will react. Even According to the UN mandate, and international law, people have a right to defend themselves. People have a right to resist occupation, people have a right to defend their land and defend their families.
But the media here [in Britain] is biassed, and it doesn’t give a true representation of what is actually happening. The media here makes out that it’s an equal clash between two forces or two armies. But it’s not. It’s literally people with stones for the most part and a small faction who have some rockets.
But innocent people are the ones being killed. All of the places that are always targeted by Israel are residential; residential homes, schools, Mosques and places that people rely on to survive and to live, like water factories.
And in terms of the resistance on the streets and protests by Palestinans, a lot of reports seem to be suggesting that these are a step change in terms of size and mood on the ground. Do you think this current situation will light a spark for more struggle, both in Palestine and internationally?
Well, I hope so. With Ramadan, this happens every year. Gaza gets bombed every year, there’s protests in Jerusalem every year. So this isn’t something that happens once in a blue moon, this is every year, the systematic killing of Palestinian people.
But I do feel that this one is different, I think with Covid. And with all the protests and with the unrest around the world, and with people not being happy or satisfied with their government, I really, really hope this one will be different and some action will come out of it.
I mean, the UN has spoken many times about how Israel has breached international law, committed crimes against humanity and human rights abuses. But nothing’s ever done.I hope now, with this, you know, things will change. I think we need to keep the momentum up as people living in the West.
We saw with the Black Lives Matter protest, 1000s of people came out to the streets, 1000s of people from all over, even in places like Swansea and Cardiff, the streets were full. And I think that we need to have the same kind of anger and aggression for the loss of life of Palestinian children.
We really need to stand up and keep pushing our governments. For example, in Oldham, there’s a weapons factory that has been providing a lot of the weapons that are being used now against Palestinians. It’s called Elbit [Systems].
People have been protesting out there and demanding it be shut down. They should not stop protesting until this is shut down, because the UK is contributing to the deaths. UK arms companies are selling things to Israel and sending weapons to Israel. Our government has just as much responsibility as the government of Israel, because they know what’s happening, yet they continue to support it.
Finally, why is it so important for people to show solidarity for Palestine?
If we as human beings turn a blind eye to this and we allow it to continue, then who’s to say it won’t happen to us one day? If we don’t stand in the face of oppression and adversity, who’s to say that it won’t take place on our doorstep?
They will only stop when we take a stand. Today it’s Palestinians, tomorrow will be South Americans, the next day it will be the Uighur Muslims in China and so on.
If we allow governments to oppress people if they get in their way, then we will soon also be oppressed.
So we have to unite and stand. Everyone stood against Apartheid, well not everyone, but a lot of people stood against Aparheid in South Africa until it stopped. Nelson Mandela himself said that we will never truly be free until Palestine is free.
This is something that’s been going on for many, many years. And whilst that continues and whilst that is allowed to happen then we can’t expect peace. Because you can’t have peace when people are being oppressed, people are being killed and people are being tortured and imprisoned. Youngsters are being imprisoned, separated from their families. We have to take a stand against it.
