[Applause]
Thank you for
the tour of a turbulent horizon. Lamese,
I got to thinking when I saw my longtime
uh collaborator Ron Mai come in from
Scotland.
He and I became involved in this cause I
know we don't look it now more than 40
years ago.
And I couldn't help as I listened to you
Lamese compare one of the many changed
facts
uh on the ground.
When Ron and I in the mid 1970s
went to the Middle East, Lebanon to be
precise, Beirut to learn more and commit
ourselves more to this cause.
Almost everybody in the Middle East
supported the Palestinian cause.
But here in Britain from which we had
come, hardly anybody supported the
Palestinian cause. You could have fitted
easily with room for a few elephants at
the back of the hall every supporter of
the PLO in 1975 into this room with a
lot of space to spare. Indeed, it was an
intensely controversial thing to do in
1975
to say that you were a supporter of the
PLO. And now we have almost the opposite
situation.
Almost everybody in Britain, the United
States now at least accepts, if they
don't support the centrality of the
Palestinian issue, the essential point
that without justice for the
Palestinians, there can be no peace in
the region and therefore the world.
Whilst in the Arab countries, the
Palestinians are quite abandoned, about
which more later.
A lady from the one of three television
stations
uh filming this meeting asked me before
we began
what we were calling for to happen. What
was the purpose of this meeting? Well,
the purpose of this meeting is to say
that for us, the Palestinian issue
cannot be separated from the great
issues now gripping the world of
instability and insecurity
and the swirl of dangerous events which
imperils all of us.
What we're demanding is simple.
That our governments and the
international
community as they like to call
themselves
live up to their responsibilities
as powers.
For the United Nations to live up to its
responsibility.
for the governments of the world who
have a legal responsibility
to protect the people of what is an
internationally recognized
illegally occupied territory.
This is important
because we live in a world where our
governments are ready to move heaven and
earth threaten war against
people who behave illegally, seize
territory illegally. We're Russia, for
example, is currently under intensifying
economic sanctions
because the people of Crimea
voted to leave the Ukraine and return to
Russia.
So unacceptable is this in the modern
age that all the governments of the
European Union choreographed by the
government of the United States has
imposed
very powerful and stringent sanctions
against the government of Russia. Iran
has just emerged from a long period and
may not have entirely emerged from a
long period of international sanction,
ostracism,
and the daily threat of war
against it. And it didn't even occupy
anybody else's country. didn't even have
weapons
that are banned under international law
yet was sanctioned and threatened.
Nonetheless,
it's vital for people to grasp. That's
why I mentioned gave away my age
how long this has been going on.
The Palestinians of Nablo, from which
Lamese springs
have been living under illegal military
occupation, brute force occupation since
1967
when the Beatles
were at the top of the charts. And the
Beatles are 40 years dead.
and Nablas and all the other towns and
cities are still under the same illegal
military occupation except it's gotten
much much worse over the years. I used
to travel regularly
in the West Bank in Jerusalem and Gaza.
I can't any longer. I'm banned by Israel
from entering the West Bank. become
banned by the government of Egypt from
entering Egypt and therefore Gaza and
Jerusalem of course is entirely out of
bounds.
But in those days
on my first visit 1979
to what we called still call the
occupied territories, the occupied West
Bank, I was able to drive around all day
and every day one end of the West Bank
to the other and more importantly so
were the Palestinians.
Now there are hundreds of checkpoints.
The aparite wall only what did you say
30% complete another 70% to go and
settlements intensifying
with a settler population
of hundreds of thousands of people. And
here I want to deal with an issue of
nmanllete.
When I hear the word settlement,
I don't know about you, I think about
log cabins,
covered wagons,
heroic frontier spirit
of people just pushing the frontiers,
pushing the edges of human existence.
These settlements are cities.
There are cities like Beverly Hills in
some cases. Malia Dumin, the biggest
settlement
very near to Jerusalem, is a city of
western proportions
where people frolic in fountains and
swimming pools on green lawns that are
continually sprinkled. All of it using
stolen Palestinian water while the
Palestinians
whose water it is whose land it is
go without.
And when I hear the word settler ditto,
these people are not settlers.
These are not settlements. These are
cities built by thieves on stolen land.
And that's what we should call them.
They're not settlers. They're land
thieves.
And here's the problem. I often, I hope,
disarm interviewers by putting it this
way. If somebody stole your house, God
forbid,
and you had to go and live on a piece of
rough land, in a tent, in a refugee
camp,
for how long would you continue to
demand your house back?
I say forever.
And your children after you.
Because every day that you wake up in
your new situation,
as a refugee,
as a displaced person in your own land,
or even worse, in other lands nearby,
you are literally or metaphorically
looking at your own house, your own
garden, your own trees,
and watching someone else who already
had a house
who came from Brooklyn
almost certainly. You'll forgive me. I
know that's where you're from nowadays,
too. They're the most violent. Who?
They're the worst. No, it's true.
They've brought Brooklyn
to the Palestinian lands. They already
had a house in Britain or in Russia or
in France. They had lives. Nobody was
bothering them. The problem is they've
gone to somebody else's land and stolen
their house and they wonder why people
are resisting. The only wonder is that
the resistance is not total always 247
for every single year since 1967.
That's the only thing to be surprised
about.
And if these people are not settlers,
these are not settlements. If they are
thieves living on stolen land, the right
of the person whose land it is to resist
them is absolute, absolutely legal and
absolutely moral.
I just looked at the some of the uh
Russes from the film on Tony Blair that
we've made that's coming out very soon.
I saw Tony Blair in the refugee camps
filled with Kosovan refugees saying that
international law and international
morality would never rest until every
single Kosovan was allowed to return to
their land and their home. If true for
Kosans, why not then true for
Palestinians?
Why is the victim of this great crime
called the terrorist and the terrorist
who perpetrated this great crime called
the victim of terrorism? We rejected at
the door one of the main Zionist
agitators in London who wanted to come
in here. If he had come in here, he
would have in his inimitable style
accused us of sympathizing with
terrorism when in fact
the people who are facilitating this
terrorism are the supporters of Zionism
and the supporters of this illegal
entity in the first place. So what are
we asking? We're asking our government
to stop treating the victims as the
baddies and stop treating the
perpetrators as the goodies. But that's
the opposite of what our government is
doing. Our government even changed the
law to make it impossible
for anybody to go to court and seek a
judge's decision to issue an arrest
warrant for suspected war criminals if
they uh come into this country. This
government is presently changing the law
to make it illegal, imagine, for a
council or any public body in Britain to
make a decision not to purchase goods
and services from this illegal settler
state.
How much more clearly
can you identify yourself with the
criminal and therefore against the
victim?
And here's our problem, specifically
British problem.
We are the author of this entire
disaster.
I was going to call it a tragedy, but
it's not a tragedy. It's a disaster.
It's a manmade disaster. And it was made
in London, made in the building that I
sat in for 30 years. I used to walk past
the very room
where Balffor 99 years ago promised on
behalf of one people to a second people
the land that belonged to a third people
unique even by imperialist standards. We
didn't even possess the land. We were
giving away to a people who by the way
at that time overwhelmingly rejected the
idea of Zionism. When Balffor made this
declaration, he made it to a tiny group
in 1917
who represented a mere cintilla of
international Jewish opinion.
overwhelmingly Jewish opinion at that
time was on the left and wanted
to be protected in their own countries
rather than go to somebody else's
country and cause misery for a century
uh on top of them. So
on the eve of the Balffor declaration
centinery, we have a special
responsibility towards the Palestinian
people and that has in part driven the
more than 40 years now that I have been
involved in this struggle.
So we demand our own governments. We
demand our
governments in the international fora
and organs that we are a part of to do
something to live up to their
international obligations. At the very
least
to stop selling weapons
to this settler state, to stop
strengthening this settler state. And if
they won't boycott, divest, and sanction
this settler state, at least allow the
people to do so.
If I'm the mayor of London, it will be
illegal for me by the by the time of
May, it will be illegal to refuse to buy
Israeli goods and services. So, let me
tell you right now, David Cameron, if
I'm the mayor of London, I will buy no
Israeli goods, no Israeli services,
whether it's legal or whether it's
illegal.
But here I must turn because the other
part of my equation with which I began
is this.
Aslamist sketched
this new situation in this winter of
discontent that is taking shape where
young Palestinians
beholden to none of the existing
political parties in Palestine without
direction, without leadership
are taking the matter into their own
hands and rising up as is their legal
and moral Right.
Where are the Arabs?
I'll tell you where they are. They're
busily murdering other Arabs.
They're busily trying to start a war
between the Arabs and the Iranians
instead of coming to the aid of the
Palestinians.
They're massacring the poorest Arabs of
the lot in Yemen. Thousands of people in
Yemen have been massacred
relentlessly
by Saudi Arabia and its grizzly allies,
all of them Arabs.
Syria is being ripped to shreds.
The ancient Arab capital
of Syria, the Lad Sham,
is being destroyed by Arabs.
by Arab governments who can't rebuild
the destroyed houses in Gaza, but have
limitless, absolutely limitless budgets
for destroying the buildings in Syria
and the people in them.
And not only
are they doing that,
but they are, as Lamese told you,
openly now, openly
belly dancing for Israel,
normalizing their relations with a state
that has committed crimes
almost beyond enumeration
against other Arabs, other Muslims. How
can any Arab government have normal,
even friendly relations
with the
state which is illegally occupying Al
Axa?
They're forever telling us, some of them
how Muslim they are,
aren't they? Isn't that Saudi Arabia's
point? Visa v Iran. Will the leaders of
the Muslims but your belly dancing for a
state that is occupying al axa from
which the prophet himself ascended to
the heavens?
How can this be explained? Never mind
justified. Of course they don't try to
explain it or justify it. Some of them
don't even have the guts to announce it.
I was in a Gulf country
couple of years ago and the lift opened
and out of the lift came Shimon Perez,
the president of the settler state. And
yet the Gulf country I was in officially
had no relations whatsoever
with Israel
except Israel's president was coming out
of the lift in the best hotel in their
capital city. There are kings of Arabia
shopping
in Tel Aviv. At least their wives are
shopping
in the malls in Tel Aviv. What kind of
people are they? This Cece, who we were
told was the new Nasser,
is shooting Palestinians across the
fence in Gaza. A mentally ill man, went
into the water just a couple of weeks
ago and was shot dead by Cece's army.
The man was mentally ill. had no idea
what he was doing, but he was a
Palestinian in Gaza and he was
crossing the international border.
I'm running out of time.
So, let me conclude before a Q&A which I
hope will mainly be directed towards
Lamese. It's not every day that we have
an activist from overseas of her
stature.
But let me conclude by saying this. I
have seen many Palestinian leaderships
come and go.
Mahmud Abbas
is not the leader of the Palestinian
people. Neither for that matter are the
leaders of the other parties. The
leaders of the Palestinian people are
people whose names we don't know.
They are the young people that are
facing the guns and facing the awesome
destructive power. Can you just imagine
for a minute what life would be like if
we were occupied here in London? If
there were foreign tanks and armies
everywhere
and our leaders were collaborating with
that foreign powers occupation were
growing fat on the salaries and the
expenses afforded to them.
Wouldn't we hope that our young people
would not surrender but would carry on
that struggle that once we were proud to
identify with?
That's why the 153rd
martyr of this alkud inifada who fell
today Sarwir Ibrahimi
his parents are proud of him.
I don't know the circumstances in which
he was slain,
but I can imagine them. Just like the
previous 152,
he was either
moaned down, shot down, beaten to death,
lynched. They're even lynching Eratrians
thinking that they are Arabs.
or he died
knowingly
confronting those who stole his own
land, stole his own house. It's the
anniversary of Tom H today as well. He
died 12 years ago. Tom Hornel, a British
hero,
shot down by these brutes.
We've had Rachel Cy and other
internationals who went there just to
bear witness to what's going on
and whose lives were brutally ended by
these
tyrants and the Brazilian guy.
The Brazilian guy. I don't know the
Brazilian. You mean the Italian one? No,
the Brazilian. They killed him in the
underground. Oh, in London. Yes. That's
a slightly different uh matter. They
thought he was an Arab. They certainly
did.
But the children of Palestine
are rising up and their children, if
necessary, will do the same. I used to
believe, Ron will bear me out, that one
day I'd make a kind of heroic entrance
into liberated Jerusalem with the flags
flying
and people welcoming those of us who
have identified with this struggle for
so long. I no longer believe that that
will happen. But my youngest child is
here, one and a half years old. My
friend,
Palestinian friend in the audience, when
he saw him at a recent demonstration, he
pinched his cheeks and said,
"You little Genghis can.
You have to help us liberate Palestine.
The Arabs will not do it. We need a
Genghis can." Well, of course, there are
Arabs and there are Arabs.
These young martyrs, 153 of them, these
young strugglers, thousands of them,
all these people in Palestine that are
defending their honor, defending their
dignity and their land and their
heritage, they are all Arabs.
The kings of Arabia will pass.
In fact, they're so old, they probably
passed by
half past 11, some of them. But the this
new generation of Palestinians, I'm
sure, will liberate their country. And
Lamese with my little gang can can enjoy
that welcome in liberated Jerusalem.
Wasalam alalaykum. Thank you.