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U.S. Anti-Israel Activity
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Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
Chronology
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Posted: August 14, 2007
- May 25-27, 2007: Al-Awda held its fifth annual convention, “Uniting for the Return,” at a hotel in southern California. During the opening speech, Alia Hasan, an Al-Awda representative from Los Angeles, stated, “the Zionists [were] trying to silence all Palestinians and our supporters because we refuse to accept an illegal state built on lies and theft.” Hasan was alleging that “Zionist” pressure caused Al-Awda’s decision to move the event from the University of California, Riverside campus to the hotel, which some Al-Awda supporters also used to explain the low attendance. Workshops addressed a range of topics, including the importance of refugee support and boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns, as well as integrating the Palestinian right of return into the antiwar movement.
- November 16-19, 2006: Samia Halaby, a former Al-Awda co-chair, served on a delegation at the “Solidarity with the Resistance” conference in Beirut, which was organized by the Hezbollah and the Communist Party of Lebanon. The gathering was held to consolidate international support for “the resistance movements in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, without distinction,” including Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and the Iraqi insurgency. The conference’s final statement indicated that participants agreed “to establish a worldwide network against the American-Zionist project which does not only target the area but also humanity.” This, they agreed, will be achieved by “developing more and greater relations between leftist, democratic and nationalist currents and Islamic and resistance movements.”
- July-September 2006: Al-Awda organized and co-sponsored rallies in several cities in response to the fighting in the Middle East between Israel and terrorist organizations in Gaza and Lebanon. These events were marked by support for terrorist groups, calls for the destruction of Israel, messages equating Zionism with Nazism and a proliferation of anti-Semitism.
- July 14-16, 2006: Al-Awda held its fourth annual convention at San Francisco State University. The gathering focused on two main campaigns: the “political and material isolation of the Genocidal Zionist State of Israel” and the “political and material support of the Palestinian refugee population.” A book by anti-Israel writer Lenni Brenner, “51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis” was available for purchase and convention speaker Eyad Kishawi, Al-Awda San Francisco organizer, made similar charges of Zionist-Nazi ties during his presentation. Kishawi also spoke about supporting divestment programs against Israel and argued that Israel oppresses even its Jewish residents. Salman abu Sitta, longtime right of return activist and former member of Palestine National Council, said that “Zionists, now called Israelis” are responsible for “the largest planned and foreign-supported ethnic cleaning in modern history.”
- April 15-17 2005: Al-Awda held its third annual convention at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). One of the speakers, UCLA English professor Saree Makdisi, said, “Jews are practicing racial superiority” and called Israel “a fantasy.” A map of Israel that hung in the event’s main conference room was captioned, “this is the largest planned ethnic cleansing in modern history.”
- October 15-17, 2004: Al-Awda Wisconsin organizer Fayyad Sbaihat was a national contact for the fourth annual conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM), an umbrella organization of anti-Israel groups that promotes divestment from Israel, which took place at Duke University. Sbaihat blamed the Israel/Palestinian conflict on “a colonialist mentality on the part of Zionists that the natives don't matter” and charged that "the Palestinians are left on reservations and in ghettos. There was never really the possibility of a two-state solution.” Al-Awda co-founder Mazin Qumsiyeh, another speaker at the event, called Zionism “a disease” and claimed that the violence in the Middle East started with “the idea that the land belongs to the Jewish people.” Qumsiyeh also asked audience members, “If apartheid was a problem in South Africa, why do we consider it a solution in Palestine and Israel?”
- April 16-18, 2004: Al-Awda held its second annual convention, at a Hunter College campus in New York City. One of the speakers, Lamis Deek, co-chair of Al-Awda New York, referred to Israeli soldiers as “Zionist henchmen authority” and “Nazis.” Al-Awda, he said, embodies the “ultimate rejection of Zionism.” At the convention, Al-Awda adopted, through participants’ vote, the Al-Awda Points of Unity.
- June 20-22, 2003: Al-Awda held its first annual convention, in Toronto, Canada. It was co-sponsored by the Arab Student Association at the University of Toronto. The event was billed as “Palestinian Right of Return and Self-Determination in a New Colonial World: Strategies and Actions.” It included sessions titled “Apartheid Israel and its Misrepresentation in U.S. Discourse” and “History of Palestinian Resistance to Colonialism and Zionism.”
- October 12-14, 2002: During the second PSM conference, held at the University of Michigan, Al-Awda representatives sold T-shirts inscribed with its slogan, “Intifada! Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” indicating the group’s unwillingness to accept the existence of the Israel.
- February 2002: Al-Awda members created its lobbying arm, Citizens for Fair Legislation (CFL). Through alerts on its Web site distributed via others, CFL encourages visitors to contact elected officials on relevant issues and promotes anti-Israel events. Whereas such efforts were promoted by CFL consistently for several years, they have been sporadic since late 2006.
- April 7, 2001: Several thousand people attended Al-Awda’s second large event, the “Right of Return Rally,” in New York City. The event was organized by Mazin Qumsiyeh, among others, and featured speeches by Edward Said; George Habash, former secretary general of the PFLP (via telephone); and Rafeeq Jaber and Raeed Tayeh, representatives from the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). The anti-Semitic IAP, which was among the rally’s endorsers, has been described by the U.S. government as part of “Hamas’ propaganda apparatus.” Other endorsing groups included the International Action Center (IAC), the Trans-Arab Research Institute (TARI), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Solidarity events took place in Canada, Spain and Australia, as well as in Jordan and Lebanon.
- September 16, 2000: Al-Awda held its first large event, a march and rally in Washington D.C that attracted an estimated few thousand attendees. The event, held before the break of the second intifada, was organized to demand the right of return for Palestinians and to commemorate the date of the September, 16, 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut. Among the 150 endorsing organizations were the Arab American Institute, IAC, TARI, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Sabeel, and chapters of ADC and the Muslim American Society (MAS). Speakers included Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada; radical Imam Abdul Alim Musa; and Al-Awda co-founder and rally co-chair Zahi Damuni. Organizers included Hussein Ibish, then-ADC communications director, and Rania Masri and Mazin Qumsiyeh, Al-Awda Media co-chairs. Solidarity events took place in London, Lebanon and Jordan, according to Al-Awda.
IAP was also one of this rally’s sponsors/endorsers and its chairman, Sabri Samirah, gave a speech in which he made two arguments: “Jerusalem is an Arab, Palestinian and Islamic holy city; and will stay forever as such,” and “The Palestinian right of return is…non-negotiable by anyone.” In support of these ideas, attendees shouted “Back to Jerusalem we will go!” and “No return, no peace!”
- April 2000: Al-Awda was founded by a group of attendees a conference in Boston of the Trans-Arab Research Institute (TARI), a pro-Palestinian think tank, as a North American and Europe-based grassroots organization whose mission would be to advocate for the “Palestinian right of return.” Al-Awda, which is Arabic for “the return,” was first established as an online listserve to facilitate communication between activists and it grew into an active international organization from there.
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