By Sean Malloy
"I was very young when we left Jaffa in 1948, when my family became refugees", Dr Ilham Abu Ghazaleh recalls. "Life was extremely difficult. We lived on the bare minimum. We emigrated to another city where we had uncles and other people who let us use their homes. I can see it in front of my eyes: all of the Palestinian refugees in the streets, without food, without clothes."
Dr Abu Ghazaleh, a linguistics professor and a leading academic on gender issues in the Middle East, spoke to 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly about both her personal experiences and current issues affecting Palestinians. Her recent Australian speaking tour was organised by the Uniting Church under adverse conditions. Obtaining permission from the Israeli government to leave the country took Abu Ghazaleh three months, and when she did receive permission, she had to memorise what she wanted to say, because she wasn't allowed to carry any form of paper with her.
In 1948 Zionist forces usurped power in Palestine and declared the state of Israel. The 1948 war and the terror pursued by the newly formed Israeli army resulted in the displacement of 900,000 Palestinian refugees.
"People left during the war of 1948 thinking it will be only a week and then they would go back", says Abu Ghazaleh. "In front of me were all of these people, everybody in the streets, living in a trance, not knowing what happened to them because for thousands of years they lived peacefully on this land.
"I remember as a child our first activities were to help people — those of us who had a house to help them. Everybody in my house was helping. I could see the poverty. Many of these people had never [before] had to ask for blankets and milk for their children."
Politics is a major part of life in the occupied territories. "Since I was a child, I remember always being at
demonstrations, seeing people killed in front of me, seeing houses demolished. This is the life that we live, and 90% of our talk is politics.
"The immediate situation, every day, calls for a politicised life. I don't think there is a Palestinian who is not politicised.
"When I went to Europe for the first time in 1973, I was living with a family in England. I could speak nothing but politics. It was very difficult to communicate; they talked about flowers and other things. In our extremely difficult life, we did not talk about flowers. They were talking about pets, and we don't have pets.
"My first shock was when they took me to a supermarket and I saw an area that said 'dog food'. I thought it was a food made out of dogs, because not in my wildest dreams could I ever think that you have an area where you have food for animals. I started to see the first world clearly — the difference between ours and theirs."
The Middle East peace talks are currently a major topic of Palestinian discussion and activity.
"It seems that the peace talks haven't been achieving a lot", Abu Ghazaleh says. "When people meet together, it is an achievement, but it seems that the Israelis do not want to give anything to Palestinians.
"The Israeli government wants to keep Jerusalem. The Israelis want to keep the settlements they created after 1967. The Israeli government does not want to give us legislative rights over our land and its resources. They want to treat us by law as 'residents'."
Despite the US sponsorship of the negotiations, the US position is only reinforcing Israel's dominance in the region, Abu Ghazaleh believes.
"Now America is heading the negotiations, all we see is that its agenda is nothing but the agenda of the Israeli government. Some European governments are becoming more understanding and willing to support a peaceful situation in the area. They have started to
see it is Israel who is not allowing peace."
She stresses that the negotiations are worthwhile but that Palestinians will continue to work for their liberation if the negotiations fail.
"I believe that we will continue to do what we've been doing since 1967. We will continue to try to remain on the land, because the main objective of the Zionist movement since the beginning of the century has been to kick us off the land, directly or indirectly.
"We will continue to resist, we will continue to build our lives in the way that we would like, we will be waiting for the moment when the world becomes more sensitive to the issues of oppressed people."
Abu Ghazaleh explained that without the PLO, the Palestinian negotiating team would not be able to function. Israel and its allies have tried to smash the PLO since its formation in 1964. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to carry out Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's orders to "get rid of the PLO once and for all". Nevertheless, today "There is no person who goes to the negotiations who will not tell you that 'the PLO is my representation'. "Palestinian intelligentsia, most of whom are outside the occupied territories, are with the PLO. Whatever the Palestinian delegates need in terms of political advice, statistics etc it comes from the PLO.
"The PLO itself has not been allowed to negotiate because the PLO represents not only Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza but also the 6 million Palestinians all over the world. They are not allowing the PLO to take part in the negotiations because if they do they will have to deal with the 4 million Palestinians who are refugees.
"The West, America and Israel have a problem. Their problem is that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have their representation in the PLO, and at the same time the PLO is the representative body of the negotiating team who goes to Washington."
Within Israel, the political situation is polarising. "We believe that the Israeli left is becoming bigger" compared to five years ago, she says.
"For us both Likud and Labour are bad, but at least the 'best of the worst' have been elected. We believe that the left must have had an input into this result. They are still not powerful enough though, because there is this very fine balance between the liberals of the Labour Party, Likud and the right. The whole government might collapse because the left is not strong enough to support the government.
"We were sad to see several members from Meretz [the most left of the parties in the government] who, the moment they became part of the government, adopted government positions. They agreed with the government policy to deport 400 Palestinians to the south of Lebanon.
"Palestinians, for some years now, have done their best to have discussions with the Israeli left. We tend to believe that the situation in the area is polarising Israel. We would like to believe that the left is taking a little bit more ground because we see that we have a joint struggle in the future."
Abu Ghazaleh believes that the weight of Islamic fundamentalists has been blown out of proportion by the media. She sees the social policies of these organisations as regressive.
"I believe that the Islamic fundamentalists will grow
if the negotiations fail ... Their social agenda is old hat, especially for women. We are extremely afraid that all of our social gains, particularly for women, will be affected.
"I don't know what constituency the Islamic fundamentalists have, but it definitely does not in any way reach the constituency of the PLO.
"However, they are expanding for several reasons. In the history has always been a pull either towards nationalism or towards Islam. Since America smashed the last place of nationalism in the Arab world, Iraq, it means that America gave a green light for the Islamisists to grow. Now they are the scapegoat of American diplomacy: [the US] use 'fundamentalism' as they used 'communism'.
"The Israelis help in the expansion of Islamisists because we live in a cultural ghetto created by the occupation. Palestinians in the territories have been living in a prison since 1967. We do not have access to what is going on in the world, especially in the Arab world.
"We are extremely frightened that the life the children live, which is extremely oppressive, extremely closed, will affect their lives when we get our state. We will try to counter it by trying to create democracy, but we will be tackling years of oppression."