Summary
Author of the introduction to BADIL and Zochrot’s twenty-five-page report-back Study Visit to Cape Town, setting out the difficulties of planning return — settler fear of return as calamity and the indigenous equation of return with a reversal of six decades of settler colonialism (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.181-182).
Details
- “For both BADIL and Zochrot, it is this aspect of the liberation of Palestine to which we have dedicated our efforts for over a decade since our organizations’ establishment” — through the course of the work, conceptions of return “have remained somewhat superficial”, among settlers who see it as a calamity to be avoided at any cost and among the indigenous community that equates it to a reversal of six decades of settler-colonialism, “the return to a paradise lost” (PDF p.181).
- His questions include: “Are the descendants of large landowners to return to bountiful properties, while the many more descendants of workers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers to return to no property at all?” and “How, for instance, is return to materialize to a village whose inhabitants numbered less than two thousand before the Nakba, and who now number in the tens of thousands?” (PDF p.182).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, BADIL, Zochrot, Umar al-Ghubari, Right of Return