diana buttu is a palestinian human rights lawyer former beares a university professor and former legal advisor to the palestinian negotiation team who to receive her law degree from queen's university in kingston ontario in canada and a masters of law from stanford university she is currently working as a lawyer on land confiscation home demolitions and revoke ation of residency buju has appeared on numerous news and analysis programs speaking on refugee rights the following presentation given up the two thousand and ten convention of the palestine right to return coalition is entitled palestinian refugee rights the palestinian political process and the so called negotiations i know that for a lot of people with the obama administration with the new changing circumstances in the west bank that people actually believe that there is something different that is going around it's going to happen this time around and what i want to talk about today is how it's really nothing different that's happening this time around and instead show through a series of slides why why it is that nothing different is happening this time around after the negotiations process and in the year two thousand and currently as we're hearing more and more talk of new negotiations i think it becomes important to step back and ask ourselves why is it did that th negotiations fail to end you'll see a lot of commentary on the question of why it is that the negotiations failed in my view the negotiations didn't fail at all it was quite the opposite the negotiations very much succeeded they succeeded in allowing israel to implement its long term strategy against the palestinians don't get it don't mistake me the negotiations did not fail from the viewpoint of israel they actually succeeded because it ended up being one and yet another term tool that israel uses and its long term strategy of trying to confine the palestinians into a small of a space as possible take as much of the land of their land as possible while all the while pretending that there are sort of talks and a partner and you know negotiations and if only end if only end if only so really at the essence the negotiations process again don't misquote me the negotiations process did not fail from the standpoint of the israelis it was a process that was put into place and designed precisely to carry out and implement israel's long term when the process began israel had declared that it had wanted a few things out of the out of the so called peace process they wanted better diplomatic relations it wanted better security and it got both of them but the thing that it ended up getting which was even more important to israel of better diplomatic relations and better security was the continued land grab and it's that continued land grab that i'm going to talk a little bit about now so the first lie that we're looking at and i'm going to  most of these slides are going to focus on the west bank and on the gaza strip and i'm going to talk a little bit about the palestinians like myself who are citizens of the state of israel this first slide that you're going to see is very typical slide of  the west bank with all of the cities that are demarcated on it and here you've got very typical palestinian areas of palestinian built up areas sort of showing up on the map the population and figures and so on and so forth and here you've got the israeli settlements that are showing up now you know yesterday when norman finkelstein was talking he mentioned something that was very important he said the settlements themselves only comprise about one to two percent of the west bank he's actually right on that he's actually factually right on this particular port point but you can see that the way that the settlements were built and have been built and continue to be built it's not so easy as norman finkelstein said yesterday to simply just evacuate out eighty percent of the settlers and put them to six percent of the settlements and here we've got the israeli closed areas and military bases now this particular slide i always feel is very important for one reason which is it doesn't have any of the closures marked on it it doesn't have any of the checkpoints that are marked on it it doesn't have any of the roads that are marked on it anything like that nothing on that but yet anybody who even has a little bit of a sense of economy and how economies move just looking at that alone you can see that the solution that is being pushed forward out of an economic solution is one that simply not going to work it never will work never has work never will work that even when you have the removal of checkpoints which is what a lot of the members of the palestinian authority are now calling for even when you do that even if you simply remove all of the checkpoints you're still faced with a situation like this in which the vast majority of the west bank is no longer in palestinian hands or in palestinian control so here we go to oslo and this is what happened during our this is the big prize that israel wanted it wanted to be able to justify its separation of the people from their land and so the way that they did it is very simple you classify areas into palestinian areas and israeli areas with area a an area b those two areas that are highlighted there being the so called palestinian government just as there's a really prime minister there is a palestinian prime minister just as there is an israeli president there's a palestinian president unfortunately when it comes to palestinians we actually have two prime ministers one president we had a coup without really having a state and you know the rest is history sort of anyway so the whole the point of it was trying to separate palestinians from their land and you can see very clearly that this was the beginning bases of how to separate people from their land you do it ethnically you try to separate ethnically add to that the settlements now the interesting thing about the settlements was that during the period of the of the also process a time when as i said one of the goals that the palestinian authority of the p l o had at the time was to create statehood and to focus on statehood and to move away from the issue of the right of return instead of compromise give a compromise rights for something like this compromise the issue of the right of return in order to get statehood and the fascinating thing with all this and this is the part that it is never really clicked for me is that even during the period of negotiations even during the period where they were focused exclusively on this concept of statehood and getting a state that even during this period the number of settlements ended up doubling during the period of the year from one thousand nine hundred three to the year two thousand they end up doubling from two hundred thousand settlers to four hundred thousand settlers within a seven year period it was as though the also accords gave israel the green light and just they pushed it and they said we're going to go ahead and we're going to continue to build and continue to build and new to build and nobody is going to stop us and did they did so now what you're looking at is you've got us we've got a situation which they're close to five hundred thousand settlers that are now living in in the west bank living  closed military zone and you can see how during the period of all slow and this is current day these are current amounts by the way that the space that palestinians are living in a shrinking so the idea is confined the palestinians into as small a space as possible take as much land of as possible so again the tools are home demolitions land confiscation so on and so forth but it's that ideology that hasn't gone away and it's that ideology that we need to be challenging another tool that's used to confiscate land nature reserves and this is what we're looking at right now so the point of all of this is that during the period of all slow during the period of the negotiations that israel's long term strategy has been and always will be to try to get rid of as many palestinians as possible whether it's by getting rid of them turning them into refugees or by confining them into a small of a space and taking up their land this is the long term strategy and this is the strategy that we need to be fighting now here's you know i  love the slide because it actually shows you what's actually happening you know it's when you can do something close up and what you're looking at here is you've got you've got this is actually satellite  to your left and this is where the wall has gone up and there's the palestinian population again the strategy is playing itself out confine the palestinians into a small space as possible take as much land to israeli settlements in the area come combined se population maybe seven thousand you've got a palestinian population of about fifty thousand palestinians and you can see the fascinating is that here again here is i was part of the team that worked on litigating the case of the wall before the international court of justice and this was  of the slides that we actually ended up using which is it shows you very clearly the link between between what israel's long term strategy is and how it is that is affecting that long term strategy see you see and this slide you've got the two settlements that are that are on there outside of the wall and you've got a part of the palestinian population which is actually confined and separate inside that well now again here's a good again this is the part where i often kind of wonder about  israeli statements you can see that the wall goes around not just the settlement itself but also around the planned expansion area of that settlement with the with the long term goal again being confined the palestinians  to a smaller space as possible and take as much land as possible i think the major issue that i wanted to focus on here is that this time around the difference is going to be absolutely zero with the exception with one exception which is what they actually call the talks between the period one thousand nine hundred three to two thousand they called the negotiations this time around they're calling it proximity talks i don't really know what proximity talk is like it just means that one person is close to the other and they're not really talking there's a mediator i'm not really quite sure what that whole thing means but the same problem is going to happen that happened during the period of one thousand nine hundred three to the year two thousand which is a problem that i face during that period which is that  between the period of one thousand nine hundred three to the year two thousand i for one and i can't speak about anybody else but i for one checked out and the reason that i checked out was that i was reading the new york times and i was reading the washington post and i was reading the wall street journal and what was important to me at the time between those years was finishing law school and becoming a lawyer i don't know why that was so important to me but it was and so what mattered to me when i read the wall street journal and the washington post in the new york times was seeing whether there was a handshake whether there was a meeting it didn't really matter to me what was coming out of the meeting but i felt that things were good i felt that things were moving in the right direction this time around we're going to continue to see the same reporting it's going to be a little bit different it's going to continue to be like did he wink or did he blink did he not sure did he elbow did he whatever do is he sending a message is he not sending a message but that's going to be the  only difference is that in terms of the substance the substance is going to continue to be the same which is that first on the issue of land israel has never and will never recognize or acknowledge the palestinian right to exist in their homeland it has never happened it will never happen unless we do something about it which i'll talk about in a second the second thing is that somewhat similar to what norman finkelstein said yesterday is that there's going to continue to to be demands on palestinians to even concede even further on their on their own territory something that that we've seen in the past and will continue to see in the future so even if you are somebody who believes in the two state solution ideologically believes in the two state solution the two state solution as they would like to put it is not going to be one that is based on the one nine hundred sixty seven borders or even based on the one nine hundred forty seven partition plan but instead is going to be based on something that is practical  and something that's doable and something that we can this and we can with the idea being that that as israel continues to negotiate and puts a had a gun to the head of the palestinians they're going to continue to demand more and more and more concessions from the palestinians saying that unless you actually accept and make these huge concessions we are not going to stop the human rights abuses and the atrocities that we're committing in the west bank and the gaza strip and indeed to the palestinians who are citizens of israel and to refugees that's the next thing the third thing is jerusalem one of the most fascinating things that's happened with your islam is that as the peace process continued and as now the proxy somebody talks are about to launch half of all of the land confiscation orders that were now receiving in the in the west bank more than about half of them are actually in the area of easterners them more than half of the home demolition orders that are taking place issue of building fewer than one hundred twenty eight permits were issued last year to palestinians living in east jerusalem to be able to build their homes this is a crime when you hear a population that is two hundred thousand strong and growing to only get one hundred twenty eight permits housing construction permits during that year at the same time when wester islam got more than eight thousand construction permits it shows you what the long term strategy is and do these and again the part of the point is really confined and try to get rid of as many palestinians as possible can find them make life so difficult that they eventually and that policy is not going to change and finally and i think the most important thing when it comes to the negotiations is that there has never been and there will never be provided that the current configuration is in place any recognition that palestinians have a right to return to their homes period this is something on the part of israel unfortunately that same that same issue is also taking place within the p l o within palestinian authority if you if you read carefully and words are very very careful if you read very carefully what you see in every single peace plan if they want to call it that every peace plan that has been put forward on the table over the course of the past decade pretty much takes the same shape and form oh you know some sort of a compromise on territory so that you get somewhat of the sixty seven borders somewhat of a compromise so that there's a land swap somewhat of a compromise when it comes to east jerusalem but the fascinating thing in this is something that palestinian the palestinian leadership in the negotiators are saying and this is why words are important is they're not talking about the right of return instead they talk about things called just solutions solution does not equal rights and this is the most important thing that i think we need to be aware of now all of this is to say that this is all this is to say that when it comes to the issue of negotiations again in too many of us the negotiations failed but we shouldn't be viewing it as a failure of the negotiations but we should be viewing it is as a success of israel's project in order to try to put forward and promote negotiations and this is why it becomes very alarming when we ourselves begin to use the language of negotiations and begin to believe in the process but negotiations the process of negotiations is a process that has been very successful it's been very very successful for israel now with that  quite an interesting story which will relate to what i want to talk about which is that in one nine hundred forty eight my grandmother and grandfather fled along with at the time they had nine children they ended up doubling that by the time  nine years later so end up being a very very large family that i come from but in one nine hundred forty eight they fled and they fled not just from him to nazareth but they then fled from nazareth up to lebanon and then from lebanon they went to syria and from syria they went to jordan and then from jordan they became infiltrators just like there's now this new law that filtration it's very interesting how history repeats itself so they infiltrated back so called infiltrated back in one thousand nine hundred fifty my grandmother recently passed away and it was which was very hard very emotional for me but just before she passed away i had a really wonderful opportunity she died at the age of ninety seven she was saying to me before she passed away shoes of a very feisty woman was i asked her said you know ground why did you why did you flee in one thousand nine hundred eight and these are the stories i think are very important because we never have this conversation as families we never really talk to one said we were waiting for the iraqi army waiting for the iraqi army you know anybody who has read history they know that they sort of stopped at the west bank just in order to protect their little protector and what have you but but this was the which she was told is that they were not fleeing they were just going to be leaving because they were waiting for the iraqi army and they waited for the iraqi army for a period of about two years and in one thousand nine hundred fifty when she decided and she was  one who decide it wasn't my grandmother father it was her she was the one who decided nine hundred fifty she decided that she was going to go back and she was going to go back to palestine they didn't know that there was had been taken over at this point in time when she decided to go back i asked her so why did you decide to go back and she said a very important thing which has stayed with me forever which is i realized that the iraqi army was not coming and so this is the point is that we have been waiting for far too long for the iraqi army to show up we've been waiting we put our faith in the leadership that has proven that it's that it cannot lead we put our faith in a leadership that has proven that it  corrupt and that it's more interested in maintaining the trappings of power and continuing to implement israeli strategy we've put our faith in the u s administration believing that somehow if only americans knew a little bit more about us that that they will somehow change and that the u s administration will change and that u s policy will change we've been waiting for the iraqi army for far too long and it's time for us to now no longer wait for the iraqi army and it's time for us to actually start doing things just in the same way that my grandmother in one nine hundred fifty decided despite everything with at that point in time now eleven children no longer nine to go back to palestine she was no longer going to wait for the iraqi army and this is what we it's now our duty to do this as well we cannot wait for the iraqi army any longer we have to take matters into our own hands so the question becomes what is it that we do there's a few things that i think that we need to focus on first is we need to focus on the boycott we need to focus on b d s for you know i don't want to hear people say oh it's not going to do anything it won't work it won't this it does it it will work it will work it will work and even if it doesn't work at least we tried it and it will work it will work now the reason we need to focus on and boycott divestment sanctions i know i'm speaking to an audience of people who are sympathetic is that for far too long israel has gotten away with matters they've gotten away with murder literally they've gotten away with murder and the boycott divestment and sanctions movement is the only thing that is going to try to put a stop to israel in terms of not being able to get away with murder and longer the second thing and i think this is also a very important thing is we need to start focusing on our ability and palestinian ability to stay in palestine if you believe that the long term strategy if israel is to try to get rid of as many palestinians as possible and take as much land of theirs as possible then the only response that you can have to that is to make sure that palestinians actually remain in their land that's  so what i mean by that is there are a lot of projects that focus on somewhat these are the projects that we need to start focusing in on now these are the projects where we need to start don't we need more ambulances that really they don't what we need is we need strateg ensure that palestinians actually remain on their land on the ground that's the second thing and with that i think that it becomes of crucially important that we stop focusing on the divisions that are taking place within our own community and there are plenty of divisions that are within our own community i don't care about him i don't care about i don't care about all of the petty politics to me it goes back to something that mr fraction months which is all of this is a group of bald men it doesn't matter to me who is in charge or why they're in charge but what matters to me is whether any of these organizations have as their primary goal making sure that palestinians remain on their land and the third and i think one of the next strategy that i think we need to start employing is that something that just referred to just spoke about yesterday which is holding people accountable and trying to make sure that israeli leaders get held accountable one of the most fascinating things that has happened as a result of the gaza massacre is that israelis can no longer travel they are free to travel there israeli leaders are afraid to go to the u k they're afraid to go to other countries within europe and it's starting it's a growing movement now that i want to continue to that i want to continue to see which is i want to make sure that it's now not just israeli leaders that are held to account but that is it is the israeli people that are now held to account i don't like this fiction of separating the people from the leadership because i personally believe that the only way that people will be held accountable is if the actual people are now beginning to be held accountable for the actions of of the government that's one of the next things in addition to that i also believe that there's a lot of legal strategies that we can be employing on this on this matter you know i don't i'm not a lawyer who believes that laws just sort of developed out of a vacuum i really understand the power dynamics that go into development of law but i think that as a whole we are a growing community we're getting stronger we're getting louder ten years ago there weren't this many people in the room in two years two more years time this room will be double the size it is it will be double the size it is and so because of that our voices are becoming louder they're becoming stronger and we need to start focusing on other mechanisms to ensure the final thing that i think is one of the most important strategies that we need to focus on is that if you look at one of the elements that has divided us as a community whether and i'm not talking about factional but i'm talking about as a community has been this debate of two state one mass so on and so forth i think that we're wrongly placed at it we are misplaced at focusing on that as as being the primary dividing point that is not to me the primary dividing point the primary issue for me is do you believe that palestinians have the right to return that's it do you believe that palestinians have have the right to live in their home and that's it doesn't matter to me and it's  quite i've never been a person who's believed that statehood or the concept of statehood whether it's two states or one will be the will be something that actually enshrines people's human rights it never has in the history of mankind it never will in the history of mankind history it states are actually oppressors of human rights they are not organized elements that uphold human rights and said we need to start focusing on the concept of and if we focus on the concept of allowed it as a community i think that we will be able to overcome this long term strategy that israel has whether it's a strategy that israel has whether it's a strategy of the palestinian authority has bought into or whether it's a strategy that has been used to divide us as a community we need to start focusing on our unity and our unity is out so with that i want to thank you very much and i'm open for question