By failing to obey the UN resolution on the right to establish a Palestinian state with the same rights as Israel, occupying the territories that should constitute this state, Israel – with the solitary support of the US – prevents the UN decision from being realised. In order to get to Palestine you need to arrive at the main Israeli airport – Ben Gurion Airport – where you need to submit to the interrogations of the Israel security services, which have arbitrary power to let a person pass or not. The alternative is to descend in Jordan and make a long journey by land to the Palestinian territory.
Although it has a strong identity, an ancient history and an extraordinary trajectory of struggle, Palestine still does not exist as a sovereign territory, as an independent state. It is invaded by Israeli armed forces, which occupy its territories, keep the country split between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This, in turn, is quartered by the walls that cross it, because of the Jewish settlements in the middle of Palestinian territory.
The Palestinians are dominated, oppressed, humiliated. Attempts are being made to make the lives of people in these territories impossible, so that they will submit definitively to being exploited by Israel or to abandoning Palestine, leaving the field open for Israel’s objective – to appropriate the entire Palestinian territory and incorporate it into Israel.
Holding the Forum in Palestine has significance beyond simply being another space for discussion and exchange among movements that struggle for “another possible world”. It means legitimising the existence of Palestine, giving voice to the Palestinians, integrating them in their struggles within the global movement of the World Social Forum. In the same way as it was important that Lula not only visited Palestine, but did what other representatives did not: slept there, lived with the Palestinian people, got to know the real and oppressive conditions of their lives.
But at the same time, the forum should learn about the very precarious conditions under which schools in Palestine are operating, both material and in terms of tools that enable knowledge, study, continuity of knowledge and consciousness of Palestinian identity among new generations.
Emir Sader is a political scientist.
Translated by Hilde C. Stephansen