For the Palestinian Right of Return

(Letters)

12 May 2016

Dear comrades,

May 15 commemorates the Nakba or Catastrophe: the expulsion of an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homeland by which Israel was established in 1948. Comrade Wilde’s rich forum on Palestine states that “some 50 percent of the Palestinian population lives outside the Occupied Territories—in Jordan, Lebanon, Israel” (“Defend the Palestinian People!” WV No. 1089, 6 May). It is important to include Syria, with a Palestinian population before the present civil war close to 600,000. With the onslaught of that sordid conflagration Palestinians have suffered what they call a “Second Nakba” with more than 250,000 refugees uprooted and sent into a second exile.

Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp, which had 150,000 residents and became a thriving suburb of Damascus, has been subjected to a total military siege by the Assad regime since 2013 and turned into a murderous battlefield by the contending factions. Now reduced to 1,000 families, even one year ago UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon compared Yarmouk to a “death camp.”

Of the nine million Palestinians in the Near East, due to the Nakba and the expulsions of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, more than five million Palestinians in the Near East are registered as refugees, including 72 percent of Gaza’s residents, or better put, inmates. Flowing from Comrade Wilde’s defense of Palestinian national rights is our demand for the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The demand and its realization underline that there can be no just solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict outside of a socialist Near East.

Comradely regards,
Reuben Samuels