Talk by Dr Jamal Zahalka,Palestinian Arab member of the Israeli Knesset

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Friday January 28, 2005 21:09 by Tom Lonergan - IPSC tomlon777 at eircom dot net

Talk by Dr Jamal Zahalka,Palestinian Arab member of the Israeli Knesset (Trinity College)

Dr Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian Arab member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) and a co-founder of Balad, the National Democratic Alliance will speak in the Arts Block, Trinity College, Dublin on Monday evening January 31st. The talk will take place at 7-30pm, in the Arts Block, in Room 3074.

Dr Zahalka primarily campaigns for the rights of Palestinians within Israel. In 2003 Dr Zahalka and his party strongly opposed the introduction of Israeli law prohibiting the granting of residency or citizenship status to Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who were married to Israeli citizens.

Dr Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian Arab member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) and a co-founder of Balad, the National Democratic Alliance will speak in the Arts Block, Trinity College, Dublin on Monday evening January 31st. The talk will take place at 7-30pm, in the Arts Block, in Room 3074.

Dr Zahalka primarily campaigns for the rights of Palestinians within Israel. In 2003 Dr Zahalka and his party strongly opposed the introduction of Israeli law prohibiting the granting of residency or citizenship status to Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who were married to Israeli citizens. The new law violated the constitutionally-protected rights of equality, liberty and privacy, as it limited the ability of Israeli citizens', namely Palestinian citizens of Israel, to exercise these rights based on the ethnicity of their spouses. Eg. Where a Palestinian Arab who lives in Israel and who is a citizen of Israel, marries a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they cannot live together in Israel. These discriminatory measures are put in place to limit the number of Palestinians resident in Israel.

In October 2000 as Palestinians living inside Israel came out onto the streets in support of their comrades staging of a second intifada in the occupied territories, the Israeli police force opened fire, shooting dead 13 Palestinians. Since then Dr Zahalka has been working closely with the families of the dead in their efforts to take a legal case against the Israeli police force and its government.

Dr Zahalka will speak on the current situation and what life is like as a Palestinian living inside Israel, and on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. He has lodged a number of complaints against Israel to international organizations for rights violation involving its Arab citizens.

Details of Palestinians living within Israel: Palestinian Arabs in Israel comprise approx 20% of the total population in Israel, at over 1 million out of a population of 5 million. Of the 156,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 war, approximately 20% were displaced from their homes and villages and became “internal” refugees.

Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians within Israel have been subjugated to systematic state-sponsored policies of exclusion, discrimination and subjugation. Israel has a policy of land confiscation and political and economic repression in order to promote a Zionist agenda designed to develop the Jewish population’s economic, political, and cultural infrastructures at the expense of Palestinians pursuit of equality and self-determination. The National Democratic Assembly's principal goal is to fight the inhumane policies and practices of the existing Israeli government through legal and political means. The Israeli authorities massively confiscated Arab-owned lands. By 1993, over 80% of the lands owned by Palestinians living in Israel had been confiscated and allocated for the exclusive use of Jewish citizens.

All are welcome to the talk which is hosted by Trinity One World Society and The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

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