Palestine: History &
Talk by Sr.Sukeina,
8 November 2003
As part of the Ramadan Boycott Israel Campaign Sr.Sukeina was invited
to give a talk to Muslim sisters and brothers at a mosque in south
London. The talk is in two parts, each part approximately 10 minutes
long. She first briefly looks at the history of the tragedy and
then in the second part addresses the question of what our responsibility,
as Muslims living in the west, is towards the Palestinian struggle.
Here we present her talk in full - both the words and the audio.
A moving video on the massacre of Deir Yassin was shown between
the two parts of the talk. A short clip from this video is also
Exhibition on Palestine accompanied the talk
Part 1: History
Brothers and sisters in Islam
As you all know for the past
two years we as a community have been trying to boycott the companies
that support Israel - with mixed success. Today I want to briefly
look at why we are boycotting - touching on the history of Palestine.
Palestine has been a Muslim country
for well over a 1000 years. In that period we have seen numerous
invasions from the West - to steal the land- the crusades.
Finally they took Palestine with
most of the Middle-East at the end of the first world war with the
defeat of the Ottoman State. The Imperialist powers - Britain and
France - carved our land into small pieces to divide between them.
Lebanon, Syria - The French took, Egypt and Palestine - The British
took, and so on. So the British had control over Palestine at the
end of the first world war.
Now, 20 years before this a political
movement called Zionism had started among the Jews, basically Zionism
believed that Jews cannot live with non-Jews, they demanded a land
of their own. They considered many countries like Argentina, Cyprus
and Uganda for their exclusive Jewish state, but they realised that
in order to get support of the Jewish people it would have to be
Palestine with its biblical background. But even then most of the
Jews at the time rejected the idea. The religious Jews condemned
Zionism as a "blasphemy
against Judaism". And in fact on November 10, 1975 the
world condemned Zionism at the UN General Assembly as "a
form of racism and racial discrimination".
It is only with the rise of anti-Semitism
in Europe that Zionism gathered more support among the Jews. The
Zionist realised that their plot to steal Palestine will require
the support from the Imperialist powers of the day. They had predicted
the British take over of Palestine before the end of the first world
war. So they held secret meetings with the British government promising
to be their watchdog in the Middle East, securing British interest
like the Suez Canal in return for Britain's support in the creation
of a Jewish State in Palestine.
A quotation from the British
Prime Minister Sir Campbell Bannerman reveals why Britain found
it imperative to support the creation of a Zionist state in the
heartland of Islam. This is very important - in one quotation it
tells us why they created Israel. This is a quotation from a British
Prime Minister over 40 years before the creation of Israel - he
is talking about Muslims not just Palestinians.
Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman
are people who control spacious territories teeming with manifest
and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world
routes. Their lands were the cradle of human civilizations
These people have one faith,
one language, one history and the same aspirations.
No natural barriers can
isolate these people from one another... if per chance, this
nation were to be unified into one state, it would then take
the fate of the world into its hands and would separate Europe
from the rest of the world.
Taking these considerations
seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the heart of
this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such
a way that it could exhaust its powers in never-ending wars.
It could also serve as a springboard for the West to gain
its coveted objects.
This resulted in the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 in which Britain promised the Zionists a national
home in Palestine. We have to realize that at that time, at the
end of the first world war there were very few Jews in Palestine
- just 56,000 Jews compare to 1 million Palestinians, that's less
than 6% of the population in Palestine.
So Lord Balfour in a confidential
letter revealed the plot and I quote
Palestine we do not propose to even go through the formality
of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants.... The
four powers are committed to Zionism."
The 4 powers being America, Britain,
France and Russia They all conspired to create Israel.
Now we come to the second world
war. After the second world war the British Empire was coming to
an end. The US, the country least exhausted by the war emerged as
a new power in the world, so the Zionists turned to America for
patronage, For the Americans this was an attractive proposal. President
Truman new that a Zionist state, completely dependent on the US
for its daily survival, would be devoted to US interests in the
So in 1946 after the Zionists
blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem, slaughtering 91 innocent
people, the Palestinian issue was hurriedly passed to the UN. The
UN has no legal mandate to partition a country against the wishes
of its people and yet with US domination of the UN, it proposed
a partition plan for Palestine granting 55% of Palestine to the
Jews who in fact owned only 6% of the land.
Even after massive US bullying,
all the countries of Asia and Africa opposed the partition plan,
except for three, one of which was white dominated South-Africa.
The UN ambassador of Haiti began
to cry when he was forced to change his vote, similarly vulnerable
Liberia threatened with a rubber embargo had to obey the US. This
is the sort of shameful open bullying that went on that day to secure
the votes for the partition of Palestine.
The Palestinians obviously rejected
the theft of their land and a war broke out as the ruthless Zionist
soldiers made a grab for the land slaughtering Palestinians wherever
they found them. The Palestinians were left to fight alone; they
had no army and few weapons to oppose the Zionist military who had
been trained and armed by the Britain army.
On 9th April 1948 soldiers of
the Irgun, a particularly fanatic Zionist terrorist group commanded
by Menachem Begin who later became the Prime Minister of Israel,
entered the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. And they slaughtered
250-300 men, women, and children in cold blood. Their bodies were
purposely mutilated to terrorize the rest of the Palestinians into
fleeing their homes from fear of similar massacres, thereby achieving
the Zionist aim of ethnic cleansing.
Menachem Begin himself said:
Yassin massacre was not only necessary but without it the State
of Israel would not have emerged.
At Haifa, Jaffa and other cities
the Zionists terrorized the population into fleeing by broadcasting
horror recordings that filled the air with shrieks and anguish moans
of Muslim women and children, interrupted by a sorrowful voice that
called out in Arabic Flee for your lives, the Jews are using
poisonous gas. As the Palestinians fled Haifa only one phrase
trembled on their lips Deir Yassin, Deir Yassin.
Those that didn't flee were slaughtered
or forcefully removed - over 400 Palestinian cities and villages
were depopulated like this. Over 800,000 Palestinians were expelled
from their homes.
This is how the "foreign
body" - the cancer called Israel was "planted in the heart
of our Islamic nation".
Deir Yassin Video
Brothers and sisters what we
are about to see is one woman's moving eyewitness account of Deir
Deir Yassin - The Agony (3min Video Clip)
The video clip is from the video "Deir Yassin - The Agony"
produced by Press House (Khaled Al-Zighari), Al-Quds. It is available
in both arabic and english, and is distributed in Europe by the
Return Centre (PRC). It costs only £4 (UK) and is one
of several excellent videos that they have on Palestine. Highly
Part 2: Our Responsibility
This slaughter of Muslims in
Palestine - their blood shed on the holy soil of the land of our
first qibla, the Masjid Al-Aqsa, that started with Deir Yassin continues
to this day. We were all witnesses to the barbaric massacre at Jenin
just last year.
We all read about Muntaha Seraya.
How 15 Israeli soldiers beat her and her four children with their
fists and guns after bursting into her home in Jenin. The youngest
was just 4 years old. She herself was four months pregnant.... she
suffered a miscarriage half an hour after the soldiers left.
They used her husband as a human
shield, resting their M-16 rifles on his shoulder as they moved
door to door firing in to the houses. When an israeli sniper shot
the "human shield" by mistake he was left bleeding for
five days before being taken to the hospital.
This is the reality Palestinians
live with every day. We have to ask ourselves what is our responsibility
- mine and yours as Muslims?
Lets see what non-Muslims are
doing in the name of justice. I do not know whether you can see
this photo but you probably know the story of Rachel Corrie.
Israeli army bulldozer used for murder
She wasn't a Muslim, she hadn't
read the Quranic ayat that commands us to stand firmly for justice:
Quran Surah Nissa (4) Ayat 135 :
"O ye who believe!
stand out firmly for justice,
as witnesses to God,
even as against yourselves,
or your parents,
or your kin,
and whether it be (against) rich or poor:
for God can best protect both.
Follow not the lusts (of your hearts),
lest ye swerve,
and if ye distort (justice) or decline to do justice,
verily God is well- acquainted with all that ye do."
Rachel hadn't heard those words,
she wasn't a Muslim, but she felt her responsibility was to stand
against injustice so she went to Palestine. She stood against this
Israeli army bulldozer, defending a Palestinian home from destruction.
The bulldozer drove directly over her, twice, crushing her body
and she lost her life, standing for justice on the 16th of March
Rachel Corrie - stood against injustice
She was only 23 years old with
her whole life in front of her. She had the same aspirations that
all of us have for life and yet she sacrificed her life to stand
So I repeat again what is OUR
responsibility as MUSLIMS?
It is for each of us to look
into our hearts to find the answer. But one thing is clear if we
can not stand for justice like we are commanded to, like Rachel
Corrie did, what we mustn't do is stand on the side of injustice
- we mustn't help the oppressor. For that, there is no justification.
This brings us back to the boycott.
We have a list
of companies here that actively support Israel - the oppressor
Click on the image to see the details
If you have a look at the list
you will see a lot of familiar names like Coca-Cola, McDonalds,
Nestle, Sara Lee, Marks & Spencer etc. Most of them have easy
alternatives you can switch to. Take Coca-Cola for example, there
are so many Muslim alternatives like Mecca-Cola, Qibla-Cola, Zam-Zam-Cola,
Muslim-Up that it becomes difficult to choose which one to go for.
And most of them even give a percentage to a Muslim or Palestinian
charity, so why buy Coke?
A poster created by the youth of the Mosque showing
the products to boycott
and the fatwa of their religious leader Ayatollah Seestani
Our Marja-e-Taqlid Ayatollah
Seestani has given a clear fatwa in his book " A code of practice
for Muslims living in the West." On page 146, fatwa no 249
he says :
is not permissible for a Muslim to buy products of the countries
that are in a state of war with Islam and Muslims, for example
and again on page 150, fatwa
no 265 he is asked a question
it permissible to buy from shops that dedicate part of their profits
to supporting Israel?
and his answer is clear:
do not allow that"
My brothers and sisters my message
for today is stop buying the products of oppression and show your
support for the Palestinians by attending this years Quds
Day demonstration on Sunday 23rd of November - thats in two
Remember it was Imam
Khomeini (RA) who 24 years ago first inaugurated the last Friday
of Ramadan as Quds Day a day of solidarity with the oppressed people
of the world and in particular solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians.
Let us all on that Sunday afternoon,
at least, stand together for justice.