الكاتب: kafej

At this critical juncture, Palestine’s leaders should come together to craft a clear strategy for reunifying the Palestinian people

As Israel continues its war on Gaza, which is causing loss of life and displacement at a scale that has led to it being labeled a “genocide” by various experts, the Palestinian liberation struggle is at a critical juncture.

Despite undoubtedly recognising the importance of the current moment, however, Palestinian political factions, including Hamas and Fatah among others, appear unable to come together and lay out a coherent and realistic vision for the future of Palestine. It’s imperative for them to set aside their differences, acknowledge their moral responsibilities to the nation, and come together to craft a clear strategy for reunifying the Palestinian people. Such a strategy must not only thwart Israel’s well-defined and openly discussed plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and detach it from the Palestinian homeland, but also respond to Israeli efforts to displace Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel itself.

As a Palestinian from Gaza, I believe at this point in the conflict, opportunities are ripe for putting an end to the ongoing war in Gaza, uniting the Palestinian factions, and launching a new political path to end the occupation. There are 10 clear steps that could and should be taken, starting with Palestinian leaders, to achieve this and put our nation on a direct path towards justice, peace and statehood:

1. First and foremost, all Palestinian factions should commit to the fulfilment and eventual expansion of the Qatar-brokered agreement to exchange Israeli captives in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
2. Hamas should declare its acceptance of and commitment to the Fatah reconciliation agreement it signed in Cairo in 2017. It should call on the Palestinian Authority to assume its responsibilities in Gaza and also reassert the commitment of resistance factions in Gaza to all agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). To counter Israel’s destructive post-war plans for Gaza, Palestinian leaders should establish an interim governing council for the Strip comprising technocrats from the region. All past Palestinian Authority personnel from Gaza, including the police, should be called upon to return to their duties. This plan should also include retaining civilian Hamas employees, including the police. The reintegration of Hamas fighters and weaponry into the Palestinian Authority forces after the end of the war should also remain under consideration.
3. Hamas should publicly acknowledge the Peace Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the foundation for a peace process, and agree to the scheduling of elections for the entire Palestinian territory within one year. In return, Israel should be pressured to recognise a reformed Hamas as a mainstream Palestinian political faction and a party to future negotiations.
4. The PLO should be reactivated and reformed in a way that would ensure the representation of all Palestinian parties and components within its structures. Particular emphasis should be placed on empowering young Palestinians, both men and women, taking on consequential roles within the organisation and have a say in the future of Palestine. The reformed PLO should include not only Fatah, Hamas and other PLO factions, but also representatives from the Palestinian diaspora, as well as independent representatives from across the nation. Members of the organisation should be reelected every four years in free and fair elections, and it should be agreed that the organisation will have the final say in all critical issues concerning the Palestinian people until an independent Palestinian state is established.
5. The reconstruction of Gaza should start immediately under international and Arab supervision. While the international community should contribute to funding the project, the brunt of the financial burden should be put on Israel as the occupying power responsible for causing the destruction. The reconstruction effort should be used to put Gaza on the path to achieving sustainable economic growth. It should also aim to address the rapid depletion of the Strip’s environmental resources as a result of the occupation, including issues relating to water and electricity shortages, shrinking fishing areas, and destruction of agricultural land among others.
6. Israel should be made to set up a compensation fund for the families – both Israeli and Palestinian – victimised by its wars, aggressions and occupation. Western countries adopted the idea that Russia would be compelled to pay for its war in Ukraine, and Ukraine would be rebuilt using frozen Russian assets. The Palestinian leadership should insist that the same responsibility is imposed on Israel.
7. International observers should be deployed along Israel’s borders to prevent confrontations. Turkiye [Turkey], which is accepted as an honest broker by the Palestinians and has strong relations with the West and Israel as a NATO member, could be asked to take on this important responsibility.
8. The siege on Gaza should be lifted, fully and unconditionally, with its border crossings, airports and ports reopened and its residents given full freedom of movement. A permanent and secure passage between Gaza and the West Bank should also be established. Turkiye can also play a crucial role in opening Gaza up to the world, by establishing maritime and aerial bridges for reconstruction and development.
9. Israel should be pressured to immediately and unconditionally halt all its settlement activities and initiate comprehensive negotiations for bringing an end to its occupation under UN auspices, based on the 1967 borders, and within a pre-set timeframe of no more than three years. The Arab League should continue to push for its 2002 Arab Peace Initiative which called for all Arab states to recognise and normalise relations with Israel in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Any further attempts at normalisation should be frozen until this is achieved.
10. Finally, if this political track towards sustainable peace and dignified co-existence fails or faces a significant roadblock, a reformed PLO that is kept in check by the Palestinian people through regular elections should be accepted as the sole entity that could decide on the future direction and nature of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Finland has accused Russia of pushing asylum seekers to its eastern border, which Russia denies.

The European Union’s border protection agency, Frontex, is set to deploy 50 officers to Finland after an increase in asylum seeker arrivals at its eastern border with Russia.

Frontex said on Thursday that in addition to border guard officers and other staff, the agency would send equipment such as patrol cars “to bolster Finland’s border control activities”.

The reinforcement is expected to be on the ground “as soon as next week”, it said in a statement.

Finland on Wednesday said it would shut all but its northernmost border crossing with Russia after it recorded an increase in arrivals of undocumented migrants.

Helsinki said Moscow was to blame, with Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo accusing the Russian authorities of “a systematic and organised action” of facilitating the entry of the migrants.

“Undoubtedly Russia is instrumentalising migrants” as part of its “hybrid warfare” against Finland, Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said on Wednesday.

Finland joined NATO in April after decades of military non-alignment and pragmatic friendly relations with Moscow. Its 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Russia serves as the EU’s external border and makes up NATO’s northeastern flank.

Moscow has denied it is funnelling desperate asylum seekers to the Finnish border.

More than 600 asylum seekers have entered Finland via Russia in November, compared with only a few dozen in September and October.

They were mostly from countries including Yemen, Afghanistan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, according to border officials. Most were young men in their 20s, but some were families with children, border guard data and photos from news outlets showed.

Stopping short of naming Russia, Frontex head Hans Leijtens said in a statement that the agency was bolstering support to Finland as it was facing “hybrid challenges”.

“This collaboration shows that when facing complex border issues, Europe stands united, offering support through tangible actions,” Leijtens added.

Frontex currently has 10 officers working at the borders of Finland.

In 2021, 3,000 to 4,000 asylum seekers became stranded in a no-man’s land on the border between Poland and Belarus as Warsaw deployed security forces to stop people from entering amid freezing winter temperatures.

Lithuania and Latvia also reported sharp increases in the number of people trying to cross their borders at the time.

The EU and Warsaw said Minsk was deliberately enticing migrants and refugees to Belarus and then pushing them westwards with promises of easy entry into the bloc, and accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of masterminding the crisis.

When Mahtowin Monro thinks back to the Thanksgivings of her childhood, she remembers the pageants.

It was an elementary school tradition to divide the class in two, with some children dressed as Pilgrims — in bonnets and tall hats — and others assigned to represent Indigenous peoples, with paper feathers and headbands.

Together, they were meant to act out the holiday myth: that early settlers in the United States embraced their newfound Indigenous neighbours with open arms and a hearty feast.

But even as a child, Monro could sense that depiction was wrong. Now, she helps lead a ceremony meant to honour the real history of Indigenous peoples in North America — a history she believes Thanksgiving plays a part in erasing.

On the fourth Thursday of November, timed to the US Thanksgiving holiday, she and other members of the group United American Indians of New England (UAINE) gather in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to hold a National Day of Mourning.

The event is part protest, part remembrance, part spiritual ceremony. It not only acknowledges the ongoing violence against Indigenous people but also brings together speakers on a range of issues, from environmental destruction to fishing rights.

Monro, who identifies as Oglala Sioux, attended her first National Day of Mourning in the mid-1980s and said she was instantly hooked.

“It was, to me, so amazing,” Monro said. “I really liked the idea that there were Native people in New England — some of whom had been told growing up that they were extinct — that were there speaking about their history and what was going on with them now.”

It was at the ceremony that she met the late Indigenous leader Wamsutta Frank James, who would eventually be the grandfather to her twin children.

An Aquinnah Wampanoag man, James was among the founders of the National Day of Mourning in 1970.

At the time, he had been invited to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival to Plymouth — but event organisers revoked the offer after screening his remarks, which referenced the atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples.

“Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees,” Frank wrote in his suppressed speech.

“What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important.”

Rejected from the anniversary event, Frank instead organised a protest on Cole’s Hill, overlooking Plymouth Bay — a tradition Monro and her daughter Kisha James carry on to this day.

Monro spoke to Al Jazeera about her memories of Frank and why reimagining holidays can be a tool for empowerment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Al Jazeera: Why do you think that they approached Wamsutta to speak? And what were they expecting him to say?

Mahtowin Monro: Well, he was very well known in the area as the head of the Federated Eastern Indian League. He was quite prominent. And I think there was this idea that he was going to come and praise the Pilgrims.

They thought that he would come and say, “Oh, we’re so grateful that the Pilgrims came, and we all got along, and everything has been great.”

He wrote his speech along with his wife. I want to give her credit. It wasn’t just him. But he very carefully used Pilgrim sources such as Mourt’s Relation and other things they had written. He certainly couldn’t go and praise the Pilgrims, but he also felt it was important to tell the truth about what had happened.

Thanksgiving was not a happy time for him or other Wampanoag people because it represents a celebration of the invasion and all the devastation that would follow for Indigenous people in the region. So he was very clear about that.

By today’s standards, his suppressed speech is actually pretty tame. People now would say things even more forcefully, but the state wanted to see his remarks in advance. And when he sent them, they said, “Oh no, you can’t go and give that.”

Al Jazeera: How do you think that the rejection of the speech shaped him as a person and as a leader?

Monro: Certainly he was not going to go give a speech that would be palatable to these state officials. He was not going to give a speech in praise of the Pilgrims and all the good that they had supposedly done for Indigenous peoples, when that was completely counter to any historical reality.

He had been somebody whose family had suffered a lot of discrimination. I’ll give you an example. He was, we believe, the first Native man to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music. He was an incredibly talented musician, a trumpet player.

When he got to the end of his courses at the New England Conservatory, he was told by his primary teacher, who cared about him very much: “You’re the best trumpet player in this class, but no symphony orchestra in the country will hire you because of the colour of your skin.”

And that was true because he was dark-skinned. At the time, all the orchestras in the country were all white, right? So, given all his talent, he couldn’t get a job.

He experienced tremendous discrimination in his life, as did his family. All his siblings, all of them would talk about how they had to run faster and study harder and do everything better to try to overcome all the prejudice that they dealt with.

I think that’s why he felt strongly — well before 1970 — that it was important for Indigenous people in the region to be united and to work together to assert themselves as Indigenous people and to demand respect from the white people.

Al Jazeera: You and your daughter Kisha are very much keeping his legacy alive and keeping this ceremony alive. How did he inspire you? How did he shape your work today?

Monro: I learned everything about the Day of Mourning from him — how to do things and what the traditions were, that sort of thing. I spent many hours talking to him about that, to understand them more fully.

I didn’t at the time know that I would end up being a leader in the organization, but certainly it led to that. And he was very supportive. He also felt that it would be important to have more women out front. To be honest, although women had always done a lot of the work, they weren’t necessarily out front as speakers or leaders within the organization.

What I learned from him is to just keep doing this, because it’s really important to do this kind of educational work and speak truth to power and tell the truth about our history.

Al Jazeera: There’s this larger push to question holidays like Thanksgiving and Columbus Day and, in some cases, reimagine those holidays entirely. Why is it important to interrogate holidays and question the history that they celebrate?

Monro: Our organization obviously does more in the year than just organising the National Day of Mourning. One of the things that we do is we do work on Indigenous Peoples’ Day campaigns — that is, campaigns to abolish Columbus Day and celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead.

We’ve been doing that for several years now. In Massachusetts, for instance, we have managed to get resolutions passed in at least 30 towns. But we’re also trying to get it passed on a statewide basis.

The celebration of [European explorer Christopher] Columbus is really harmful. It gives us the idea that Native people were these passive people, just waiting for Columbus to arrive — just waiting to be discovered — when, in fact, they had many, many different cultures and were perfectly successful on their own.

But it continues to be presented that Columbus and all the Europeans who came somehow brought civilisation to us. All of this is really damaging. It is damaging if you’re a kid and you’re Native. You know, Columbus was a genocidal maniac. We don’t hide that from our kids.

It is damaging not just to our kids but any kid to learn nonsense like that. It’s the worst kind of settler colonial nonsense. It erases us and presents their version of history as the only true history. So these things are really embedded throughout American culture, and it’s really important to resist that and to call it out.

Al Jazeera: Have you ever heard any pushback about the National Day of Mourning? And how do you address misconceptions or concerns that you hear?

Monro: Well, we address them individually, or sometimes we don’t address them at all.

There are people who absolutely resist any truth-telling. They don’t want to hear about the genocide of Indigenous people. They want to have this very pretty George-Washington-and-cherry-pie kind of history that doesn’t tell the truth.

So we’re not going to change their minds and really don’t waste our time fighting with them. But there are a lot of other people: settlers who’ve grown up with all this mythology, with all this nonsense. When they start to find out the truth, they’re actually pretty mad that they were lied to for so long.

So I think it’s really important for non-Native people to experience being with Native people and listening to us and getting a better understanding. They don’t understand whose land they are on. And believe me, we make that clear.

Two migrants have died in the English Channel after trying to reach the UK from France.

A man and a woman, both believed to be in their 30s, were found lifeless at around 1.30pm on Wednesday near Boulogne-Sur-Mer, the local prosecutor told Le Monde.

They were among 60 people found on board a dinghy that had got into distress.

Several of the group had fallen into the sea and were suffering from hypothermia when they were brought to shore for treatment.

But medics were unable to save the two people found unresponsive.

They are the seventh and eighth migrants to die at sea off the French coast so far this year.

The six others – all from Afghanistan and aged between 21 and 34 – lost their lives on 12 August.

Reports of the newest deaths come ahead of the two-year anniversary of the single greatest loss of life in the Channel in recent history when 27 migrants drowned on 24 November 2021.

At least 27,708 people have crossed to the UK aboard small boats so far this year, according to government data compiled and analysed by Sky News.

This is 34% lower than at the same time in 2022, when 42,206 people had succeeded in making the dangerous journey.

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Despite the overall number of people making the life-threatening trip in 2023 being lower than last year, the number of people being packed aboard each boat has increased – a sign that smugglers are seeking to make more profit, at the expense of safety.

An average of almost 49 people have been found on board each boat that made it to the UK so far this year. It was 41 per boat last year and just 13 in 2020.

On Thursday, revised official figures showed that net migration to the UK in 2022 was at a record high of 745,000.

Police in Dublin are dealing with a “serious incident” after a stabbing involving several children outside a school in the city centre.

Police said five people including three young children, a man and a woman have been taken to hospitals in the Dublin region.

One of the children, a girl, and the woman are being treated for serious injuries.

The other two children and the man are being treated for less serious injuries, according to police.

Police are currently at the scene on Parnell Square East and are being assisted by other emergency services.

“Five casualties have been taken to various hospitals in the Dublin region,” an Irish police spokesperson said.

“The casualties include an adult male, an adult female and three young children.

“One child, a girl, has sustained serious injuries, the other two children are being treated for less serious injuries.

“An Garda Siochana is in contact with parents of all three injured children.”

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