Fatah: “We won’t relinquish a grain of soil… from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River”
Fatah officials:
“We won’t relinquish a grain of soil from the land of historical Palestine
from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River”
“We are at the beginning of an ongoing confrontation,”
Israel will leave as other “invaders” have
Two Fatah officials have recently repeated the PA and Fatah’s uncompromising stance that “Palestine” includes all of the State of Israel in addition to the PA areas and Gaza, and that Jews/Israelis are nothing but temporary “invaders.” This position of course leaves no room for a two-state solution which the PA and Fatah claim – to foreign audiences – they support.
The media spokesperson and “popular resistance coordinator” of Fatah’s Qalqilya branch, Murad Shtewi, stressed that Palestinians view the entire area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as “Palestine,” and that they won’t give up an inch of it. He also called on Palestinians to carry out “a popular revolution” against Israel:
“Shtewi emphasized that the Palestinian people will not relinquish a grain of soil from the land of historical Palestine from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River, despite the American administration’s attempts to allow the occupation state to expand the settlement and legitimize it, and he demanded that our people carry out a popular revolution against the occupation everywhere.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 30, 2019]
At the same event a group of Palestinian scouts held “signs emphasizing the right of our people in Palestine and the return to it from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River.” Palestinian Media Watch has documented that the PA and Fatah espouse the “liberation” of “Palestine” from “the river to the sea,” and teach even children that “Palestine will return” and that this is the end goal.
The head of Fatah’s Jenin branch similarly expressed the view that all of Israel will become “Palestine” as he stated that the Israelis “will leave” as the previous “invaders” have done. He implied that Palestinians will use violence to make this happen, stating that “we are at the beginning of an ongoing confrontation, and are not making do with a rally or procession.”
Head of Fatah’s Jenin Branch Ata Abu Rmeileh: “Our God has honored us and placed us in this land to stand against the invaders and the oppressors. The Tatars, the Mongols, the Crusaders, and the British have left, and these [Israelis] will leave, they will leave [too]. We are carrying out Ribat (i.e., religious conflict over land claimed to be Islamic) in this land. We in the Fatah Movement… today we are at the beginning of an ongoing confrontation, and are not making do with a rally or procession.”
[Official PA TV, Giants of Endurance, Nov. 28, 2019]
Fatah published yet a third expression of the PA’s denial of Israel's right to exist and their claim that all the land between “the sea and the river” is “Palestine”:
“No one can force the Palestinians to renounce their homeland's borders, its name, the shape of its map, and the position of its neighbors’ names in memory, and there are two strong neighbors that have been adjacent to Palestine and protecting it since the dawn of history: The [Mediterranean] Sea to the west and the [Jordan] River to the east – and no one has a right to describe the land that they are protecting between [the river and the sea] with any description other than Palestine.”
[Official Fatah Facebook page, Nov. 29, 2019]
The following are longer excerpts of the statements cited above:
“Dozens of civilians and foreign solidarity activists suffered from suffocation yesterday [Nov. 29, 2019] after they inhaled the toxic gas fired by the occupation army during the oppression of the weekly Kafar Qaddum procession against the settlement…
[Fatah’s] Qalqilya branch media spokesperson and popular resistance coordinator in the village Murad Shtewi emphasized that the Palestinian people will not relinquish a grain of soil from the land of historical Palestine from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River, despite the American administration’s attempts to allow the occupation state to expand the settlement and legitimize it, and he demanded that our people carry out a popular revolution against the occupation everywhere.
In the procession, which set out after Friday prayers, hundreds of members of the village and a number of foreign solidarity activists and Israeli activists participated, led by a group of scouts from the Kafar Qaddum High School for Boys and a number of boy and girl scouts who waved signs emphasizing the right of our people in Palestine and the return to it from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 30, 2019]
Text posted on the official Fatah Facebook page, written by Secretary of Fatah’s Branch in Poland Khalil Nazzal
Posted text: "The daily message
No one has a right to partition my homeland
UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (see note below –Ed.), which was ratified on Nov. 29, 1947, regarding the partition of Palestine will continue to be an example of the way in which this international body violated the principles of justice and the peoples’ rights to sovereignty over their country without external interference. What increases the extent of the crime that this resolution represents is that the UN was established on the ruins of the League of Nations that failed to protect the international security and peace and did not succeed in saving the world from the blights of World War II, and then came the new international body and through its unjust resolution established a new international regime based on denying the peoples' rights, injustice, arbitrariness, and a bias in favor of the Zionist myths that are full of a sick interpretation of history…
No one can force the Palestinians to renounce their homeland's borders, its name, the shape of its map, and the position of its neighbors’ names in memory, and there are two strong neighbors that have been adjacent to Palestine and protecting it since the dawn of history: The [Mediterranean] Sea to the west and the [Jordan] River to the east – and no one has a right to describe the land that they are protecting between [the river and the sea] with any description other than Palestine…
The homeland is larger than the state, and if our people has accepted the idea of establishing a state on part of its homeland, this does not mean that it is prepared to renounce its historical right to the homeland. Our people has already proven its eternal right to Palestine through the national consensus regarding adherence to the right of return, and it is a right that destroys the foundations of the Zionist state as we now know it. Therefore, the various generations’ insistence of holding onto the house keys and property deeds must be directly understood as an absolute rejection of the partition resolution and adherence to the homeland as a complete entity."
[Official Fatah Facebook page, Nov. 29, 2019]
UN Resolution 181 (the UN partition plan for Palestine) was passed by the UN General Assembly in 1947. It called for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem as a separate entity under the rule of a special international body. The Arab state was meant to be comprised of the western Galilee, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and the remaining territory of the Mandate west of the Jordan River would be the state of Israel - Jordan (known at the time as Transjordan) had already been established in what had been the part of the Mandate that was east of the Jordan River. The resolution was accepted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, but Arab leaders and governments rejected it, and launched a war to destroy Israel.
The official PA TV program Giants of Endurance on which the Head of Fatah’s Jenin Branch Ata Abu Rmeileh spoke, as cited above, was about the death of Sami Ahed Abu Diak - Palestinian terrorist who shot and murdered Israeli civilian Ilya Krivitz in Silat Al-Dhar northwest of Nablus on June 20, 2001, and also murdered 3 Palestinians in 2001 who he suspected of aiding Israel. Abu Diak was arrested in 2002, and was serving 3 life sentences and an additional 30 years. Abu Diak died in prison of cancer on Nov. 26, 2019; Israel had provided cancer treatment for him during his imprisonment.