The full speech if Dr Tahboub : Ladies and gentlemen, Assalamu alikum, peace be upon you all. I decided at the last minute that instead of boring you with tables and charts, which state the obvious- which is the suffering that Palestinians have to endure. To speak to you from heart to heart especially in the wake of the press conference held by the UNRWA alongside 50 NGOs last week, highlighting the human catastrophe in Palestine. I’ll take one minute of my time of 8 minutes to ask you to look at your watches and stop breathing. Most of us will not be able to do so for a single minute, because hypoxia (which is the decrease of oxygen in the blood) forces us involuntarily to breathe again. Unfortunately, premature babies on ventilators in Gaza don’t have that luxury. When electricity is cut off, a daily even in Palestine, the switch into emergency generators takes from 30 seconds to one minute to operate, rendering their vulnerable premature brains and putting their lives as a whole at risk. In the United States, convicted prisoners are executed by a lethal dose of potassium, renal failure patients in Gaza die a slow agonizing death because of hyperkalemia, which refers to the rise of potassium in their blood. During the 6 years of siege, 400 renal failure patients in Gaza died due to lack of dialysis equipment, solutions, medicines and lack of trained medical staff. I went to the tunnels in Gaza, where 10.000 Palestinians are very happy that they found work and can put bread on the table but they are a health time bomb as they all already have dust chest diseases. It is only in Gaza that you exchange your lungs and sometimes your life for baby milk. I have been in diaspora for 46 years and my first contact with Palestine was when I went to Gaza during the 2009 war on Gaza, to find that the occupation forces had inflicted 5D on Gaza: death, destruction, disease, degradation and deprivation, which were met with the Capital Majestic D of Defiance. People of Palestine do not need food or medicine and the days of cooking oil and sacks of flour and rice (which later were turned into underwear) are gone, what the Palestinians need is freedom... to be treated as human beings and not as a charity project. People in Palestine have one the highest literacy rates in the world and the highest in the Arab World at 93%, and if Gazans were left to export their strawberries, flowers and to drill their natural gas on the shores of Gaza, they would have an economy which rivals Qatar’s. Darkness is an every night situation in Gaza and when our late Professor, Dr Qandeel Shaker, visited his birth place in Khan Younis after 40 years in the diaspora, he found his nieces and nephews with 8 and 10 children. Expressing his amazement, his 90 year old aunty with years of wisdom behind her, said to him: bless you my nephew, we have occupation, bombings, poverty, no electricity and no fun?? When officials in Gaza heard the story, they said that if the occupation had any common sense, they would pour fuel in Gaza’s power station depos free of charge, but common sense is not common! Palestinians love life and are fun loving people, all they want is what we all want anywhere in the world: freedom, jobs, houses, good education and good health systems, but they have to endure sixty four years of occupation and six years of siege. Mahmoud Sarsak, a promising young Palestinian footballer with a bull neck that would rival Wayne Rooney’s in his prime is on hunger strike nearly 100 days now as he tried to cross to Ramallah to join his national team. Derar Abu Seesi: the Gaza power plant chief engineer was kidnapped in Ukraine whilst visiting his in laws and taken to Israel by Mossad agents using fake passports, but who are we to question Israeli murder and espionage? Moses, the great Prophet of the three Abrahamic faiths: Islam, Christianity and Judaism said to the Pharaoh: let my people go, and I say the same to modern day Pharaohs: let my people go. They say negotiate: we negotiated for 35 years, Begin is dead, Sadat is dead, Arafat is dead, Rabin is dead, Sharon is in between and Mubarak is in jail hopefully not coming back, as the incarnation of another dictator Ahmed Shaafik, but Netenyahu is well alive and kicking: cancelling 3 caravan outposts and rewarding the illegal settlers with 800 housing units in Selwan. About capacity building, PalMed, an organisation I chair in the UK and represent is committed to start kidney transplant programmes in the west bank and Gaza in the next few months, and having local teams within two years. Our funding for this programme is zero but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Ladies and gentlemen, if there would be a refugee conference next year there would be no Palestine and unless the international community forces its will on the illegal occupation and declares an independent Palestinian state at the 67 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital there will be nothing to negotiate about come next year. Might is not right, they have a drone, while I have a dream that the sun of freedom will rise in Palestine soon. And Huda Ghalia: the girl whose family was killed on the Gazan beach, will be able to finish her corn hub in peace and Mahmoud Sarsak will join Manchester United. We condemn the congress’s last attempt to restrict the refugees to those who were forced out of their homes in 1948. As if they were supposed to have no offspring but to die and vanish. Ladies and gentlemen, occupation and siege are the disease, the rest are symptoms and you treat the disease not the symptoms, we must all remember that in 1948 Israel was not established on Mars but on our lands and homes, and unto our land and homes we shall return. I hope we will celebrate the next international refugee day with a free independent Palestinian state and with an implementation of the right of return which guaranteed by international law. Viva Freedom. Viva Palestine. Thank you all for your support and WE SHALL OVERCOME SOME DAY.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 09:46:25 +0000
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