A joint GCC – Open Discussions meeting held on May 20th 2008
Dr Dawood Abdulla: There are a number of assertions that must be made at the outset. After 60 years the Right of Return (ROT) remains rooted and Israel continues to deny readmission to the refugees.
The continuity of the conflict has not only been due to the occupation of Palestinian land but also the denial of the ROR. The exercise of the ROR is fundamental to the exercise of self-determination but can only be exercised on the land from which the Palestinians came.
Over the years and most recently Israel has refused to allow tihd despite binding international commitment and laws which demand it. It has given various spurious excuses, all of which violate international law, namely:
(a) That their return would distort the ‘Jewish character’ of the state of Israel
(b) That their homes were destroyed and therefore it is impracticable
(c) That there is insufficient land
(d) That they are not nationals of Israel
(e) That they can return to the Palestinian state in the West Bank
(f) That is is not bounded by Resolution 194 because it is a General Assembly resolution.
Each of these arguments can be refuted. The UN never intended to set up an exclusive and racially pure Jewish state when it partioned Palestine. The resolution called for the enactmant of a democratic constitution. Needless to say the partition itself had no legal basis as the sovereign ownership of the land rested with the Palestinian people. They were not consulted. The case of Namibia and South Africa were resolved at the ICJ. Palestine could have gone that way also.
The destruction and change of names of places and property does not in any way signify a transfer of ownership. Let it be remembered that when the state of Israel was created the Jews in Palestine owned a mere six percent of the land. They passed what was called the Absentee Property Law and seized the property of the refugees. Without the use of the refugee property Israel enriched itself. The refugees still hold the legal deeds and are entitled to restitution of the property in accord with Resolution 194.
The claim that there is insufficient land is untenable. About 85% of Israelis live on 15% of the land. In southern Israel the population density is six persons per sq km. In the Gaza Strip it is 6,000. Eighty-three percent of Gazans are refugees. They come mainly from 231 villages in southern Israel and live within 50kms of their homes. Ninety percent of all refugees live within a one hundred mile radious of their homes. The Israelis say there is insufficient land but they managed to bring one million settlers from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and Omert seeks to bring another 250,000 from Germany.
Under the law of state succession – a subset of the law of nations – Israel is obliged to readmit the refugees, regardless of how they left or how long ago that occurred. The Nationality Law passed in 1952 denies the refugees Israeli citizenship.
The current claim that they should return to a West Bank state is a violation of their rights. There must be no confusion betewen return of the refugees to their homes and the sovereignty of the proposed state of Palestine. Sovereignty is a political act in which a state extends its recognised authority over a territory. The right of return is an inalienable right applied to man and his home wherever his home is located. This is shy Resolution 194 says those wishing to return should be allowed to return to their homes and property.
This resolution resolves that the refugees wishng to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property to those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made god by the governments or authorities responsible.
There are options for the resolution of refugee problems: (a) repartiration, (b) integration on places of exile (c) resettlement in third countries.
Repatriation has always been the favoured solution. The Palestinians want to return but all efforts are made to prevent this. It is their insistence that has kept the issue alive and on the agenda of all initiatives despite Isreal’s best efforts to ignore it.
In 2001 an All Party British Delegation visited the camps and found that the Palestinians wanted to return. Efforts to resolve the matter have failed because it was approached purely as a security or humanitarian problem i.e. the provision of relief and humanitarian aid.
The problem is or course a legal and political one, directly stemming from the national rights of the Palestinian people. The problem of the Palestine Arab refugees has arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights under the Charter of the Uinted Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNGA Rresolution 2535 (XX1V) B, 10 December 1969).
Their return to their homes is not a product of peace. On the contrary it is a necessary condition for the transition to peace. Towards this end Resolution 3089 D notes the enjoyment by the Palestine Arab refugees of their right to return to their homes and property, recongised by the General Assembly Resolution 194 is indispensable ‘for a just settlement of the refugee problem’.
As it stands, the injustice of expulsion cannot be rectified by another act of wrong-doing. No opinion poll, survey or referendum can nullify, negate or divest the individual Palestinian of his right of return. At best, these can only be used to obstruct and delay the exercise of this right.
While politics does have a deinite role to play in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the centrality of international law has an even more important role. In the past, the primacy of the law of nations has been subjected to the dicates of international plitics and the balance of power in the region. Any further attempts to resolve the Palestinian refugee issue outside the framework of international law must be challenged.
The issue of the Palestinian refugees cannot be resolved through exclusive ‘negitations’ between the politically unequal Israel and the PLO. It is only on the leve grounds of international, humanitairan and human rights law could the parties attain parity.
As long as the refugee issue remains unresolved the region is well poised to witness more instaiblity and turmoil. In the final analysis the misery, insecurity and mayhem of the camps woudl only end when the Palestinian refugees are allowed to exercise their right of return.
This would only be realised when Israel is confronted with the legal and political consequences of its usurpation of Palestinian land and forces expulsion of its people. The present approach of lamenting about the complexity of the problem is patently farcical as it serves no other purpose than buying precious time for the Zionists to crate more ‘facts on the ground’.
Rabbi Cohen: I would like to thank the organisers of this event for giving me the opportunity to talk to you this evening. Let me briefly introduce myself. First of all let me pray to the Almighty that the deliberations we are involved in this evening should be true and correct in their content and in their conclusion. People can easily lead themselves down the wrong path and we have to be constantly aware of this.
I am what is known as an Orthodox Jew, that is a Jew who tries to live his life according to the text of the Jewish way of life, the Jewish religion. I am here under the banner of the Neturi Kata. It is not really a group or party. It is a philosophy held by authentic Orthodox jewery in opposition to Zionism. The name means literary guardians of the city. It refers back to something in our literature where a wise man came to our city and who asked who are your guardians? They pointed to the soldiers and he said no, they are not the guardians of the city, they are the destroyers. The guardians are the wise men who teach you how to behave and how to ensure the correct continuation of the community as the guardians of the city.
What happened Palestine before the Zionist era there was a small indigenous Jewish population who lived for centuries, as in many other Arab and Muslim lands, with the Muslim community and they managed very well indeed.
When the Zionist pioneers colonised Palestine with a view to making it an exclusively Jewish state they were essentially secular Jews. The indigenous population were staunch religious Jews and they were very alarmed at the whole effect. They set up Neturi Kata in opposition to the Zionists.
We have a religious and humanitarian duty to spread our message. To those who are not familiar with the situation Jewish and Zionist is considered the same. Our message is that not all the Jews are Zionists but Zionism and Judaism are two diametrically opposed concepts. I would like to explain that a bit. The opposition to Zionists and Zionism by Orthodox Jews is based on two grounds: the grounds of religious belief and Jewish values which are also shared by other religions on humanitarism. There is very strong opposition on both of those grounds.
The different concept is as follows. Let us look at it first of all from a religious point of view. Judaism is an age-old way of life which goes back thousands of years. Our teaching is that it was divinely revealed to the Jewish people 3500 years ago both in the form of the written law, which is the Bible and in conjunction with it was the oral law. The two are linked entirely together. The written law cannot be understood without the oral law which has been handed down from pupil to teacher from generation to generation and was later embodied in the Talmud and a variety of books and literature which developed from that.
The Jewish way of life, the values of Judaism teaches us what to do with all aspects of our lives from the cradle to the grave. It is an ethical, moral and religious way of life. Zionism is a new movement. It came into being approximately 100 years ago by people who had moved away from the religious way of life. It lacked any moral, ethical or religious values. It was a purely a nationalist philosophy. It did not accept the authority of almighty God. So it is a totally different concept.
Specifically we have to look at the approach of Judaism to the question of Palestine and the Holy Land. How the Jewish religion looks at it and how Zionism looks at it. We are taught in our religious teachings that the Jewish people would like in the land of Palestine known as the Holy Land. But this was subject to conditions. This is all written in our teachings. The conditions that we had to maintain certain ethical, moral and religious standards otherwise the Jewish people would be dispersed into a divinely decreed state of exile.
The Jewish people after their initial formation from approximately the first 1500 years of their existence were in the Holy Land. But sadly the conditions were not maintained so as was foretold the Jewish people were dispersed throughout the world during the past 2000 years. They have been swept to the four corners of the globe. We are taught that this is a divinely decreed exile and under the terms of that exile we have to live as loyal citizens in any country in which we find ourselves. We are not allowed in any way to force the issue and try and break out of this exile by the efforts of our hands. So we are not allowed to form a state of our own in Palestine. So that his the Jewish religious approach. Our duty is to live peaceful lives where ever we are, even in Palestine. We are not allowed to form a state in Palestine.
The Zionist idea was totally different. It started 100 years ago and was introduced by secular Jews who did not accept that their exile was divinely decreed. They believed they had to get their act together and force the issue. It was a nationalistic idea to form a nation of our own. At one time it was mooted that they could set up a homeland in Uganda. The Zionists opted for Palestine as it had a long strong cultural association with the Jewish people. They were able to set up a state in Palestine. At the beginning of Zionism most of the Jews were opposed to their ideas.
As far as forming a state is concerned the concept of Zionism flies completely in the face of the Jewish approach as was brought down through the ages. This nationalistic idea does not exist. To compound the problem the Zionists wanted to form a state in Palestine. There was an already indigenous population in Palestine and it is well recorded and documented both in the Zionist writings and in their statements that they would consciously over rule the wishes of the indigenous people by driving them away. That was their underlying aim right from the start.
When they started coming into Palestine in the early 1900s, the early pioneers, and the local population of the Palestinians realised that here was a group that wanted to set up a sectarian state, a state just for themsevles so of course confrontation resulted. That is the confrontation which has existed from that day on.
There was reference before that there was no justification for Zionism since its formation of the state. Confrontation led to violence, violence led to bloodshed, bloodshed on both sides, Jewish and Palestinian, and that has been the picture from approximately 100 years ago right up to the present time. As the previous speaker said there has been no advancement whatsoever. The bloodshed that we see, the horrible, brutal bloodshed that we see today of the Palestinians is the result of the confrontation which was started by the Zionist idea of producing a sectarian state over and above the wishes of the Palestinians.
This is a shocking contravention to the basic Jewish values of humanitarism. So we have opposition both on the grounds of religious belief and on grounds of humanitarism. The existence of the Zionist state is the underlying cause of the bloodshed in the Middle East. The Zionists claim it is supposed to be a safe haven for the Jews. I think history will show it has been the most dangerous place for the Jews in the world since the Second World War where both the Jews and the Palestinians have died in their thousands. What sort of safe haven is that?
Zionism was set up to produce a sectarian state. The President of of the United States says the only true democratic state in the Middle East is Israel. It is absolutely ludicrious. It is democratic for one group but not for the occupants of that area.
So the Orthodox Jewish view is that the Zionist state is criminal and a flawed concept, both on religious and humanitarian grounds.
I am often asked how many people in the Jewish nation agree with the views I am putting to you this evening. This is a good question. I did say earlier that at the beginning of Zionism it was almost universally opposed by all sections of the Jewish people. But after the Second World War there was a tragic refugee situation and the refugees were enticed by Zionists to come to Palestine. It is a well known fact that President Roosevelt was prepared to absorb all of them into the USA. The USA had to not used its immigration quote during the years of the Second World War. They would have been prepared and able to absorb the refugees and they would have been prepared and able to go to the USA.
But the Zionists had to build their majority in Palestine and this was an opportunity. After the Second World War they jumped on the bandwagon and they use it as a very pillar for supporting the state. They said lets get all these Jews to Palestine. Many Orthodox Jews went to Palestine at that time. The difference between Judaism and Zionism became fudged because they were living in a Zionist state.
Today most of the members of the non Orthodox Jewish nation, and that is sadly the majority do support Zionism although there is a small minority that denounce the humanitarian flaws of Zionism apart from the religious flaws.
But from the Jewish orthodox point of view it is fair to say that the majority of orthodox Jews have no problem with the dissolution of the Zionist state. If this entity was dissolved and replaced with another regime they would have no problem with that. They have no ideological attraction to Zionism. But even within that grouping there are different opinions of how to deal with the fact that for the time being the Zionist state does exist. So what do you do if you want to live in the country? Do you co-operate with the Zionists if you want to live in the country? Some of them did not because they support the Zionists but from a practical point of view.
Neturi Kata says there should be no co-operation with the Zionist state because it is flawed. It is a criminally flawed concept with which there should be no co-operation and many of us are prepared to say this is public to the severe annoyance of our Zionist brethren.
We have the authority of history. The majority of religious authorities did not approve of Zionism. The people who have settled in the West Bank are staunch supporters of the Zionist ideology and they claim their views are part of the Jewish religion.
They draw from Jewish religious sporadically and cherry pick the statements which say that the land of Israel should belong to the Jews. They do ignore the fact that this was subject to conditions and that now we are in a divinely decreed exile and this does not apply now. But the orthodox Jews have the authority of history. The Jewish religion is thousands of years old. The nationalist idea of forming a state in Palestine is a new idea, only 100 years old. If Zionism was part of Jewism it would have been around thousands of years ago. That in itself is a very simple way to show that the fact that their claim is not correct.
The Zionists are very clever and powerful in their claims and they claim that they represent the Jewish people but since the whole concept of Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing they cannot claim that they represent the Jewish people. The identity of the Jew is different from that of the Zionist. They represent Zionists, they do not represent Jews.
This leads on to a very important point that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semetism. The Zionists claim they have to have a state to combat anti-Semetism. But they very often cause animosity against Jews because of their actions and because the world assumes that Zionism and Judaism are the same thing. That can in itself lead to a new form of anti-Semetism. The old form of Anti-Semetism was a bigotted hatred which thankfully, specially since WW2, does not show itself and the Jews live peacefully in every country. The new form of animosity has developed because of the new and brutal Zionist philosophy in Palestine. People say if this what the Jews are like we are right in our animosity towards them. Therefore we must differentiate and say that Zionism is not Judaism. Anti-Zionism should not be equated with anti Semetism.
We have a terrible impasse in Palestine. We talk about peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This is a contradiction in terms. The very concept of Israel and Zionism can never satisfy the Palestinians and there will not be peace in the Middle East until there is a total, we hope peaceful, dissolution of the Zionist state. The concept of the Zionist state is flawed and criminal. Our prayer is that there should be a total peacefull dismantling of the Zionist state speedly to be replaced by a regime which would be entirely in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinian people. We would have to step back and let the Palestinians decide what sort of regime they want to have, whether it is secular, democratic, or an Islamic state. We would go along with that.
Jewish people have lived in Muslim states for centuries and there have been no problems. Because the Zionist state is flawed and false it cannot last. Falsehood comes to an end eventually. We don’t know how. We hope peacefully. At the moment it is a dream because the Zionist state is a powerful entity supported by the United States but we have in our lifetime seen tremendous changes. Who would have dreamt that the apartheid state in South Africa would come to an end comparatively bloodlessly. When I was a young man it was generally accepted that the apartheid state in South Africa would not end without a blood bath. There was no blood bath. It was not a bed of roses but it came to an end in a much easier way. It came to an end because the nations of the world accepted that apartheid was a flawed concept. That view has not been adopted yet regarding the Zionist state of Israel.
Who would have dreamt that the mighty edifice of the Soviet Union would disappear, fizzle out over night almost bloodlessly. So it can come. We have to pray for the peaceful dissolution of the Zionist state where Jew and Arab will be able to live peacefully alongside each other as they did for centuries. And may we end with a prayer when the glory of the almighty will be revealed over the whole world and all mankind will live in peace with each other.
Arzu Merali: Salam to you. I am conscious that I don’t want to take up too much of your time so I just want to throw out a few thoughts. I have been doing this human rights – activism work for a long time. I am 37 and I started as a teenager and I have a few decades behind me.
What I would like to talk about is perhaps a more personal view of activism, specifically as a Muslim activist over the past few decades going through different phases of campaigning and so on and methodologies.
The chair used the phrase ‘the age of cynicism’ and the question came to my mind when I was asked to make this presentation was that as a civil society organisation we have the motto that the role of civil society organisations is to speak truth to power. I remember this coming very prominently when we made a decision to embark on a project which was about articulating what Muslims in the United Kingdom thought policies to Tony Blair and now to Gordon Brown.
Speaking truth to power is not something we particularly like to do as an organisation because we felt speaking to the government about human rights is fairly bankrupt. Reviewing that in the past few months as I was asked to speak today it came to my mind to ask is that really the job or the only job. It came up specifically in the context about talking about Palestine. I could sit here for many long hours and send you all to sleep with many success stories about Muslims campaigning whether it is work I have been involved with or seen at the Islamic Human Rights Commission or other organisations.
Only a few months ago we had a very absurd case in Saudi Arabia when a women was raped and then she was actually sentenced to lashes herself while the attackers were given reduced sentences. After some campaigning on this there was backtracking by the Saudi authorities on this. The punishment of lashes was lifted. There were schools in the UK that wanted to ban the hijab and people like ourselves got involved and there was victory. There are even bigger cases that we can talk about when governments have actually changed policies.
But when we sit down and think about the world – what has campaigning done on the issue of Palestine – it starts to get a bit difficult. You really are a bit stuck to see what has happened in the last 20, ten or even five years that has had a seismic shift.
I was fortunate enough to grow up in the anti apartheid movement and see that sea change and see how the impossible happened in front of our eyes: the legal dismemberment of apartheid. If you talk to member of the ANC today they will still argue that they are living in a very racially divided society and we are now in the ethical mode of transforming society in a different way.
When it comes to Palestine and how to begin dismantling the project of Israel where are we at. We see successive governments who are not the least bit sympathetic to say the least about this issue. We have had the odd success here and there – the odd minister has said this or that. Some people lost their jobs because they spoke out in support of the Palestinian struggle. But on the whole we might start getting a very negative picture about where campaigning takes us. The solidarity movement, direct action, campaigns in Palestine, Check point Watch where people go in front of thanks and stop bulldozers. You can get a bit disheartened.
As a bit of an aside I have just returned from Belgium on a completely different issue where I went with a colleague to look at issues facing Muslims in Europe. We had a meeting with about ten women most of whom were Muslim in Antwerp. I was asking many questions. One of the women said I have never thought about it so systematically – I am having such a bad time here. When I sit down and start analysing I can become rather despondent and depressed.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission of which I am a part, organised a conference a couple of weeks ago marking the 60th anniversary of the Nakba and the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was an opportune moment to look at how these two projects have progressed, creating a state of Israel and promoting universal human rights for everyone.
In the run up to this when I was speaking to one of the speakers who was talking about the right to water he said something to me which made me change the way I thought about our activism on Palestine. He said it is not the job of the Islamic Human Rights Commission or any other organisation whether its Oxfam or Amnesty to just sit there and speak truth to power. Power knows what it is doing and doesn’t really care. The issues we are facing right now is that we need to speak truth to ordinary people because ordinary people at the moment are unaware of what their own right are and are under continuous bombardment particularly on the issue of Palestine to divest themselves of the process of campaigning for justice.
In the past ten years we have seen relentless attacks, the demonisation of Palestinians, the demonisation of the struggle for justice, for freedom, for liberation which is really the same struggle as that of the people in South Africa twenty or thirty years ago. And yet we see such a huge anti-Palestinian movement. You start to realise that where we are standing as a campaigner. Now I am talking pretty much about everyone in the room because at the end of the day everyone has to be a campaigner even if it just means from an Islamic perspective to hate something in your heart, if you can’t do anything else.
Our job is to understand what is happening and to transfer that understanding to other people. We have been under a sort of siege now on the issue of Palestine. It is treated differently from other human rights issues. I am not saying this is a deliberate conspiracy on the part of the United Nations. There is a whole section of the UN which deals with Palestinian refugees which is separate from the other refugee bodies. There are specific reasons for this. The scale of the problem is huge but at the same time it has a sort of effect on the psyche of people working within the human rights community that perhaps these are not real refugees, they don’t have the same status as other refugees being dealt with by the other refugee mechanisms in the United Nations.
So for all of us it is about picking up on the knowledge and pushing it forward. I am guessing that most of the people in the room are pro-Palestinian. From my own experience I have a rather pathetic confession as someone who has been campaigning for Palestine for 28 years is that while I have been privileged to edit the journal of Palestine Internationalist for the past two years I have come across article after article submitted by people working on the ground.
This happened particularly last year when we were covering human rights abuses and I sat down and read about something I did not know was happening. I did not know the situation was so severe. I will give you an example of how important campaigning is and how it can succeed just in the transfer of knowledge. This was to do with checkpoints and the effect that they had on the lives of Palestinian people.
Everyone knows about cases where pregnant Palestinian women have been stopped at check points and not allowed to cross over to go to the hospital. They were forced to give birth by the roadside. Most people know about these cases. The penny didn’t drop for me about how traumatic the effect of checkpoints is on the everyday lives of people in Palestine until I read an article by the founder of an organisation called Checkpoint Watch. This is a group of Jewish women who sit at checkpoints across the occupied territories and monitor what is going on. They try to intervene and get some help for people who are in very desperate situations.
I sat there and realised that sometimes people just cannot get to work. Going to work is not just like you and me going to work where we get a good wage or if we don’t get a good wage we get some satisfaction from it. These are people going to do demeaning jobs for a kind of slave wage. They have to humiliate themselves just to get the means to live a meagre existence. We often don’t realise the scale of poverty amongst Palestinians. We do not think of it as a humanitarian disaster in the same way as we think about some countries in Africa or people in the wake of a natural disaster. What happens to people in Burma and places of that.
To get other people to understand does create a movement. I have to go back to the case of South Africa and the transformation in the way in which people thought. I am old enough to remember Mrs Thatcher talking about in a very derogatory way about the aspirations of South Africans. You have the highest standard of living in Africa – what the hell are you moaning about.
The infrastructure of the state was crushing the people – their dignity and their humanity did change. There was an alternative media and people were trying to get understanding out.
There has been a silent success story of campaigning in Palestine which is different from all the other success stories with Amnesty International campaigns and not so big but just as exciting IHC campaigns which we do and get a prisoner out of prison. There is a movement there. Everybody in this rooms needs to latch on to this and understand at this time that when 60 years of Israel is being celebrated as if there was some kind of glory in that there is a huge challenge ahead of us.
There is one aspect of campaigning on Palestine which I want to allude to before I finish. It looks back to happier times when the Twin Towers were still standing and there wasn’t such a huge excuse to demonise Muslims and every kind of dissent in the world. In the summer of 2001 at the world conference against racism in Durban, South Africa. It was a meeting convened by the United Nations in which civil society has a huge part to play.
One of the things that happened – and it is worth bearing in mind as it is not beyond the realms of possibility that a similar movement could not happen again. The facts are stacked against it not the least of which is a very organised Zionist project to demonise what happen in Durban in 2001 and to stop it happening again. There will be a follow-up conference next year. We don’t know exactly where or when.
I don’t think anyone who went to the 2001 conference expected that Palestine was going to feature in the way that it ultimately did. I think in part in was due to the very courageous input of Neturi Kata who held up placards saying that Zionism is racism and so on. It was such a symbolic image. Many civil society organisations were able to create a very pro-Palestine agenda although be it that the governments did not want to listen. The symbolism of it was a very special moment. I can’t adequately describe it and looking back on it it seems surreal given the events of the past years for Muslims, the Arab world and oppressed people generally. There was a unity across civil society that I have not seen before or since. There is a real momentum that people are not going to shut up about Palestine anymore. There was a euphoria among many of us – a real high. For once the agenda had been set by Muslim activists acting in concert with Jewish activists and civil society organisations from all sorts of backgrounds. People of faith and no faith and leftist organisations from the USA who were latching on to this movement.
The impetus came from Muslims and we do not have the best kind of reputation when it comes to being in the forefront of things particularly in the last seven years but even before. As activists we tend to adopt a knee jerk reaction. If something happens our movements kick in. There was the feeling that for once oppressed people had set the agenda and it can be done.
It is not as if before 9/11 they were rosy days and people were not scared of being targetted by the secret police and the things that people are worried about now.
Just to end up I would ask people to think about this issue because to be brutally honest there is a tendency for us to say what has campaigning on Palestine achieved. There isn’t a single Democratic or Republican candidate in the USA saying anything vaguley useful. We are in the same situation we were in ten or twenty years ago with regard to the Arab government. They are the people who, if we use the South African analogy, should be the frontline states for the Palestinian struggle.
When you start looking at your job and who it is your duty to speak truth to then you start finding a way, in sha Allah to start a movement on Palestine. This is not to say that nothing has happened before but we can join up the dots and turn it into something powerful. The key to this is that it is not just up on the panel who do this for a living. The responsiblity carries to everyone. This is the symbolic issue for oppressed peoples around the world.
