Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the so-called Partition Plan about the future of the British Mandate for Palestine, which led to the establishment of the state of Israel. The British Mandate was set up in 1922 by the League of Nations—the predecessor of the UN—following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. According to the Mandate, the Brits were supposed to provide “administrative assistance” until the future legal entities set up on the former Ottoman Palestinian territories would be able “to stand alone.” The Mandate also required Britain to put into effect the Balfour Declaration, named after James Balfour, the British conservative Foreign Minister, who, in 1917, in the name of the British Cabinet, had issued a public statement about the future need to establish “a national home for the Jewish People,” alongside the Palestinian Arabs in Palestine.

International law does not recognize the term “national home,” a notion that was intentionally kept vague to keep open specific geographical, legal, administrative solutions at a later date. The Declaration did not specify either the exact borders or the internal boundaries of Palestine, however, it did not envisage that the “home of the Jewish people” would cover all Palestine, where the Arab population had a clear majority, besides a sizeable Jewish and smaller Christian communities. The British controlled Palestine for almost three decades, overseeing growing nationalist movements, protests, riots, revolts, grave and tragic conflicts between the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities. Finding a solution for the “home of the Jewish people” became an especially urgent concern following the murder of six million people designated as Jewish in the course of World War II. Later, the British government acknowledged that the wish of the local populations should have been taken into account, including the protection of the political rights of the Palestinian Arab population.

HU OSA 300 Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute

Numerous Subject Files series include collections of press clippings, news agency releases, and RFE/RL analyses related to Palestine. Among others, the Old Code Subject Files of the Soviet Red Archives reflect how the Soviet press covered issues related to Palestine between 1966 and 1993; the Western Press Archives contains Western press items on the relationship between the USSR and Palestine in the 1980s; the Records of Kevin Devlin shed light on the contacts between Israeli and Arab Communist parties in the 1960s–1970s.

HU OSA 341 Human Rights Watch Reports

The organization Human Rights Watch conducts intensive field work and systematic investigations of human rights violations in more than 70 countries. The thematic reports preserved at the Archivum including titles like Nowhere to Go: The Tragedy of the Remaining Palestinian Families in Kuwait (1991), Israeli Interrogation Methods Under Fire After Death of Detained Palestinian (1992), Palestinian Deportees Continue to Suffer from Poor Conditions in Lebanon Camp (1993), Torture and Ill-Treatment: Israel’s Interrogation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (1994), and others.

HU OSA 329 Video Recordings of WITNESS

WITNESS was a project founded in 1992 that promoted video and online technologies to disclose human rights violations around the world. The documentary Palestinian Arab Citizens of Israel: A Case Study of Discrimination was co-produced by WITNESS and The Arab Association for Human Rights, a Palestinian Arab NGO. The collection also includes raw footage documenting the living conditions in “unrecognized” Palestinian villages like Jaffa, Kammaneh, or Al-Jelasi, as well as interviews with residents.