Awda1State

Dear Participants and Supporters of the 2nd Haifa conference for the Return of the Palestinian Refugees and the Democratic Secular State in Historic Palestine,

Sort of Apology

Friday and Saturday, 20-21 of June, 2008 – after a year of dreaming and working for it to happen – the Haifa conference was such a great success that we hardly believed it was real… But on Saturday night, as we made the 5 minutes drive from elMidan back home to Hallisa, a poor, mostly Arab, neighborhood in east Haifa, the racist and Un-Democratic state of Israel was clearly and vigorously there – the streets were filled with police and special “anti riot” units, stopping people and beating them at random. We spent the next week collecting evidence and organizing a demonstration against police violence…