Posted on 16-4-2002

Palestinian Speaks About Palestine

Official Representative of Palestine to Australasia, Ali Kazak, to hold
public meetings in Auckland and Wellington.

You are invited to hear Ali Kazak, a prominent defender of Palestinian
national and human rights for the last 32 years, speak on the current
brutal Israeli invasion and occupation of the West Bank at public meetings
in Auckland and Wellington next week.

The venues and meeting times are:

Monday, April 22 at 7.30pm in the Auditorium of Trades Hall, 147 Great
North Road, Grey Lynn. (Contacts: Mike Treen 021 254 7440; Alex Muir (09)
376 3780)

Tuesday, April 23 at 7.30pm at St John's Church Hall, Corner of Willis and
Dixon Streets. (Contact: Anna Sutherland 0508 ALLIANCE or 021 323 467)

A brief bio of ALI KAZAK's life and work follows:

Ali Kazak is Head of the General Palestinian Delegation's regional mission
to Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific region and Ambassador of
Palestine to Vanuatu and Ambassador-designate to Papua New Guinea. He has
been prominent in the defence of Palestinian national and human rights for
32 years.

His activities in defence of his people's national, political, cultural and
human rights were recognised in 1981 with his appointment by the PLO
Executive Committee as the PLO's representative to Australia, New Zealand
and the Pacific region. In the following year he opened the Palestine
Information Office, which was recognised by the Australian government in
1989 as the office of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and then
further recognised in 1994 as the General Palestinian Delegation.

After enormous effort made by Mr Kazak for many years, in 1986 he was
successful in persuading the then government of Australia to issue visas to
senior Palestinian officials. This was followed by the extension of
official invitations by the governments of Australia and New Zealand to
Palestinian ministers and senior PLO Executive Committee members to visit.

He has addressed and represented Palestine at numerous national and
international conferences and forums on the Palestine question and has
written numerous articles on this and related topics in the mainstream
Australian and international media. Mr Kazak was the founder, publisher and
co-editor of the well-known newspaper Free Palestine (1979-90), as well as
the publisher and editor of Background Briefing (1987-93), the book The
Jerusalem Question (1997) as well as other booklets and publications on the
Palestine question. He was the founder and the driving force behind the
establishment of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign on 30 May 1981 in a
number of states in Australia (VIC, ACT, SA, WA and QLD) and in New
Zealand's major cities, and other Palestinian community groups.

Mr Kazak migrated to Australia in 1970. He was born in Haifa, Palestine,
in 1947. Palestine was under the British Mandate at that time, and the
Zionist underground terrorist organisations - the Haganah, Irgun and the
Stern Gang, comprising European Jewish settlers - had already began their
armed take-over of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish Zionist state.
Mr Kazak and his mother were amongst the more than 900,000 Palestinians
expelled from their properties and homeland as a result of Zionist Jewish
terrorism and intimidation in 1948. He was then about ten months old. They
took refuge with relatives in Syria. His father survived the exodus of
1948 and was among the 30% of the Palestinians who managed to remain in
their ancestral home. For the next four years his parents tried
continuously to be reunited through the International Red Cross and other
legal bodies, but to no avail.

Finally, at great risk Mr Kazak's mother crossed the border on foot at
night to rejoin her husband in Haifa, believing that once she was back in
her own country she could not be legally deported and that the authorities
would allow her son to rejoin his parents. However, following her arrival
safely back home, the Israeli forces arrested Mrs Kazak in the early hours
of the morning and detained her without charge or trial for 47 days, and
then they deported her to Lebanon. They refused to inform Mr Kazak's
father where she was taken in order to prevent him from taking the case to
court.

Thus Mr Kazak grew up and was educated in Syria. He was nine years old
when Israel, along with France and England attacked Egypt and occupied the
Gaza Strip in 1956. At the age of twenty he witnessed another wave of
Palestinian refugees, resulting from Israel's 1967 occupation of East
Jerusalem, the Palestinian Bank and the Gaza Strip. He received his
tertiary education at the College of Commerce, Damascus University. In
1968, while at Damascus University, Mr Kazak was invited to join the
Palestine National Liberation Movement (Fateh) which was at the time
underground and which is now the largest party within the PLO.

Mr Kazak is married with two daughters and two sons.