Sam PF's Journal - 60 Years
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12:18 am
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60 Years
Today Israel starts a week of celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of their formation as a state, culminating in their Independence Day of May 14th.
Amidst the chorus of fawning congratulations from world leaders, artists and celebrities, it is fortunately (as the BBC article shows) becoming harder - at least outside the US - to ignore the other side of the events of 60 years ago, the Palestinian Nakba, or Catastrophe.
In the course of the Israeli 'War of Independence', around 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and land as the result of a campaign of massacres and ethnic cleansing by forces of the nascent Israeli state. Many were forcibly expelled, many others fled the fighting - all were subsequently denied the right to return to their homes, in defiance of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Over 530 Palestinian villages were destroyed. With the Absentee Property Act of 1950, Israel subsequently confiscated the land of the exiled Palestinians without compensation.
Israel's apologists have long tried to deny these facts, but such denials increasingly lack intellectual credibility given the wealth of documentation - including from Israeli sources - that substantiates them. This fact sheet from Jewish Voice for Peace presents one of the most compact but comprehensive accounts I've seen. If you only follow one link from this post, that's probably the one to go for.
The orchestrated nature of the campaign is amde clear by Plan Dalet, adopted by the Zionist leadership early in 1948: (from JVP factsheet)
These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state (Plan Dalet, 10 March,
1948)
The diaries of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin - who signed the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat - record his role as leader of the Israeli forces attacking Lydda in July 1947:
After attacking Lydda Ben-Gurion would repeat the question: What is to be done with the population?, waving his hand in a gesture which said: Drive them out!.' Driving out' is a term with a harsh ring, .... Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook.
Rabin signed the order that "The residents of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age" on July 12th 2008.
This is the reality behind the foundation of the state of Israel, this is what lies behind all the subsequent wars and conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians and the other states in the region. And until this fundamental wrong is acknowledged and given redress, Israel will never know peace.
I don't think there was anything intrinsically wrong with the desire of many (originally mostly European) Jews to live in Palestine, to feel a connection with the land that was the cradle of their religion and community. It is also entirely understandable - even before the Holocaust - that many European Jews wanted a guaranteed option for getting out of Europe. (Like many others, the Perlo's found their escape route to the United States when things got too hot in Poland, but who could know when the US or anyone else would open or close their doors?) There were Zionists - the young Uri Avnery, now a veteran Israeli peace activist, was one of them - who wanted Zionism to be a movement that worked with the indigenous Arab population in seeking freedom from British rule and building an independent state. There were no doubt many others who thought that way, though how many we'll never know.
But that's not how Zionism manifested itself. The thing is, the European Jews who formed the leadership of the Zionist movement were, in particular, Europeans. With a typical arrogant European belief in the superiority of our civilisation, and disregard for lesser peoples, whose rights did not need to be taken into account.
The way I see it though, the actual wrong started in 1922, when the League of Nations carved up the former Ottoman Empire in the Levant and Mesopotamia between Britain and France to be ruled as 'Mandates', with Palestine going to Britain - breaking British promises during WW1 of independence for the Arabs who rose up against their Ottoman overlords. While the principle of self-determination was considered crucial for the superior Europeans, this did not apply to peoples of swarthier complexion. The British used their Mandate in Palestine to implement the 1917 Balfour Declaration, supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine. (Although they later started to have second thoughts). The British ruthlessly suppressed a Palestinian uprising against their rule in the 1930s.
Had the peoples of the Middle East, including Palestine, been granted self-determination after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the state of Israel could never have come to be. Perhaps there could still have been large-scale Jewish immigration to the region - that would have been a matter for negotiation with whatever independent states existed there, instead of the dictat of colonial rulers. But I don't see how one can justify the creation of Israel without believing that the Arabs of Palestine were not entitled to control over their own destiny, that their rights of necessity had to be overridden.
In other words, Zionism - certainly in the dominant form it has taken and was manifested in the creation of Israel - is indeed racism, of simple logical necessity.
That doesn't mean I believe the state of Israel can or should be abolished - it is there, it is recognised as a UN member state, its people have been there for 60 years. Some things cannot simply be reversed, even if it were possible, without as great an injustice as the original event. No-one, not even Hamas, actually thinks that's going to happen anyway. But I do believe the ideology of Zionism that lies at the root of the Israeli state in its present form needs to be challenged and overcome.
There is a demonstration in London on Saturday to mark the 60th Anniversary of the Nakba, calling for an end to the seige of Gaza, an end to the Occupation, and for the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Ah, there is one in Stockholm on the 15th, that's good.
Tags: palestine
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Thank you for all this information. |
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