By Khalid Amayreh
Normal nations, like normal people,
don’t celebrate their days of infamy.
In fact, they struggle to forget them.
Some countries with a troubled past try
hard to deal with their shameful legacies,
often by openly acknowledging their sins
and apologizing to their victims and to their victims’ descendants.
However, in Israel, which encapsulates evil and racism,
ethnic cleansing is celebrated with utmost pride as a
consummate national achievement and a glorious success
story. “This is our manifest destiny,” many Zionists would
ostentatiously argue, with glee and deep satisfaction
apparent in the tone of their voices.
Sixty years ago today, one of the greatest thefts in history
took place in Palestine: when armed Zionist gangs launched
a massive campaign of murder and terror against the native
Palestinians.
The marauding vandals of Zionism murdered thousands of
innocent people, destroyed thousands of homes, bulldozed
hundreds of villages, and expelled the bulk of the Palestinian
people from their ancestral motherland.
This campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing, as Israeli
historian and political analyst Ilan Pappe argued in his
recent book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” was not
an unintended consequence or fortuitous occurrence, or
even a “miracle,” as Israel’s first president, Chairman Weizmann,
proclaimed; it was actually the result of long and meticulous planning.
Now, sixty years later, the victims, these suffering and
long-tormented Palestinian refugees, are still waiting to be
repatriated and compensated for their seemingly unending
nightmare.
Predictably, Zionism called the barbarian drive of ethnic
cleansing “war of independence” and “national fulfillment”.
Zionism, a Godless and manifestly racist ideology to which many
Jews have converted rather blindly, viewed the dispossession of
the Palestinian community as a proper response to Nazism and
the holocaust.
For their part, Europe in particular and the West in general saw
the creation of Israel in Palestine as a long-awaited opportunity
to dispose of the remaining European Jewry and also to atone for
centuries of anti-Semitism, culminating in the holocaust.
As to the fate of the Palestinians, whose homeland was stolen
from them in order to create a state for the victims of European
racism, it was of none of anyone’s concern.
Bertand Russell illustrated this inhumanity in a message
he sent to the International Conference of Parliamentarians
in Cairo, in February 1970.
“The tragedy of the people of Palestine,” he wrote, “is that
their country was given by a foreign power to another people
for the creation of a new state. The result was that many
hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made
permanently homeless. With every new conflict their
number increased.”
Russell then asked: “How much longer is the world willing to
endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear
that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which
they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of
the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would
accept being expelled en masse from their country. How can
anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment
which nobody else would tolerate?”
Today, Israel is celebrating sixty years of ethnic cleansing,
home demolitions, land seizure, racism, murder and terror
which continue to haunt those courageous Palestinians who
are still clinging to their homeland despite the high price they
pay, mostly in their own blood and the blood of their
innocent children.
True, Palestinian resilience and tenacity have almost
transcended reality in the face of the sheer evilness of Zionism.
But Israeli criminality continued to assume Nazi proportions
as is evident from the ongoing genocidal blockade of the Gaza
Strip, where 1.5 million Palestinians are constantly bombed,
starved and murdered for electing a government that both
Israel and the Bush administration didn’t like.
And in the West Bank, Israeli has effectively transformed
Palestinian cities, towns and villages into virtual detention
camps as Gestapo-like Israeli soldiers are having an open
season on helpless and unprotected Palestinians commuting
to their homes, schools, colleges and workplaces.
I don’t really know if it is possible to count on an awakening
of Zionist conscience. But, do Zionists have a conscience?
How can “conscience” and “Zionism” be used in the same
phrase?
Well, in order to have conscience, one has to believe in the
difference between right and wrong, a characteristic that is
conspicuously nonexistent in the collective Zionist mindset.
I really wonder how these self-absorbed Zionists could look
at themselves in the mirror, knowing that they are living in
stolen homes, built on stolen land whose lawful owners were
banished and condemned to live a miserable life in squalid
refugee camps for sixty years and continuing?
Ask any person with a minimal sense of honesty what he
would call these depraved squatters and he or she wouldn’t
hesitate to tell you that they are “thieves and criminals.”
Yes, undoubtedly, many of these same people had lost
homes and businesses and other property in Poland,
Germany, and Eastern Europe and also in some Arab
countries. But do they have the right to kill or displace
the innocent Palestinians and take over their homes,
farms, orchards, to steal their homeland and banish them
to the four winds?
This obscene injustice can’t be accepted, neither by the
laws of man nor the laws of heaven. And wrongs must
be corrected and injustices must be rectified, or there
will be no peace.
There is no doubt that the creation of Israel was an act
of rape of the highest order. It continues to be an act of
rape and will always be as such till the end of time.
True, Israel is today an imposing reality that no one can
deny. And it does enjoy certain political legitimacy in the
eyes of many people.
But as a child of rape and a brat of oppression, Israel has
no iota of moral legitimacy since it was founded at the
expense of another people, the Palestinian people.
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