Nakba Day, 2018

Yesterday was Nakba Day, the day set aside to remember the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 in connection with the creation of the “Jewish State” of Israel. Over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and villages, and many massacred, in an ethnic-cleansing operation that should shock the conscience. Hundreds of villages were erased and replaced by Jewish towns. The Arabs who remained in the Israeli state that was imposed on them by Zionist military forces have been second-class citizens, at best, from that time.

Since 1967 the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, many of whom were refugees from the 1948 catastrophe, have lived under the boot of the Israeli government. Their day-to-day lives are under the arbitrary control of the Israeli government. Gaza is an open-air blockaded prison camp subject to periodic military onslaughts (recently the Israeli miltary has been shooting unarmed Palestinians who get too close to the fence but also bombing), while the West Bank is relentlessly gobbled up by Jewish-only settlements and violated by a wall that surrounds Palestinian towns and cuts people’s homes off from their farms. For the Israeli ruling elite, the so-called peace process is a sham. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now in his unprecedented fourth term as prime minister and who has the full backing of the Trump adminisration, rejects any realistic plan to let the Palestinians go -- that is, have their own country on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He insists that they must recognize Israel as the Jewish state, that is, as the state of Jews everywhere, even though it sits largely on stolen property (PDF) -- which raises an interesting question: Is subjugation of the Palestinians an instantiation of Jewish values or is it not? If it is (as apparently most of its supporters believe), then what does that say for Jewish values? If it is not, then what does that say for Israel's purported status as the Jewish State?

Again, I note that the best short introduction to the catastrophe is Jeremy Hammond’s The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict. Further, Hammond debunks the myth that the United Nations created the state of Israel.



Additional reading: "Why the Inconvenient Truths of the Nakba Must Be Recognized," by Tom Pessah; "The Anti-Semite's Best Friend," by Jonathan Cook;  "Israel Must Recognize Its Responsibility for the Nakba, the Palestinian Tragedy," by Saeb Erekat; and "The sacking of Jaffa during the Palestinian Nakba, as narrated by three Omars," by Allison Deger.

(Versions of this post appeared previously.)

Deir Yassin, April 9, 1948

Today is the 66th anniversary of the slaughter of Palestinian men, women, and children by Zionist paramilitary forces at the village of Deir Yassin. For details see my post of a year ago.

The Deir Yassin Massacre, April 9, 1948

Today is the 65th anniversary of the slaughter of the Arab inhabitants of the Palestinian village Deir Yassin (population about 600), west of Jerusalem, at the hands of Zionist militias, Irgun and Lehi, or Stern Gang. About a hundred residents, including 30 infants. (Irgun was led by future prime minister Menachem Begin. Another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was a Lehi commander.) By any standard, these were terrorist organizations. Indeed, conservative historian Paul Johnson writes that the Zionist militias created the terrorist model in the Middle East.

Dein Yassin was just one of the many atrocities that comprise the Nakba, or the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians in the founding of Israel. In fact, residents of other Arab villages fled their homes as the Zionist paramilitary forces spread the word about Deir Yassin. Historian Ilan Pappe writes, "At the time, the Jewish leadership proudly announced a high number of victims so as to make Deir Yassin the epicentre of the catastrophe--a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight." In his memoir, Begin wrote that panicked Arabs fled their homes in great number at the "wild tales of 'Irgun butchery.'"

Here is a moving account by Dina Elmuti at Electronic Intifada.

According to Wikipedia:

In 1949, despite protests, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Shaul Bet was built on what had been Deir Yassin's land, now considered part of Har Nof, an Orthodox area. Four Jewish scholars, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, Werner Senator, and Cecil Roth, wrote to Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, asking that Deir Yassin be left uninhabited, or that its settlement be postponed. They wrote that it had become "infamous throughout the Jewish world, the Arab world and the whole world." Settling the land so soon after the killings would amount to an endorsement of them. Ben-Gurion failed to respond, though the correspondents sent him copy after copy. Eventually his secretary replied that he had been too busy to read their letter.

In 1951, construction of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center began, using some of the village's houses, now hidden behind the hospital's fence, with entry closely restricted. Har HaMenuchot, a Jewish cemetery, lies to the north. To the south is a valley containing part of the Jerusalem Forest, and on the other side of the valley, a mile and a half away, lie Mount Herzl and the Holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem.

For more, see Jeremy Hammond's The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination and Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Deir Yassin Day

Today is Deir Yassin Day. Anyone who seeks understanding about the unending conflict in Palestine/Israel ought to know about this massacre of 254 innocent Palestinians by the Zionist paramilitary forces Irgun (headed by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang in 1948, a month before the Jewish state declared independence. Deir Yassin was among the worst incidents of the Nakba, the ethnic-cleansing catastrophe that befell the Palestinians in the creation of the state of Israel. Some 750,000 people were driven from their homes (which were then destroyed or expropriated) and were not allowed to return.

The best brief introduction to the Nakba is Jeremy Hammond’s The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination.

In a not unrelated story, Israel has barred from entry Günter Grass, the NobelPrize winning German poet for his poem “What Must Be Said,” which is about the danger to peace from Israel’s nuclear arsenal. As Israel and the United States edge toward war with Iran, which is not thought by them to be building even one nuclear weapon, it is worth recalling that Israel has an arsenal of several hundred warheads, including submarine-based nukes.