‘Catastrophe’ for Palestinians
Israel’s national Independence Day today being observed by Palestinians as Nakba
In the last few weeks, tens of thousands of Palestinians took part in the “Great March of Return” near the border between Gaza and Israel.
They were demanding the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their homes in what is now Israel, and the lifting of the Gaza blockade that has been imposed by Israel since the early 1990s with devastating results for 1.8 million Palestinians.
The largely non-violent protests have been met by the Israeli army with a disproportionate use of deadly force against the protesters.
Dozens of Palestinians were killed, and thousands were injured including hundreds of children.
Protests in Gaza were planned to continue until May 15, Israel’s Independence Day observed by the Palestinians as “Nakba” or Catastrophe Day. A look back at past and present history will explain the catastrophic effects.
The Jewish population of Palestine remained small for centuries. Early in the 20th Century, the European Zionists have encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine with a goal of establishing a Jewish state. By 1946, 67 per cent of the population was Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) and 33 per cent Jewish.
In the 1980s, documents from the Israeli archives have revealed that, long before 1948, the Zionist goal was to establish a Jewish state with a Jewish majority through the removal of the Palestinian inhabitants.
With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, close to 800,000 Palestinians were evicted, thousands were massacred, and hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed (see Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine).
Today, this would be regarded as a clear case of ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity under international law.
By 1948, a plan code-named Plan Dalet was put into action. “The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine).
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will also be displaced after the 1967 War which saw Israel occupy the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.
Today, the Palestinians are still suffering from the effects of the theft of their homeland. The State of Israel is doing everything in its power to make their lives so unbearable that they give up and leave. Home demolitions, daily humiliation, theft of Palestinian land and violation of human rights are an everyday ordeal. In Israel, Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin are treated like second class citizens.
Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has compiled a database of over 65 Israeli discriminatory laws that affect the lives of Palestinians.
“These laws limit the rights of Palestinians in all areas of life, from citizenship rights to the right to political participation, land and housing rights, education rights, cultural and language rights, religious rights, and due process rights during detention” (adalah.org).
Apologists for Israel will go to great length to absolve it from its responsibility for the inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. They will blame the victims or other parties such as Hamas.
Yet, the real problem is the Israeli occupation, the oppression, and the apartheid-like policies of the State of Israel towards the Palestinians. According to natural justice and international law, the Palestinian people have the right to resist occupation.
Certain forms of resistance are unequivocally unjustifiable. Nonetheless, and in the words of the Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy, Palestinians “don’t want Israel to continue tyrannizing them, so they resist. They hurl stones and firebombs. That’s what resistance looks like. Sometimes they act with heinous murderousness, but even that is not as bad as their occupier’s built-in violence.”