HISTORY OF 1948 DRIVES PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE

“Hello 1948, we’re back,” Israeli journalist Yinon Magal wrote in Hebrew on Twitter last week. Those are terrifying words. “It’s all very simple actually,” Magal tweeted, claiming that the conflict could be resolved by expelling more Palestinians from Israel.

While his encouragement of further war crimes is abhorrent, his claim sheds light on the key to understanding — and resolving — the Israeli-palestinian “conflict” today: the year 1948.

The importance of this moment in history led us to pour a decade of our lives into producing the documentary “1948: Creation & Catastrophe.” From refugee camps in Lebanon to suburban homes in Israel to right here in San Diego County, we interviewed Israelis and Palestinians who remember 1948 firsthand.

For Israelis, 1948 was a year of creation. Shmuel Toledano’s eyes sparkled when he recalled the founding of his state and “the feeling of, ‘You have a state of your own,’ a Jewish state.” He said, “No one … has ever lived such a situation.” It was a feeling of finally being secure, finally having a place to call home after centuries of persecution.

But for Palestinians, 1948 was a catastrophe. Mazen Elkhairy recalled the day Israeli soldiers took over his town of Ramle, “They came into each house at gunpoint, ‘You leave!’” Eight out of every 10 Palestinians who lived in what became Israel were forced out of their homes by Israelis. Palestinians saw their homes taken over by Europeans and Russians, nearly all of whom had arrived in Palestine only within the past few decades.

Holocaust survivor Josef Ben-eliezer experienced the expulsion of Palestinians from Ramle from the Israeli side. As “masses of people” went through his checkpoint, he watched Israeli soldiers confiscate valuables from refugees. “That reminded me very much of the time when I was a child. We’re starting to do the same thing people have done to us as Jews.”

Our researchers translated, from Hebrew, copies of Israeli military orders calling upon soldiers to “liquidate Arab settlements within this area,” “quickly expel Lod’s inhabitants without bothering with age selection,” “occupy the villages, cleanse them of their inhabitants” and “expel the Arab refugees from those villages and prevent them from returning again by destroying the villages,” just to name a few. What is happening in Sheikh Jarrah today is a continuation of the Zionist project of expanding the state of Israel and taking more land.

Israeli veteran Mordechai Bar-on described in detail how his platoon would attack Palestinian villages. They “would begin by a short barrage of either light mortars or threeinch mortars.” Then, “we gave a one-minute coordinated shot of whatever weapons we had and stormed.” He recounted walking into homes and seeing coffee left in the pot by families who had lived in the villages moments before.

The current escalation began when the Israeli government attempted to force Palestinian families from their homes in the Jerusalem neigh

borhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli government wants to give those homes to Israeli settlers. This would actually be the second expulsion visited upon these Palestinians. In 1948, Jewish militias forced those same families to flee from Haifa and Jaffa.

We spoke with people who still remember the attacks on Haifa and Jaffa. Sitting in a refugee camp in Lebanon, Yousf Mahmoud Al Arwadi described a tactic used by Jewish militias in Jaffa — packing barrels full of explosives that they would “roll at us from up the Jaffa/tel Aviv Street.” A British intelligence report from Haifa describes, “considerable congestion outside the East Gate of hysterical and terrified Arab women and children and old people on whom the Jews opened up on mercilessly with fire.”

Israeli expulsion of Palestinians did not end in 1948. The recent 213-page report from Human Rights Watch

detailing “crimes of apartheid and persecution” by Israeli authorities highlights myriad ways that Israel continues to push Palestinians from their homes. In Israel, Palestinians live as second-class citizens under more than 65 laws that discriminate against them. In the West Bank, Israelis constantly force Palestinians to leave through its brutal military occupation, support for settler violence, home demolitions and a wall that runs deep through Palestinian territory, cutting Palestinians off from their farms and families. Israelis have turned Gaza into a massive open-air prison/ reservation. And in East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah, the Israeli government forces Palestinians out of their homes under the guise of a “real estate dispute.”

The history of 1948 is the key to understanding the Palestinian struggle. But not when used as a threat of war crimes. Absolutely essential to achieving a lasting peace is addressing the open wounds of 1948 and the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.