Palestine was never an empty piece of real estate that the zionists had yearned for as their biblical homeland. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was a result of Israel declaring the creation of a Jewish state. This led to the massacre and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. The exodus came to be known as the Nakba or Catastrophe. Seventy five years on, Palestinians remain brutalized prisoners in their own homeland.
Zionists think that there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing forgetting that Israel itself was created with the slogan to “never forget” the holocaust. Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, wrote: “Never again is not just a slogan, it is a prayer and a vow to never again glorify vile, ugly and dark violence”. The ferocity of Israel’s vile genocide of the Palestinian people speaks of someone set out to vindicate the holocaust. That the people they target had nothing to do with it never seems to rein in their pent up demons.
Israel’s atrocities are of such magnitude that prominent Israeli historian and academic Ilan Pappe was moved to record the same in his book, aptly titled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”. In a recent article titled “Why I support Palestinians”, Pappe narrates “the horrific reality Israel created in Gaza when it sealed the region, imposing a hermetic siege starting in 2007, accompanied by the relentless killing of children in the occupied West Bank”. He adds: “This violence, not a new phenomenon, has been the permanent face of Zionism since the establishment of Israel”.
The West maliciously indicts Hamas as the mother of all evils. It also justifies the merciless collective punishment in Gaza as a right to self-defense. The reality is that Israel has been killing Palestinians since 1948, thirty nine years before Hamas was even founded and fifty eight years before it won the Palestinian legislative election.
Hamas has, over the years, been coerced to lay down arms and recognize Israel. Yasser Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin for forging the Oslo Peace Accords. The first Palestinian leader to recognize Israel, he was branded a terrorist and confined to his compound which Israel bombed time and again. Allegedly poisoned, Arafat was eventually airlifted to a Paris hospital where he passed away.
As for Rabin, he was murdered by Yigal Amir, a Jew extremist and a law student at a peace rally attended by over 100,000 Israelis. Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the Oslo Accords. Calling Rabin a Nazi and a traitor, he led a mock funeral protest against him with a coffin and a hangman’s noose.
Netanyahu has consistently been against the two nation theory, usurping and creating Jewish settlements on land granted to the Palestinians under the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu now leads the most fanatically nationalist government in Israel’s history which has recklessly imperiled the life of innocent Israelis too as witnessed in the recent Hamas attack.
Israel’s Washington abetted occupational mindset and genocidal policies are the biggest deterrent for a negotiated settlement. After the recent Hamas attack, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog held all Palestinians responsible stating, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible”. Defense Minister Yoav Gallan’s orders on October 9th to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza were no less explicit.
Israel has dropped over 25,000 tons in bombs including prohibited munitions like phosphorus and cluster bombs on the 365 square kilometre Gaza Strip. Israeli officials have released statements claiming that the murder of over 12000 civilians including women and children and the destruction of their homes and neighborhoods are deliberate actions based on prior decisions. This collective punishment of a civilian population is a war crime. UN experts and international legal scholars unanimously characterize this onslaught on Gaza as genocide.
The duplicity lies starkly bare with Washington having the ICC implicate President Putin for alleged war crimes and issuing an international arrest warrant for him. The US and its European allies, always bemoaning Ukraine’s war travails, are lending active military, intelligence and political support to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. The apathy of the Muslim world too is, as it was with occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, writ as large as never before. The Arab League and OIC, toothless as they have always been, remain reduced to the pathetic hand-wringing colloquy.
In a post Hamas-attack interview, Gideon Levy, an internationally acclaimed Haaretz columnist, summed up that the Hamas attack did not occur in a vacuum and how it had shattered the myth of Israel’s impregnability. He said: “Will Israel learn its lesson? No; the threats of flattening Gaza only prove that we haven’t learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay even though Israel is paying a high price once again”.
Painting a bleak and depressing future for Israel he asserted that Gaza’s invasion would be one of the biggest war crimes Israel ever committed. He also warned that if Netanyahu’s threat “to change the Middle East” and defense minister Yoav Gallant’s threat that “Gaza will never go back to what it was” are implemented, “Israel could be on the brink of a wider war”.
Levy minced no words about the atrocities heaped on the Palestinians saying that Israel and its allies are “in their treatment of the Palestinians, they have played with fire for years, if not decades. Netanyahu bears great responsibility for what happened and he must pay the price. We’ll fire at innocent people, take out their eyes, smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab them from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course, continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza strip and everything will be alright”.
Talking about all the Palestinian people and not just those in Gaza, Levy posed the question: “How is it possible to forget that these are human beings whose ancestors were expelled from their land and placed in refugee camps where they would remain? These were human beings whom Israel dispossessed and expelled and whom it conquered again in their land of refuge and then turned into animals in a cage”. A vile atrocity of unimaginable scales brought about by Washington and the European governments that have always aided, abetted and encouraged Israel to carry out the unchallenged Palestinian genocide.
The writer tweets @miradnanaziz and can be reached at [email protected]
