Palestinian catastrophe remembered

For the 68th year, the Palestinian people are remembering the catastrophe that befell them in 1948. They will continue to do so as long as the injustice they were subjected to is not redressed. 

It is hard to predict how many more years they will have to wait, how many more times they will have to commemorate and for how long they will continue to suffer. All that is far from certain.

What is certain, though, is that time will not make them forego their usurped rights.

More than a century ago, Palestine was chosen by the Zionist movement as the land where Jews were to descend from all other parts of the world to make it their exclusive national home.

It did not matter that its own people, Arab Muslims and Christians, as well as Jews, had lived there for centuries in peace and harmony.

The Zionist movement used its power, its influence and its wealth to mobilise major world powers to endorse one of the most intolerable injustices in the modern history.

But of course the Zionists could not have achieved this alone. It was with the support of the British Empire, including anti-Semitic British officials such as Lord Balfour, that the goal could be attained.

The United Nations, on whose agenda the question of Palestine remained as a permanent item since the world body was created, is no less responsible for precipitating the ongoing tragedy.

While the principal idea for creating the UN was to maintain peace, resolve international conflicts and help the world population achieve the highest standards of prosperity and stability, the outcome so far has been the exact opposite.

Wars, conflicts, man-made disasters, diseases, grave tragedies, disintegration of societies, refugee problems, injustices and even famines have been depriving millions of people worldwide of their natural rights.

The UN failure for over seven decades to resolve the problem created by Zionist colonisation has allowed it to fester, creating endless complications that continue to spread political and security chaos over a vast region.

Although unjust and undemocratic, the partition resolution the UN General Assembly passed in 1947 could have ended up as a possible compromise if the UN had had the will to enforce its implementation.

It did not.

At the end of the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1948, when Israel was enabled by sustained foreign support to ethnic cleanse 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and to occupy 78 per cent of the historic territory of Palestine — about twice the territory awarded it under the partition resolution — the UN again failed to act.

All it did was to address the issue as a humanitarian matter.

UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, did indeed provide the Palestinians with food, shelter and other basic services and it still does. But Palestinian rights were never properly addressed.

The UN and its many relevant agencies rarely dared subject Israel to the rules they harshly apply to other member states, particularly when the supposed culprits were Arab states.

At the UN, Israel still remains above the law.

After the wars that followed 1948, the UN always failed to address the root causes, thus sowing the seeds of the next conflict.

In 1967, Israel, under the pretext of preemptive war, launched a massive surprise attack on Egypt and then on the territories of Jordan and Syria.

This war of aggression, choice and conquest left Israel in control of all of historic Palestine.

The entire land of Palestine has been occupied by Israel since then.

Israel “redeployed” from Gaza in 2005, but left it under siege by land, sea and air — the world’s largest known open-air prison.

It continues to relentlessly colonise the West Bank as the world wrings its hands and does nothing.

And there were many other Israeli wars: in 1973 with Syria and Egypt, in 1978, 1982 and 2006 against Lebanon, and in 2008, 2012 and 2014 against Gaza.

The waves of desperation and radicalisation that washed over large sectors of societies across the Middle East are undoubtedly tied to the negligence and complicity of the UN and so-called international community regarding the injustice lived by the Palestinians.

Other wars, on Iraq in 1991 and 2003, the prevailing chaos across the Arab world, the rise of Daesh and other extremist terrorist organisations, the endless violence and destruction are also linked, directly or indirectly, to the original injustice.

Unfortunately, many still believe that time will erase people’s memory. It will not.

Israel could not sit on the ruins of the Palestinians and enjoy peace and normalcy.

The Palestinians did not disappear as initially planned. Despite their expulsion, their population today, within historic Palestine, is greater than ever, and equal to or larger than the number of Israeli Jews.

And their determination to recover their rights also persists. Palestinians have come too far and lived through too much to abandon their struggle now.

No human being would acquiesce to the humiliating injustice they suffer. No Palestinian would sit idle while watching an invader in his house, on his land and in his village or town.

Relying on the assumption that the passage of time would delete the past and reshape history according to their designs, the Zionists must be stunned that instead, time continues, year after year, to put the picture in sharper focus, exposing the absurdity of attempting to violently eradicate an entire population to make room for alien invaders and expect normal life afterwards.