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david ben gurion
75 Years After Nakba, Palestinians Hail 'Historic' UN Commemoration
"This is an occasion to highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people's plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights," explained UNISPAL.
May 15, 2023
For the first time ever, the United Nations on Monday officially commemorated the Nakba, or "catastrophe," when more than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland during a sweeping Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign in service of the establishment of the modern state of Israel 75 years ago.
Events scheduled for Monday include a morning conference at U.N. headquarters in New York City held by the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, as well as a special evening commemoration in the General Assembly Hall.
"This is an occasion to highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace, require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people's plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights," the U.N. Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL) said in a statement.
\u201c@Palestine_UN @UN \ud83d\udce2Today, Tune in as @UNISPAL commemorates the 75th anniversary of Nakba. \n\n\ud83d\udea8Starting now: High-Level Special Meeting at the UN Headquarters in New York, with participation Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of #Palestine. \n\n\ud83d\udcfd\ufe0f Live streaming \ud83d\udc47\nhttps://t.co/gaLQQCdQ4d\u201d— UN Palestinian Rights Committee (@UN Palestinian Rights Committee) 1683831205
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, hailed Monday's "historic" commemoration, noting that the General Assembly in 1947 voted—without consulting Palestinians—to partition Palestine, then a British protectorate. Jews, who comprised just over one-third of Palestine's population at the time, got 55% of its land.
"It's acknowledging the responsibility of the U.N. of not being able to resolve this catastrophe for the Palestinian people for 75 years," he said, adding that "the catastrophe to the Palestinian people is still ongoing."
\u201c75 years ago, the Nakba took place in Palestine in which 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes.\n\nBut the Nakba didn\u2019t end in 1948. It continues to affect more than 12 million Palestinians who remain stateless today as they fight to end Israeli occupation \u2935\ufe0f\u201d— Al Jazeera English (@Al Jazeera English) 1684147039
Gilan Erdan, Israel's ambassador to the U.N., called the event "shameful."
"Attending one-sided Palestinian initiatives that falsely brand Israel as the source of all evil does not bring the conflict closer to an end, but only serves to inflame tensions," Erdan said in a letter to other U.N. envoys urging them to boycott the event.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement that Monday's U.N. events "mark an important milestone in international acknowledgment of the plight of the Palestinian people under occupation and their ongoing struggle for justice and freedom."
"Representatives of the United States should participate in these U.N. memorial events to demonstrate a commitment to uphold justice for all people, including Palestinians," he added.
\u201c\ud83e\uddf5Today marks 75 years of the ongoing Palestinian #Nakba, Israel's violent and brutal campaign to expel, uproot, and erase Palestinians from their homes and homeland. This is not a historic event but an ongoing process of settler-colonialism and apartheid. https://t.co/1x06L3pEIl\u201d— Josh Ruebner (@Josh Ruebner) 1684167135
No diplomats from the United States—Israel's main benefactor and often the only nation to vote against most of the world on U.N. resolutions condemning Israeli crimes or affirming Palestinian rights—attended Monday's commemoration.
However, demonstrations took place in the United States, including in Washington, D.C., where Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian-American in Congress—held a Nakba commemoration last week and where a growing number of congressional Democrats are condemning Israeli apartheid, occupation, settler colonization, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against Palestinians.
\u201cYoung liberation \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf8\u270a\ud83c\udffc\nPalestinians, their communities, & allies marched to Congress in DC on May 14, 2023 to commemorate 75 years of the Nakba (May 15), calling for an end to U.S. funding to Israel.\n\nI absolutely love photographing these women. @md2palestine @palyouthmvmt\u201d— Laura Albast (@Laura Albast) 1684118751
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), for example, recently re-introduced the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act, which would place conditions on U.S. aid, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) last month led a letter signed by more than a dozen colleagues urging the Biden administration to rethink financial assistance to Israel.
Congress currently authorizes $3.8 billion in annual—and mostly unconditional—aid to Israel.
\u201cUS congresswoman Rashia Tlaib: "I say it loud and clear by introducing a historic resolution in congress: The Nakba happened in 1948 and it never ended."\n#Nakba75\u201d— PALESTINE ONLINE \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf8 (@PALESTINE ONLINE \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf8) 1684161920
The Nakba commemorations come as the Israel Defense Forces and the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant resistance group agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire on Saturday following five days of fighting in which at least 33 Palestinians, including numerous children, were killed.
Palestinians point to Israel's continuing violent repression as evidence that the Nakba continues 75 years after the events of 1948.
That was the year that David Ben-Gurion—who would become Israel's first prime minister—and his inner circle drafted Plan Dalet, a blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arabs, whose lands Jews coveted as they fought to establish the modern state of Israel amid a British withdrawal from Mandatory Palestine prompted by increasing Zionist terrorism.
\u201c75 years ago, a horrific event forever changed the lives of Palestinians. \n\nHere's what happened.\n\n#Nakba #Nakba75\u201d— IMEU (@IMEU) 1684159468
According to official orders, "the principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages" and their replacement with Jewish ones. Often, the mere threat of violence was enough to coerce Arabs from their homes, but sometimes appalling slaughter was required to induce flight. In the most infamous of what Israeli historian Benny Morris has identified as 24 Zionist massacres during the Nakba, more than 100 Arab men, women, and children were murdered by Jewish militias at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948.
Jewish ethnic cleansing of Arabs accelerated after the allied Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, and Syrian armies invaded Palestine in a bid to smother the nascent Israeli state in its cradle. On July 11, 1948, Moshe Dayan—a future Israeli foreign and defense minister—led an assault on Lydda in which over 250 men, women, and children were massacred with automatic weapons, grenades, and cannon. What followed, on future Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's orders, was the wholesale expulsion of Arabs from Lydda and Ramle—a war crime known today as the Lydda Death March.
\u201cUS media @voxdotcom has finally done something they've never done before:\n\nThey have dared. \n\nThey just released a video of the Nakba an hour ago to their YouTube channel. An objective & factual account of the events as they were. \n\nHere's the segment about Deir Yassin.\u201d— \u0631\u0648\u0646\u064a \u0627\u0644\u062f\u0646\u0645\u0627\u0631\u0643\u064a (@\u0631\u0648\u0646\u064a \u0627\u0644\u062f\u0646\u0645\u0627\u0631\u0643\u064a) 1684158809
The international community was outraged by these events. In the United States, a group of prominent Jews including Albert Einstein excoriated the "terrorists" who attacked Deir Yassin. Others compared the Jewish militias to their would-be German destroyers, including Aharon Cizling, Israel's first agriculture minister, who lamented that "now Jews have behaved like Nazis."
When it was all over, more than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or abandoned, their denizens—some of whom still hold the keys to their stolen homes—have yet to return. Today, they and their descendants number more than 7 million, all of whom have been denied the right of return guaranteed under U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.
\u201cZionist soldier, while laughing in an Interview with the Israeli channel Hot 8:\n\n"We put Palestinians in cages and killed them. One of us raped a sixteen-year-old girl; some of us ran after them with flame throwers and burned them."\u201d— In Context (@In Context) 1670422450
Meanwhile, Israeli officials have gone to great lengths to bury evidence that the Nakba happened while presenting a distorted narrative in which Arabs purportedly consider the "catastrophe" the birth of Israel, not the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
"The thought that an international organization could mark the establishment of one of its member states as a catastrophe or disaster is both appalling and repulsive," Erdan wrote in his letter to fellow U.N. ambassadors.
\u201cPalestinian elderly woman from Gaza still has the key to her house located in the 1948-occupied Palestinian lands where she used to live before she was displaced with her husband by the lsraeli zionist groups in the 1948 Nakba.\u201d— Oday Mohammed (@Oday Mohammed) 1684172305
However, as Monday's U.N. commemorations attest, Palestinians remain committed to keeping the memory of the Nakba alive as an integral part of their freedom struggle. As Ben-Gurion presciently said of the Palestinians back in 1938, "A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily."
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'What Color Shirts'? Far-Right Ben-Gvir to Get Control Over Israeli National Guard
The former head of Israel's police accused the national security minister of "dismantling Israeli democracy" and "turning Israel into a dictatorship."
Mar 27, 2023
Democracy defenders on Monday sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's agreement to place the country's National Guard under the control of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right extremist who has advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Netanyahu's move is in exchange for a promise from Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party to remain in the prime minister's governing coalition despite an earlier threat to exit if Netanyahu delayed a highly controversial judicial overhaul. Facing massive street protests and a general strike by the nation's largest trade union, Netanyahu agreed on Monday to postpone the legislation until April or early May.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets Sunday to protest Netanyahu's firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who a day earlier advocated for a monthlong pause to the judicial reform.
"Instead of democracy, Israel doubles down on fascism against Palestinians."
Netanyahu explained in a televised address Monday that he is "not willing to tear the country apart," while asserting that "there must not be civil war."
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in response to Netanyahu's deal with his security minister: "We already saw what happened when Ben-Gvir wanted to suppress the protests, now one can only imagine what will happen when he has his own militias."
ACRI continued:
It is important to understand—the "National Guard" that Netanyahu promised is a private armed militia that will answer directly to Ben-Gvir. This is a police unit intended first and foremost to act in mixed cities, first and foremost against the Arab population. Such power in Ben-Gvir's hands = certain violation of Arabs' rights. Advancing such a proposal will also enable him to use these forces against the protests and demonstrators.
This is a new and dangerous addition to the coup d'état that we are witnessing. As if it is not enough to act against the judicial system, now we see operative steps to take authorities from the police and turn them into Ben-Gvir's Revolutionary Guards.
"The National Guard must be under the police rather than under the control of Lehava and the rest of the Kahanists," asserted Gilad Kariv, a member of Israel's parliament representing the center-left Israeli Labor Party, as he referenced the far-right Jewish supremacist political group and followers of Meir Kahane, the Orthodox rabbi convicted of terrorism before being assassinated in 1990.
For progressive critics, the idea of Ben-Gvir having a military unit under his direct control presents a frightening prospect.
Ben-Gvir was convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting the Kahanist terror group Kach after he advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. He is also an open admirer of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish supremacist who murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers at a mosque in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.
Moshe Karadi, former general commissioner of the Israel Police, told the Times of Israel that Ben-Gvir "has formed a private militia for his political needs."
"He's dismantling Israeli democracy" and "turning Israel into a dictatorship," Karadi added.
Currently a unit within the Israel Border Police, the National Guard was established under the previous Israeli government amid rising Palestinian resistance and in the wake of the 2021 military assault on Gaza.
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The Palestinian Nakba: The Resolve of Memory
May 15, 2012
Many Palestinians remember and reference al-Nakba, also known as the Catastrophe, on May 15 every year. The event marks the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians, while their villages were destroyed. The destruction of Palestine in 1947-48 ushered in the birth of Israel. Older generations relay the harsh and oppressive memory of their collective experience to younger Palestinians, many of whom live their own Nakbas today.
In covering al-Nakba, sympathetic Arab and other media play sad music and show black and white footage of displaced, frightened refugees. They rightly emphasize the concept of Sumud, steadfastness, as they show Palestinian of all ages holding unto the rusty keys of their homes and insisting on their right of return. Other, less sympathetic media discuss al-Nakba, if at all, as a side note - a nuisance in the Israeli narrative of a nation's supposedly miraculous birth and its progression to an idyllic oasis of democracy. What such reductionist representations often fail to show is that while al-Nakba started, it never truly finished.
Those who underwent the pain, harm and loss of al-Nakba are yet to receive the justice that was promised to them by the international community. UN Resolution 194 states that "the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date" (Article 11). Those who wrought this injustice are also yet to achieve their ultimate objectives in Palestine. After all, Israel doesn't have defined boundaries by accident.
David Ben Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, once prophesized that "the old (refugees) will die and the young will forget." He spoke with the harshness of a conqueror. Ben Gurion carried out his war plans to the furthest extent possible. Every region in Palestine that was meant to be taken was captured, its people were expelled or massacred in their homes and villages. Ben Guiron 'cleansed' the land, but he failed to cleanse Israel's past. Memory persists.
Ben Gurion referenced my own family's village - Beit Daras - which witnessed three battles and a massacre. In an entry in his diaries on May 12, 1948, he wrote: "Beit Daras was mortared. Fifty Arabs (were killed). The (villages of) Bashit and Sawafir were occupied. There is mass exodus from nearby areas (neighbors in Majdal). We sustained 5 dead and 15 wounded. " (War Diaries, 1947-1949).
More than fifty people were killed in Beit Daras that day. An old Gaza woman, Um Mohammed - who I discussed in my last book, My Father was a Freedom Fighter - refers to what is likely the same event:
"The town was under bombardment, and it was surrounded from all directions. There was no way out. The armed men (the Beit Daras fighters) said they were going to check on the road to Isdud, to see if it was open. They moved forward and shot few shots to see if someone would return fire. No one did. But they (the Zionist forces) were hiding and waiting to ambush the people. The armed men returned and told the people to evacuate the women and children. The people went out (including) those who were gathered at my huge house, the family house. There were mostly children and kids in the house. The Jewish (soldiers) let the people get out, and then they whipped them with bombs and machine guns. More people fell than those who were able to run. My sister and I...started running through the fields; we'd fall and get up. My sister and I escaped together holding each other's hands. The people who took the main road were either killed or injured. The firing was falling on the people like sand. The bombs from one side and the machine guns from the other."
Ben Gurion would not necessarily doubt Um Mohammed's account. He candidly stated: "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves...politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves...The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country" (as quoted in Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, pp. 91-2).
It is precisely for this reason that neither the old nor the young have forgotten. Every day is another manifestation of the same protracted al-Nakba that has lasted 64 years now. Young people's hardships today are inextricably linked to the violent and horrific uprooting decades ago.
Al-Nakba has also remained an ongoing project through generations of Israeli Zionists. When Ben Gurion died in 1973, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in his mid-twenties. He was then serving his last year in the Israeli army, and today he rules Israel with a coalition that includes almost three quarters of the Israeli parliament. Like most Israeli leaders, he continues to contribute to the very discourse by which Palestine was conquered. He speaks of peace, while his soldiers and armed settlers take over Palestinian homes and farms. He makes repeated offers to Palestinians for 'unconditional' talks, as he repeats his violent rejection of every Palestinian aspiration. His lobby in Washington is much stronger than ever before. He reigns supreme, as he continues to fulfill the 'vision' of early Zionists.
Old keys and deeds of stolen lands attest to the intergenerational experience that is Al-Nakba. Today Palestinians continue to be herded behind military checkpoints. They are denied the right to proper medical care, and their ancient olive trees are ruthlessly bulldozed. What Israel has not been able to control, however, is the resolve of Palestinians. The prison, the checkpoint and the gun reside in our collective memory in a way that cannot be held captive, controlled, or shot.
In fact, al-Nakba is not a specific date or an estimation of time, but the entirety of those 64 years and counting. The event must not be assigned to the shelves of history, not as long as refugees are still refugees and settlers continue to rob Palestinian land. As long as Netanyahu speaks the language of Ben Gurion, other 'catastrophic' episodes will follow. And as long as Palestinians hold on to their keys and deeds, the old may die but the young will never forget.
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