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Canada’s chief diplomat in Israel has been honored at an Israeli public park — built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law — as one of the donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. (more…)

Salah claimed that 120 mosques and dozens of churches have been razed since the State of Israel’s establishment, adding that new neighborhoods were established at sites previously used as cemeteries. (more…)

Of course, I didn’t expect much, but I found Obama’s brief remarks yesterday about the Palestinians extremely disingenuous and misleading. After pontificating to the audience in Cairo on the Holocaust (as if he were addressing a crowd of affirmed anti-Semites), Obama said the following about Palestine:

“[I]t is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation.”

Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? They had a homeland—and it was stolen from them in 1948. Let’s call a spade a spade. This was ethnic cleansing, not the “pain of dislocation” as Obama euphemises.

And why did Obama not mention Israel specifically in relation with the Palestinians’ suffering? Instead, your average viewer in the United States is justified in coming away with the impression that the occupation is prosecuted by some nameless evil. Everyone talks about a change in rhetoric from Washington, but I don’t see it. When it comes to the Middle East, the ritual transition of power called democracy in the U.S. causes a mere fluctuation in the degree of slavish support for the Zionist project.

Dozens protest Nakba bill

Ministers Meridor, Begin, Eitan ask government secretariat to quash motion calling to ban marking of Nakba Day by law, say it goes against Israel’s democratic values (more…)

“An old man sat with his back to the village — he could not bear to watch it burn,” said Yisrael Cohen, a Jewish militia officer, recalling the conquest of an Arab village. “From a burning courtyard a young boy came running to me laughing; he wanted to play. He came up and I took him into my arms and he hugged me. What will I do with him, I thought. It was such a contradiction to what was going on around us.” (more…)

The New York Times is such a master at disguising Israeli crimes in a cloak of romanticism and feel-good nostalgia. You really have to give them credit. I mean, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began months before the Arab armies invaded — entire families were killed, women raped, villages razed, hundreds of thousands forcibly expelled (not “evacuated” as the article claims) from their homes. But all this is irrelevant to the NYT… We are meant to empathize with this poor man who struggles with the difficult task of ethnic cleansing.

The expulsion from Be’er Sheva in 1948 was enough for her. Now she lives by herself in what used to be the family goat pen (the goats fled or were killed: One hen survived and is still alive and pecking in the soil of the goat pen). She stores some of her possessions in a rusty bus that they dragged to the site a long time ago. She heats up tea on a bonfire. “You can see the ruins of the house, you can’t see the ruins in our soul,” says Hussein al Aaidy, a man in his 50s. He was a Fatah activist, a prisoner in Israel from the 1970s who was freed during the prisoner exchange deal in 1985. After his release, he worked at several jobs, so as to be able to build a house for his family. (more…)

Today marks the 61st anniversary of the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel and which expedited the Yishuv’s plans for population “transfer”: a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from region. By the end of the war, approximately 750,000 Palestinian had either been forcibly expelled from their homes or fled the fighting. Today, the 1948 refugees remain stateless — scattered across the region from the squalid camps of South Lebanon to the ruins of Baghdad — and their descendants have expanded the number of registered Palestinian refugees into the millions.

Statelessness is violent. Stateless people have no rights that are actively enforced or protected. They have no embassy looking out for their welfare and are subject to any number of restrictions imposed by the host governments in the countries where they reside. That Israel has never considered the possibility of addressing the Palestinian refugee problem in any meaningful way has perpetuated the refugees’ plight and deepened their suffering. It is one of history’s great injustices and a lingering trauma that has defined the political identity of generations of Palestinians.

I believe that anyone who celebrates the creation and establishment of their own country simultaneously celebrates the injustices committed in order to make their state possible. When Americans celebrate July 4th, they tacitly support Manifest Destiny and the genocide of the Native Americans. Likewise, when Israelis celebrate their independence, they tacitly support the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

61 years of exile; 61 years without justice.

A new public opinion survey finds surprising attitudes on the part of Israeli Jews regarding Israel’s ongoing conflict with Arabs and Palestinians. With regard to the main historical event of the conflict — the 1948 Palestinian exodus — 39% of Israeli Jews surveyed believe expulsion by Israel was one of the factors leading to that exodus, in addition to Palestinian fear and the call of Arabs/Palestinian leaders to leave. An additional 8% believe the refugees were primarily expelled, adding up for a total of 47% that believe expulsion took place. In contrast, only 41% accept the Zionist narrative that rejects even partial expulsion and claims Palestinians left due to their own accord. (more…)

Dear all,

We have just been informed that this year the Israeli ‘independence celebrations’ will take place this Tuesday 5th May in Ballsbridge Court Hotel, Shelbourne Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. This event will be nothing other than a celebration of 61 years of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, particularly disgusting in the wake of the slaughter of 1,400 people in Gaza at the beginning of this year.

The IPSC has called for a peaceful protest picket outside the Ballsbridge Court Hotel, to start at 6.30pm. We need to shame those attending this celebration of dispossession and mass killing. Last year’s picket was highly successful and looked really well, we hope this year’s will be even bigger.

Attached is a map of how to get there – click here: http://www.ipsc.ie/images/events/nakba2009map.jpg

We are also asking people/organisations to not only build for this, but to circulate this mail far and wide, thank you.

And apologies for the short notice, we have literally just found out.

Please Note: To facilitate this emergency protest, we have changed the time of the IPSC Discussion Evening from 7.30 to 8.30pm. For more information on the discussion evening, please see: http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/ipsc/displayEvent.php?eventID=639

In solidarity,
Kevin Squires
IPSC National Coordinator

Rapoport also noted that Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti has written of the 160 mosques in Palestinian “villages” incorporated into Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements, “fewer than 40 are still standing.” (more…)

Call me cynical, but this kind of story makes me wonder if Israeli children will be performing for survivors of al-Nakba any time soon.

The word catastrophe is on everyone’s lips. People cannot help but recall the similar scenes from 60 years ago. But in 1948 the Israeli goal was the expulsion of the Palestinian people. This time around, it seems as though their goal is elimination. (more…)

Reading Eric Alterman’s recent article in The Nation magazine recently (Israel at 60: The State of the State), I began to consider the significant gulf that exists between ideology and practice among those on the American “left”. I have been an avid reader of Alterman’s for some time, regularly visiting his website (Alternet.org), following his contributions in The Nation magazine, and reading a few of his books (What Liberal Media?; The Book on Bush; etc.). Of course, Eric and I have had our differences in the past – instead of blaming the inadequacies of the American political system for Bush’s “election” in 2000, he chose to blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s loss – but I am especially disappointed in his most recent article.

Referring to the 60th anniversary of Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians and subsequent founding of the Zionist state, Alterman writes of the “successful prosecution of the War of Independence”. When discussing this state that regularly discriminates against 20% of its own population in its lawas and institutions. and which pursues policies of colonization and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories, Alterman waxes romantic about a “democratic society in the midst of countless hardships in a hostile corner of the world that had known only autocracy”.

Does this sound familiar?

Read more

In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel’s founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine’s Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.

Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people’s history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians’ renunciation of their rights. As Israel’s foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word “nakba” from their lexicon.

Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people’s mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people’s right can be secured at the cost of another’s. Read more

May 15, 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, when Palestinians were forced from their homes and ethnically cleansed en masse in a premeditated and organized campaign carried out by armed Zionist militia. Historical accounts indicate that the forced migration of Palestinians from their homeland had been planned well in advance. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was built on the violations of the rights of the Palestinian people. After widespread massacres and killings, more than 700,000 Palestinian civilians were brutally uprooted from their homes, villages and towns, and forced to become refugees in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and surrounding Arab countries. In addition, thousands of other Palestinians were internally displaced within the land subsequently occupied by Israel.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, and after its expansion in 1967 when it forcibly occupied the remainder of Palestinian West Bank land (including occupied East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, Israel has relentlessly confiscated Palestinian land in order to build illegal Jewish settlements, erasing the history of Palestine in the process. Israel’s campaign of “Establishing facts on the ground” has consistently forced more Palestinians into exile, and the Israeli authorities continue to seek to rid the land of its original inhabitants. Read more

A lack of obvious accomplishments in talks US President George Bush began with lofty ideals six months ago could change as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits the region yet again. She has visited the region nearly every month since the formal launch of peace talks last year, but nothing has yielded breakthroughs so far, at least not in public view. However, Rice might get something done with regards to Israeli roadblocks. A review of the ones that were supposedly removed will reveal that Israel has been removing just tiny dirt barriers which it calls roadblocks and is only partially dismantling the real big ones after pledging to pull them down. The UN is a witness to this charade. In March, the Israeli government announced the removal of 61 checkpoints or roadblocks in the West Bank, but the United Nations said at the time that only 44 had actually been removed and these were of little or no significance. If anything, the UN report said that as of March, the overall number of obstacles had increased. Read more

In a nation as coiled and embroiled as this, with a language fraught and zip-filed as the bible, it’s only fitting that a single daily newspaper headline will often say more than the thousands of words that follow.

So it was, that on the day before Israel was to celebrate its independence, Maariv’s banner read, simply, “60 Years of Bereavement.”

In a narrow sense, the headline, stark white on a field of black, marked Israel’s memorial day for its war dead and its victims of terrorism. At the same time, the brief headline may have said more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – and about Israelis themselves, and Palestinians as well – than all of this week’s floodtide of 60th anniversary punditry put together. Read more

This week, Israel turned 60 and with it came the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba—the destruction and systemic expulsion of the Palestinian community. No other event has so drastically altered the course of events in the Middle-East and the scars of Palestinian dispossession continue to be the cause of great consternation across the region and the world today.

I have always found that while most people possess only a very basic understanding of the conflict, it is a subject for which they hold firm and emotionally stubborn opinions. Very few topics change a conversation into an argument so efficiently—even among those with no ethnic, religious or otherwise personal connection to the conflict. Read more

As a 10-year-old growing up in Johannesburg, I celebrated Israel’s birth, 60 years ago. I unquestionably accepted the dramatic accounts of so-called self-defensive actions against Arab violence, to secure the Jewish state. The type of indoctrination South African cartoonist Zapiro so bitingly exposes in his work, raising the hackles of scribes such as David Saks of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. When I became involved in our liberation struggle, I became aware of the similarities with the Palestinian cause in the dispossession of land and birthright by expansionist settler occupation. I came to see that the racial and colonial character of the two conflicts provided greater comparisons than with any other struggle. When Nelson Mandela stated that we know as South Africans “that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” [1] he was not simply talking to our Muslim community, who can be expected to directly empathize, but to all South Africans precisely because of our experience of racial and colonial subjugation, and because we well understand the value of international solidarity.

When I came to learn of the fate that befell the Palestinians, I was shaken to the core and most particularly when I read eye-witness accounts of a massacre of Palestinian villagers that occurred a month before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence. This was at Deir Yassin, a quiet village just outside Jerusalem, which had the misfortune to lie by the road from Tel Aviv. On 9 April 1948, 254 men, women and children were butchered there by Zionist forces to secure the road. Because this was one of the few such episodes that received media attention in the West, the Zionist leadership did not deny it, but sought to label it an aberration by extremists. In fact, however, the atrocity was part of a broader plan designed by the Zionist High Command, led by Ben Gurion himself, which was aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the British mandate territory and the seizure of as much land as possible for the intended Jewish state. Read more