The Scourge of Apartheid Israel’s Forever Nakba Against Long-Suffering Palestinians

I’m old enough to remember Israel’s 1947-1948 Nakba, but as a young boy, I didn’t understand what hit home like a hammer years later.

The ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine let European Jews steal their homeland 74 years ago.

Historian Ilan Pappe documented the Palestinian holocaust.

The scourge of Zionist tyranny depopulated their villages and cities, massacred their people, raped their women and committed countless other atrocities.

Their homes, property and other possessions were lost to make way for exclusive Jewish development.

What happened in 1947-48 continues today — a perpetual dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland by Zionist grand theft and tyrannical rule.

From December 1947 to mid-May 1948, Zionist criminality expelled about 800,000 Palestinians, massacring countless others.

They destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

Nearly six months of genocidal ethnic cleansing is what international law today calls a crime of war and against humanity — what Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were imprisoned or hanged for.

For the past 74 years, the scourge of Zionist tyranny institutionalized state terror against millions of defenseless Palestinians with full US/Western support and encouragement.

Israel’s Kafkaesque matrix of control dominates all aspects of their daily lives.

It includes economic strangulation, collective punishment and exploitation by dominant Jews.

They’ve endured lost freedoms, separation walls, electric fences and border closings, regular curfews, roadblocks, and checkpoints.

They’ve watched helplessly as Israelis bulldozed their homes, destroyed their crops and orchards, arrested, imprisoned and brutalized them for being Arabs on land Jews want exclusively for themselves.

Time and again, they’ve been assaulted and denied basic services that are essential to life —  including healthcare, education, employment, and right to live on their own land in their own country, free from foreign occupation.

Annually on May 15, Palestinians commemorate their long ago Nakba catastrophe.

In 1895, Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, called for “expriopriat(ing) private property” belonging to Arabs for a Jewish state.

Before grand theft of their land began in December 1947, David Gen Gurion — Israel’s first prime minister — said the following:

“We have come, and we have stolen their country.”

“We must do everything to insure they never do return.” 

Years earlier, he told his son: 

“We will expel the Arabs and take their places…with the force at our disposal.”

Israel’s fourth prime minister, Golda Meir (from 1969 – 1974), contemptuously said:

“There are no Palestinians (sic).” 

Former terrorist, Israel’s 6th prime minister from 1977 – 1983, Menachem Begin, called Palestinians “two-legged beasts (sic).” 

He called Jews the “master race” and “divine gods on this planet (sic).”

Former Israeli president, Haim Herzog, once said: 

“I am not prepared to consider (Palestinians) as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years (sic).”

“For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner (sic).”

Nor can Palestinian owners of land be allowed to live on what Jews want exclusively for themselves.

When the Nakba began in December 1947, about 1.3 million Palestinians outnumbered 600,000 Jews by more than two to one.

Wanting them removed to make way for exclusive Jewish development, Ben Gurion said the following:

“Every attack (must) end with occupation, destruction and expulsion.”

It should include depopulation, destruction of Palestinian homes and possessions, their people massacred, survivors permanently displaced.

Ben Gurion and others like him wanted Palestinian youths and men of fighting age eliminated to prevent resistance to the diabolical Zionist plot.

They wanted the collective Palestinian memory erased from the historical record.

Israel’s Nakba Law bans commemorating it as a way to reinvent history.

Commemorating Nakba Day on Sunday at a time when Palestinians also mourn Israel’s assassination of noted Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli sniper, the broadcaster said the following:

On the Nakba’s 74th anniversary, it “didn’t end on May 15, 1948.”

It was the beginning of horrific decades to follow, adding:

“Israel continues to oppress and dispossess Palestinians to this day, albeit in a less explicit way than that during the Nakba.”

The infamous 1917 Balfour Declaration promised UK help to establish a home for Jews on stolen Palestinian land — forcibly dispossessing their people to make it possible.

During the run-up to WW II from 1936 to 1939, Palestinians rose up against their British colonialist occupiers.

In response to what’s known as the Arab Revolt, UK brutality destroyed about 2,000 Palestinian homes, massacred thousands, imprisoned thousands more.

Ruthlessly brutalizing them, their leaders were harshly mistreated, then deported,

It was prelude to the Nazi holocaust.

In November 1947, UN Res. 181 called for partitioning historic Palestine at a time when Jews were one-third of the population and owned less than 6% of the land.

Under the unacceptable partition plan, they got 55% of the land, including major cities with majority Arab populations.

Jerusalem was designated an international city under a UN Trusteeship Council.

In July 1980, Israel’s Jerusalem Law annexed the city entirely for its unified capital.

Yet months earlier in March, Security Council Res. 465 declared that:

“(M)easures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant (Fourth Geneva) violation.”

The annexation also “constitute(d) a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

It’s been nonexistent in Historic Palestine to this day since Israel’s infamous Nakba.

On May 15, 1948 when the repressive British Mandate ended, Israel self-declared itself a state.

Fifty years later on this date, Yasser Arafat declared May 15 to be a national day of remembrance.

Israel celebrates its day of independence.

The same day is the Palestinian Nakba — the catastrophe defined by widespread massacres and dispossession of about 800,000 Palestinians from their historic homeland.

The appalling injustice drives millions of Palestinian to continue struggling for justice and redress denied them all these years.

For an end to Zionist tyranny.

For the right to return to their historic homeland — to be treated as equitably as Jews.

Nothing less will ever be accepted by their long-suffering people — nor should it.