OPINIONS
Sat 29 Apr 2023 10:24 am - Jerusalem Time
75 years of the Nakba .. Facts for history and politics
The Nakba, with its meaning of calamity, catastrophe, uprooting, expulsion, displacement, continuous occupation of land and people, the destruction of 418 Palestinian villages and the displacement of more than a million people from their homes, villages and cities to live in diaspora and eternal camps deprived of their humanity. And the massacres that claimed the lives of thousands of those who were safe in their homes.. The Nakba sums up the entire Palestinian cause with all its components and dimensions, and sums up in one word the absence of international and human justice. After this long time, it bears the meaning of continuity without any political solutions looming on the political horizon, and burying the two-state solution with the establishment of the Palestinian state, and this means that the Nakba entered a phase of unknown time. And the continuation of the Nakba in the concepts of settlement, Judaization, continuous occupation, violence, apartheid, siege, four wars on Gaza, and the dispersion of fifteen million who make up the number of the Palestinian people between inside Israel and the occupied lands, camps and diaspora distributed among all countries of the world in search of human rights and humanity. The real Nakba began before May 16, 1948, the day Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. And to be embodied in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, under which Britain granted the colonial power a homeland for the Jews in Palestine and dealt with the indigenous people as a minority with few rights, and to translate this promise with the British Mandate in which Palestine was intentionally placed in order for Britain to implement the Balfour Declaration by opening the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration and facilitating the transfer of The lands, especially the lands of the Islamic endowments of the Ottoman Empire, and the arming of the Zionist militias. And up to the official day of the Nakba, with the issuance of the UN resolution on October 26, 1947, to divide Palestine and announce the establishment of Israel as a state on approximately 55 percent of the area of Palestine, noting that they constituted at that time only a population minority that did not exceed six percent. The Nakba continues with the 1948 war and Israel's occupation of twenty-five percent of Palestine, which is allocated to the Arab state, and its occupation is completed with the 1967 war to occupy all Palestinian lands. Even under the authority, Israel considers all of Palestine as one land from its security perspective and deals with the Palestinians without rights and as mere groups that came to Israel. It rejects peace and a Palestinian state.
The Nakba carries many facts that we must restore for significance and consideration. The first historical fact is that the Palestinian issue is a national liberation issue, like all national liberation issues, and its inevitable law is full independence and liberation, whether the occupation is long or short, and what confirms this historical fact is that the struggle and resistance of the Palestinian people did not stop since the first day of immigration policies in the twenties of the last century. Palestine witnessed major donations and revolutions, the most important of which was the 1936 revolution, which stopped due to Arab interventions at the time. This resistance and revolution continues to this day with the announcement of two intifadas and the harbingers of a third intifada taking place in the Palestinian territories today, and four wars fought by the people against the occupation and with the presence of more than five thousand prisoners and detainees. The second historical fact is that the Palestinian cause and its origins are the product of the colonial alliance and the Zionist movement and the solution of the Jewish problem at the expense of the Palestinian people. The Zionist movement would not have been able to achieve its goals without this colonial alliance. The irony is that this alliance stipulated by the First Zionist Congress is still a cornerstone of Israel's survival in its alliance with the United States. The third historical fact is that the historical arguments and narratives propagated by Israel derive their strength from the fact that Israel is a state of force and a state of war, and with coverage and bias from the Western media, which always takes the Zionist point of view and portrays the struggle of the Palestinian people as terrorism and violence. And that what Israel is doing in self-defense. In fact, the conflict is a struggle between the power of legitimacy and the legitimacy of power. As the world triumphs over force, legitimacy and international justice are absent from the Palestinian people.
The Nakba has its Palestinian aspects, considering the Palestinians are the people of the Nakba and those who suffer from it until today, and here are many aspects and manifestations between positive and negative, and we need another article. I will suffice here that Israel has failed to overcome the reality of the Palestinian people, the reality of the refugee problem, the reality of Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem and its religious status, and there are negative aspects represented in the division and the decline in the role of the PLO, and the Arabs scrambling towards normalization and peace with Israel. It remains that there are positive transformations that require a comprehensive Palestinian national vision, most notably that this year's celebration will be held in the heart of the United Nations General Assembly for the first time. This is an affirmation of the strength of international legitimacy, the growing sympathy for the cause and the Palestinian people even within the United States, and the rising voices critical of Israel.
What we are seeing today of a real crisis facing Israel reveals the true image of religious Zionism and its racist nationalism. These positive aspects require a comprehensive Palestinian vision and approach based on continuing to make Palestine a just cause of national liberation, activating international responsibility, and presenting an approach to peace based on the principle of rights and combating discrimination and ethnic hatred. Palestine is one with its land and one with its people within the framework of one state and one citizenship. And time will remain, no matter how long the catastrophe lasts, working for the benefit of the Palestinian people and their cause.
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75 years of the Nakba .. Facts for history and politics