The Palestinian Nakba has two versions: the first is facts and the second is sheer lies

In the eighties of the last century, the State of Israel revealed some documents from the state archives, and the archives of the Zionist movement and its organizations in Mandatory Palestine before, during, and in the years following the Palestinian Nakba. This was a valuable opportunity for a number of those who became known as the new historians in Israel, such as Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Shlomo Zand and others, to discuss the Nakba of the Palestinian people and the accompanying massacres that formed the basis for the policy of deportation, displacement and ethnic cleansing that accompanied the Nakba of the Palestinian people in 1948. The entry of new historians in Israel on the line was the beginning of a trend among some Israelis, who began to question the Zionist narrative. This limited operation also provided assistance to the activity of Israeli civil associations, such as the Zochrot Jewish Association, which specializes in the Palestinian historical narrative, and undoubtedly launched the firsts of a new historical work, in the face of the Israeli mainstream, which was and still rejects the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba.

The leaders of the State of Israel and the Zionist movement went insane, and the process of blackout and secrecy returned to the archives of the state, the archives of the Zionist movement, and the Jewish Agency, after the accusation was leveled against the new historians of having slaughtered the sacred cow.

On the Palestinian side, we must admit, as we commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nakba of the Palestinian people, which coincided with the establishment of the State of Israel, that we failed to address the Israeli narrative about the Nakba that befell the Palestinian people, and we did not present our own version of this Nakba as it actually happened.

It is clear that there are two versions of the Nakba: an Israeli one that adopted lies and falsification of facts as a method, and a Palestinian one whose events were actually ignored. Its introductions and repercussions, and were absent from the concerns of world public opinion due to various considerations, not the least of which is that the world had just emerged from the horrors of World War II and the accompanying crimes committed by the Nazi monster, and after a few years it cast a heavy shadow over the crimes that were made by the victims of Hitlerite Nazism.

(Israel) built its narrative on biblical historical allegations that relied on legends and sayings of fortune-tellers, and adhered to the legitimacy of the Zionist project, which calls for a return to the Promised Land after an alleged forced absence that lasted thousands of years, and that the Zionist project came to save the Jews from anti-Semitism and from persecution and genocide as it took place in Europe, especially on Nazi monster hands.

The Israeli narrative was based on an official disregard and exclusion of all monuments indicating the existence of Palestine before 1948, and included the names of mountains, hills, plains, ancient Canaanite cities and villages.

Israel has also used, in influencing the Israeli public awareness of the Nakba, multiple images in archeology, vegetation, food, education, architecture, and tourism that focus on the central goal of obscuring the Palestinian history in the country, and erasing the images of the Nakba in the consciousness of the average Israeli citizen.

The Zionist movement, along with it, used to deny its mere occurrence and claim that the aim of talking about the Nakba is to delegitimize Israel. It continued to deny responsibility for it and referred the responsibility for the mass exodus of Palestinians to the Arab countries that called on them to do so while awaiting the declaration of victory over the Zionist project in Palestine. And Israel, along with the Zionist movement and the Jewish Agency, continued to refuse to see the Palestinians as victims of its practices and crimes, and worked hard to strip the Palestinians of the ability to present themselves as victims.

In the best cases, Israel has presented the refugee problem as a humanitarian problem for which the Palestinian leaders and the leaders of the Arab countries bear responsibility. At the same time, it worked hard to erase memory through textbooks that ignore the human dimension of the consequences of the 1948 war, and mobilized its political, security and media machinery to delegitimize the literature of new historians that contradicted the Zionist narrative regarding the war and refugees. And enacted the Nakba Law, which aims to enable the Ministry of Education to impose penalties on educational institutions that commemorate the Nakba.

On the other hand, we Palestinians failed to present our Palestinian narrative as it happened since the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate Deed and the accompanying denial of the political rights of the Palestinian people, including their right to self-determination. In the Balfour Declaration, as in the Mandate Deed, the discussion was only about non-Jews in Palestine and about their civil and religious rights. This was happening before the rise of fascism and Nazism on the European continent and many years before the Holocaust of the Nazi monster, and this came in the context of dividing and re-dividing the world between the victorious colonial countries in the First World War, where the Zionist movement emerged as one of the tools of colonialism and a natural and logical result of the development of its control mechanisms over the countries of the region after the end of the war.

Another aspect that is no less important in presenting the Palestinian narrative is the policy followed by the Zionist movement and its institutions in Palestine during the era of the British Mandate, and the accompanying silent ethnic cleansing and displacement of citizens from their lands targeted by building the first settlements, and the policy of Hebrew work and the construction of a closed society in Palestine, which was planning To carry out large-scale ethnic cleansing when the moment is right. The construction of military and paramilitary organizations, including Jewish terrorist organizations, was in full swing under the watch and eyes of the British Mandate government, and when the right moment came with the withdrawal of British forces in Palestine, the country was the scene of combat operations for trained and armed Jewish forces that excel in numbers and equipment over the Arab armies, which I participated in the 1948 war.

The "Dalt" plan for comprehensive ethnic cleansing approved by the leadership of the Zionist movement and the Jewish Agency in March 1948 was ready, after entrusting its implementation with detailed directives to those forces, which had been built by the Zionist movement in Palestine with direct assistance from the British Mandate government. The plan was based on ethnic cleansing as a central goal of its objectives, with strict and detailed directives, calling without mercy for killing and spreading terror, besieging Palestinian cities and villages, burning homes and properties, and planting mines among the rubble to prevent the people from returning to their homes, and as a result of that criminal plan that was revealed by a number of New historians in Israel claim that the Haganah, the main regular military force and the nucleus of the army after the establishment of the state and other terrorist organizations, committed 28 massacres, the most horrific of which was in Deir Yassin, and carried out demolitions of more than 530 towns and villages, and displaced about 800,000 Palestinians and turned them into refugees. .

We presented this narrative abstractly without clarifying its nature and political context, and we did not present with it what Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and other leaders of Jewish terrorist organizations said about Deir Yassin, for example, both of whom later became heads of Israeli governments. Menachem Begin said that without Deir Yassin, it would not have been possible for Israel to exist. As for Yitzhak Shamir, he described the massacre as a humanitarian duty.

Beyond that, while Mr. Jacques Rene, Director of Red Cross Operations in Palestine at the time, who visited the village and witnessed the horrific crime in the field and submitted a chilling report on it to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, in which he expressed his anger at the barbaric practices of the Jewish forces that attacked children and women in In the village, Menachem Begin, head of the terrorist Irgun, sent a message to the leaders who carried out that crime, in which he said: “The occupation of Deir Yassin is a wonderful achievement. Israel, and to victory, as in Deir Yassin, as well as in others, we will storm and annihilate the enemy, our Lord, you have chosen us to conquer.”

Menachem Begin, head of the terrorist Aragonese, and prime minister of Israel, who overthrew the Labor Party in 1977, spoke for God, who chose him for that brutal mission. Perhaps he believed that he was the heir of Joshua bin Nun, who is narrated in the legends of the Old Testament and his travels, that he (with the help of God) invaded the city of Jericho in the thirteenth century BC and exterminated all the men, women and children in it, except for the adulteress Rahab, and followed her to the Canaanite city (Ai) near Bethlehem Where he was not satisfied with the extermination of the population of men, women and children, but rather all the animals in the city, even though the scholars of history and archaeology agree that such an invasion did not occur at all and that the city of Jericho was subjected to destruction before the appearance of Joshua bin Nun (alleged) on its borders a century and a half And that (Ai) was also subjected to destruction four centuries before the emergence of Ibn Nun.

Our Palestinian narrative was late in presenting it to the world as it happened as the difference between facts and lies and conclusive evidence of the Zionist planned crimes that were committed, which allowed for a not short period of time to spread the Israeli narrative, which claimed that the residents of Palestine left their homes in response to calls from abroad. The world was late in hearing our story as much as we were late in presenting our vision and story.

In addition to all this, the Palestinian narrative about the Nakba should not stop at what happened in 1948, but rather it should evolve and accompany what is happening over the years, because the Nakba has been going on since its first year. Who can ignore what happened in 1967 after Israel occupied the West Bank, including Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. In the first days of the occupation of that year, Israel also carried out acts of ethnic cleansing, so it brutally demolished the villages of the Latrun area (Emwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba) in the vicinity of the city of Jerusalem and displaced the people in the surrounding villages and turned their villages into a recreational park and transferred the ownership of their lands to the so-called Jewish National Fund (JNF) Keren Kimet) and turned it into a vital field for its economic activities, and as Israel did with the villages of Latrun, it did the same in Jerusalem when it destroyed the Mughrabi neighborhood on the day after the occupation. Neighboring . This must be a chapter of our story about the Nakba, so that the same scene will not be repeated in Jerusalem, where the occupation is still threatening to displace the people of Sheikh Jarrah and Batn al-Hawa in Silwan in occupied Jerusalem and other places in the Holy City.

The chapters on the demolition of Palestinian villages and towns, displacement and ethnic cleansing did not stop at the borders of what happened in 1948 and 1967, but rather continued with scenarios, pictures and brutal means through the theft of Palestinian lands and property and turning them into a vital field for settlement activities that laid in itself the basis for building a harsh system of discrimination and apartheid It is silent ethnic cleansing. One of the harsh examples of the policy of ethnic cleansing is the Palestinian Jordan Valley. Its population in 1967 exceeded 125,000 people, but today the number barely reaches 60,000 due to the policy of systematic expulsion of the population from the region and the replacement of them with Jewish settlers, which constitutes a clear and unmistakable war crime. In addition to other facts that provide an appropriate legal basis for the work of the International Criminal Court and the work of the International Court of Justice regarding the consequences of the permanent occupation in terms of changing the demographic situation of the population in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Israeli ethnic cleansing policy.

Now that we are entering a new year of the Palestinian Nakba, we notice the shift in the position of world public opinion. The situation is beginning to change, and among the indications of that is the recent UN resolution in early December 2022 to specify the fifteenth of next May as the day when the United Nations General Assembly will commemorate, at a high level, the 75th anniversary of the Nakba of Palestine. This transformation was a natural result of the steadfastness of our people in the 48 areas in the face of aggression and the attempt of permanent familyization and their steadfastness in their land as a national minority that preserved its cause and its presence on its land, and secondly due to the continuous clash between the Palestinian people in the occupied territories in the June 1967 aggression and the accompanying Israeli war crimes And a policy of discrimination and racial segregation fueled by the Israeli occupation and settlement policy and by the restoration of refugee camps and diaspora in neighboring countries for its role as a struggle lever for restoring rights under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which helped keep the refugee issue alive and their right to return, this right that does not die by statute of limitations as it was Israel dreams, as are the American administration's delusions. Here remains the task of preserving UNRWA and enabling it to play its role and provide its services in various health, educational, social and humanitarian fields and as a witness to a national, individual and collective right that must be adhered to as a firm national position in the face of attempts to liquidate the justest cause in human history.