Ikhras Shoe Of The Month Award Winner – March 2013

April 6, 2013
 

The Ikhras awards committee is pleased to announce the winner of the Muntadhar Zaidi Ikhras Shoe of the Month for March, 2013 is Lebanese journalist Octavia Nasr. Nasr is receiving this coveted award for an article she wrote titled “What the city of Haifa taught me.” The article first appeared in Arabic in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Nahar, and the English version appeared the next day on the website of the Saudi family news channel Al-Arabiya.

Nasr begins her article reminiscing about the “countless stories about Haifa’s golden days pre-1948.” The reader can almost detect a mocking undertone, as if life in pre-Nakba Haifa was not quite as “Golden” as relayed by the Palestinian refugees she encountered growing up in Lebanon, or was at least only part of the story of Haifa. Sure enough Nasr then goes on to share her awakening:

“Then the awakening came at my first meeting with a current Haifa resident more than twenty years ago…I listed all the locations that grew dear to my heart over the years: Saint Elias Church, Mount Carmel, College Des Freres school, Selizian School, Wadi al-Nasnas… To my surprise, they were all still there and flourishing with fresh new generations of Palestinians. I later met a Jewish family from Haifa and got to know a different side of the story of the majestic city. I learned about the Hadar area, Hertzel Street and Ben Gurion Boulevard. From the Druze of Haifa I learned about Isifya and Daliya village on Mount Carmel. Not to forget the Muslim community of Haifa which can be found everywhere in the Arab sections and the very prominent Baha’I faith with its majestic gardens and Abbas Dome, one of the most beautiful gardens and architectural structure in the world.”

Nasr, does refer to the “atrocities committed and the complete takeover of the land and displacement of its original people”, but only in passing. What goes unmentioned, however, is that the perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing that paved the way for the establishment of the racist, colonial entity remain there today as occupiers and continue to deny the original inhabitants of Haifa the right of return to their homes, land, and city. It’s as if the Nakba was a passing event in the distant past rather than an ongoing crime against the vast majority of the original inhabitants of the majestic seaside city that gets its name from the ancient Canaanite Arabic word al-Hayfah. The Canaanites emerged from the shores of the Arabian Peninsula to become the first group of people to settle Haifa in what originally came to be known as the Land of Canaan.
The very recent history of Haifa and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish-exclusivist, colonial-settler entity have been well documented by Palestinians, Arabs, Westerners, and Israel’s own “New Historians.” Only a select few Zionist fanatics continue to cling to the myth of a “Land without a people…” or the lie that the Palestinian Arabs, after inhabiting this land since the beginning of time, in 1948 suddenly decided to pick-up and leave voluntarily.

Between the partition plan adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 29, 1947 and the 1949 ceasefire between the newly established Zionist entity and the Arab states that ended the war, the vast majority of the indigenous population of Palestine became victims of a pre-meditated expulsion plan by foreign invaders backed by the most powerful empire at the time. It was a deliberate and systematic political-military strategy carried out through mass violence, terrorism, and massacres in order to lay the groundwork for the establishment of the modern state of Israel as envisioned by the Jewish exclusivist ideology of Zionism

As for Haifa, the attack began on April 21, 1948 when 5000 heavily armed fighters from the Zionist terrorist militia known as the Haganah descended upon the city which was poorly defended by 300-400 Palestinian volunteers. Of the 61,000 Palestinian Arabs that inhabited Haifa only 3500 were allowed to stay. The rest of the Arab population was literally pushed into the sea and forced to flee by boat to Acre, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut, Lebanon. Some of the Palestinians that ended up in Acre were ethnically cleansed again a few weeks later and forced to flee to Lebanon.

Almost 65 years later the people of Haifa continue to be denied their basic right of return, a fact to which Nasr appears oblivious when she writes:

“For some reason, Haifa was always a common denominator and it kept creeping up into my world, as the example of how integrated living between — not just Arabs and Israelis would look like — but also how the harmony among Christians, Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Baha’is and Jews can be exemplified. During a recent visit to this great city, I learned that indeed Haifa is a symbol of tolerance and co-existence.” (Emphasis ikhras editors).

The questions that immediately jump out to the reader are, first, how does a city ethnically cleansed of an indigenous population that has not yet been allowed to return become a “symbol of tolerance and co-existence”? And how can a city ruled by a colonial regime as part of a racist, exclusivist entity be described as an example of “integrated living” and “harmony”?

It’s not surprising to read such pro-Zionist bile from a militant supporter of the fascistic, Lebanese right-wing that has always been allied with Israel. Nasr began her journalism career in Lebanon at the LBC network, the propaganda arm of the Lebanese Forces established by Bashir Gemayel with the help and support of Israel. This right-wing, sectarian Christian militia was responsible for some of the ugliest massacres and crimes during the Lebanese civil war including the Sabra and Shatila massacres. This fringe element within Lebanon has always been openly hostile and racist towards Lebanese Muslims, Palestinians, Syrians, and Arabs in general and very sympathetic to Zionism and Western colonial powers. With her background in journalism and an extremist, right-wing political orientation Nasr was well prepared to move on and spend 20 years at CNN as the token Arab carefully following the script of mainstream US media before her career-ending tweet hastened her exit.

In her short piece Nasr, like many of her colleagues in the Western media, found the space to lecture the Palestinians on the virtues of non-violence.

“People who still believe in the military struggle as the only way to Palestine should learn a lesson from Haifa. Peaceful Palestinians have found a way to protect the land and safeguard it despite all the pressures and abuses.”

She seems to forget that it’s only through the continuing inherent violence of the occupation that the people of Haifa have yet to return to their city. Nasr also fails to mention that for 20 years after the start of the Nakba the Palestinian refugees did not engage in any armed resistance, and whenever those “peaceful Palestinians” attempted to visit their homes unarmed during that period they were shot and killed by the same Israeli army the right-wing sectarian militias she supported in Lebanon considered friends and natural allies.

Nasr concludes her piece with the following obscene passage:

“I know a little boy who was baptized in the Saint Elias Maronite Church in Carmel some seventy years ago. He might never see that church again, but it must be comforting for him to know that it is still standing and brings together Muslims, Christians, Jews and Druze for worship and for lessons in co-existence only Haifa can offer!”

Yes, you read that correctly. Nasr is actually saying that a Palestinian refugee forced to flee his own city can, nevertheless, find “comforting” in knowing an Israeli-occupied Haifa to which he is denied the right to return or even visit remains a place that offers lessons in “co-existence.” Haifa’s history does indeed offer lessons in co-existence, but Haifa’s present can only serve as a blatant illustration of racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, exclusivism, and intolerance. Haifa under Israeli occupation is not the city of co-existence and tolerance it was prior to the advent of Zionism. Haifa will inevitably return to its tolerant, cosmopolitan past, but only after the liberation of Palestine and the return of her indigenous population and rightful owners to her.

What is most disturbing about Nasr’s article may not have been what she wrote which amounts to boilerplate Zionist propaganda, but rather its glaring omission. Not once does Nasr remind her readers that the original inhabitants of Haifa living in refugee camps less than a 90-minute drive from their homes would not have been allowed to accompany her on what appears to have been a lovely vacation. Nasr, in all likelihood, traveled to Israel on a Business class seat and went through customs at Ben-Gurion airport with a Western passport as it is illegal for any Lebanese citizen to travel to the usurping Zionist entity.*

After her recent visit to Israel in blatant disregard of the anti-normalization campaign in Arab world, and for then sharing her vacation experience in an article that reads like a travel brochure put out by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and on behalf of all Palestinians in the diaspora, the ikhras awards committee is pleased to present Octavia Nasr with the March, 2013 Ikhras Shoe of the Month.

*As of the date of this writing Nasr has not been detained or questioned by the Lebanese authorities regarding her recent trip to Israel.

***

Every month Ikhras awards the Muntadhar Zaidi “Shoe of the month” to the House Arab or Muslim individual or organization whose behavior that month best exemplifies the behavior of what Malcolm X described, in the language of his own time, as the “house negro” (see video). The award is named in honor of the brave Iraqi journalist Muntadhar Zaidi who threw his shoes at the war criminal George W. Bush at a time House Arabs and Muslims were dining with him at the White House and inviting him to their mosques. Arab dictators and puppets of the empire are also qualified to enter the shoe of the month competition based on their own subservience to U.S.-led global imperialism. Contest guidelines prohibit any one individual or organization from winning the award more than 3 times a year.

 

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

NAKBA APARTHEID AND BDS

Daniel Mabsout,
 

The BDS campaign and company and other NGOs that endorse the BDS should not be investigated only regarding their boycott policy and its effectiveness on the ground and repercussions on the cause , but should be investigated primarily regarding their motives , plans and consequences concerning Palestine and the Palestinians . The fact that they start from recognizing Isra…el’s right to Historic Palestine and whatever land Israel usurped before 1967 makes them in favor of Israel rather than of Arabs and Palestinians and this by giving Israel an underserved legality and legitimacy . The policy of boycott followed by BDS calls for boycott on the ground of recognizing and normalizing with Israel . It boycotts the part in favor of the whole .

The fact that BDS does not impose the right to return to their homeland to all Palestinians as a precondition to any solution, makes their approach even more dubious and ridiculous . In case Palestinians do not return , the lifting – by Israel – of the so called Apartheid policies will only benefit the Arab Palestinians inside Israel who represent but a portion of the Palestinians and a minority group in occupied Palestine who might see their condition improve at the detriment of the cause itself and at the expense of the majority of Palestinians who will have to suffer endless exile and homelessness . This will also have for effect to boost Israel’s image as a democratic country and a model country in the region and hide its real usurping assaulting nature.

The approach of the BDS regarding Palestine is extremely controversial and some of their endorsers- mainly Ali Abunima of the Electronic Intifada – have reached the point of asking Israel to annex the West Bank and grant its inhabitants equal rights with Israelis and solve thus the Palestinian problem.
If these projects and suggestions of the BDS movement do not serve Israel then whom do they serve ? And why the BDS and its endorsers have totally overlooked the alternative of armed struggle not even mentioning the armed Resistance of HAMAS or that of Hizbullah that has reaped success- especially in Lebanon- and defeated Israel- by the testimony of Israelis themselves- and liberated the south after 18 years of occupation without any concessions given to the enemy? Instead of being acclaimed and saluted for its achievements, such Resistance is shunned and ignored on behalf of Palestinians whose land has been occupied for more than 60 years and who could have employed this achievement of the Resistance to improve their condition regarding Israel if not to get inspiration for any future endeavor.
Whom does the shunning of the armed Resistance serve? Does it serve Israelis or Palestinians?? All this shows that BDS – and its endorsers- play in Israel’s hands and are monitored and manipulated and intimidated by Israeli s and by Jews living abroad who have been lately almost ordering them around .

The great chaos that the Palestinian issue is going through , the successive failures and shortcomings of the different organizations and the lack of self criticism and absence of true assessment and evaluation of the situation, and the sectarian alignment that overtook HAMAS , much more than Israel’s so called might or assumed superiority, is responsible for the emptiness that allowed organizations with Jewish and Israeli affiliations -like BDS – to speak for Palestinians and draw the line of action of the cause .

Mind you , this BDS suffers from the same ailment the other Palestinians organizations suffer from , it lacks real evaluation and assessment of its role since it started its action more than eight years ago, and it is not about to admit the fact that all its actions and endeavors have very slightly – if not at all- affected the Palestinian situation . The truth is that the Palestinian situation has degenerated- lately- from bad to worse and will degenerate more and disintegrate more- at all levels – whether at the level of prisoners or settlements or Jerusalem or Gaza or Holy Sites or military assaults , nothing whatsoever has been achieved while organizations- like BDS- who monitor most functions in the occupied land- remain in a limbo situation giving Israel enough time to recover from its successive military defeats and plan carefully for the next period and resume its policies of expansion and occupation.

Is fool whoever thinks that Israel will give up such plans or give Palestinians anything that Palestinians will not get except through Resistance and struggle as the Lebanese example shows. Palestinians and Arabs from the four quarters are required to awaken to this reality and to assess the whole Palestinian and Arab situation and to determine their choices and define their line of action and recover their unity and solidarity defeating the schemes of division and partition and quarrel and refusing the recognition of the usurped State – as an Apartheid State or any state – whether via BDS or any other Palestinian organization .River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

DALET Zionism’s diabolical blueprint

DALET: The conspiracy to steal the land of Palestine

Plan D shows ‘expulsion and transfer’ were always a key part of the Zionists’ scheme.

by Stuart Littlewood, source

I have to admit, I was only dimly aware of the Dalet Plan before reading Alan Hart’s latest article ’The green light for Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine’.

The Dalet Plan, or Plan D, was the Zionist terror mob’s diabolical blueprint for the violent and blood-spattered takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – written 65 years ago and based on three earlier schemes drafted between 1945 and 1948. It was drawn up by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency.

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed in advance of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there. Indeed, the British had completed their departure by 15 May 1948.

(Palestinian Nakba- file photo)

The Plan’s intention, on the surface, was to gain control of the areas of the Jewish state and defend its borders. But it also aimed to do much more. It included measures to control the areas of Jewish settlements and concentrations located outside Jewish borders and ensure “freedom of military and economic activity” by occupying and controlling important high-ground positions on a number of transport routes.

This would be achieved by, amongst other things, “applying economic pressure on the enemy by besieging some of his cities”, “encirclement of enemy cities” and “blocking the main enemy transportation routes… Roads, bridges, main passes, important crossroads, paths, etc. must be blocked by means of: acts of sabotage, explosions, series of barricades, mine fields, as well as by controlling the elevations near roads and taking up positions there.”

Jewish forces would occupy the police stations, described as “fortresses”, fifty of which had been built by the British throughout Palestine after the Arab unrest of 1936-39.

The Plan discussed “operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force.” These operations included:

“Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

“Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Villages emptied in this way were then fortified. “Outside the borders of the state” seems a curious thing to say since nobody was saying then where Israel’s borders ran, and nobody is saying now.
If they met no resistance, “garrison troops will enter the village and take up positions in it or in locations which enable complete tactical control,” said the Plan. “The officer in command of the unit will confiscate all weapons, wireless devices, and motor vehicles in the village. In addition, he will detain all politically suspect individuals… In every region, a [Jewish] person will be appointed to be responsible for arranging the political and administrative affairs of all [Arab] villages and population centers which are occupied within that region.

And here are the chilling guidelines for besieging, occupying and controlling Arab cities:
“1. By isolating them from transportation arteries by laying mines, blowing up bridges, and a system of fixed ambushes.
2. If necessary, by occupying high points which overlook transportation arteries leading to enemy cities, and the fortification of our units in these positions.
3. By disrupting vital services, such as electricity, water, and fuel, or by using economic resources available to us, or by sabotage.
4. By launching a naval operation against the cities that can receive supplies by sea, in order to destroy the vessels carrying the provisions, as well as by carrying out acts of sabotage against harbor facilities.”

It is one of the sickest documents in history and shows why so many people question Israel’s legitimacy. Jewish terror gangs committed a massacre at Deir Yassin to set the tone and ‘soften up’ the Arabs for expulsion. More atrocities followed the declaration of Israeli statehood on 14 May 1948. 750,000 Palestinians were put to flight as Israel’s forces obliterated hundreds of Arab villages and towns. The village on which Sderot now stands was one such. To this day they have been denied the right to return and received no compensation. 34 massacres are said to have been committed in pursuit of the Jewish nation’s racist and territorial ambitions.

White Colonialist Club

The UN Partition of Palestine in 1947 cannot stand close scrutiny. At that time, UN membership did not include African states, and most Arab and Asian states were still under colonial rule. It was pretty much a white colonialist club. The Palestinians themselves had no representation and they weren’t even consulted.

The first vote failed to reach the two-thirds majority required. To ensure success in the second vote a good deal of arm-twisting was applied to the smaller countries, but again it fell short. At the third attempt France was persuaded to come “on board” after the US threatened to withdraw desperately needed post-WW2 aid, and on 29 November the UN voted to partition Palestine into three parts: a Jewish state on 14,000 sq km with some 558,000 Jews and 405,000 Palestinian Arabs; and an Arab state on 11,500 sq km with about 804,000 Palestinian Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem, including major religious sites, was to be internationally administered.

No sooner had Britain packed her bags than Israel declared statehood on 14 May 1948 and immediately began expanding territorial control across all of Palestine to accommodate a new Jewish state expanding on all fronts. 15 May marks the dark day in 1948 remembered by Palestinians as al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) brought about by the military terror that forced them off their homeland.
Atrocities occurred at Deir Yassin, Lod and Ramle. The massacre at Deir Yassin was carried out by the two Zionist terror groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. On an April morning in 1948 (before the Israeli state declaration) 130 of their commandos made a dawn raid on this small Arab town with a population of 750, to the west of Jerusalem. The attack was initially beaten off, and only when a crack unit of the Haganah arrived with mortars were the Arab townsmen overwhelmed. The Irgun and the Stern Gang, smarting from the humiliation of having to summon help, embarked on a ‘clean-up’ in which they systematically murdered and executed at least 100 residents – mostly women, children and old people. The Irgun afterwards exaggerated the number, quoting 254, to frighten other Arab towns and villages.

The Haganah played down their part in the raid and afterwards said the massacre “disgraced the cause of Jewish fighters and dishonoured Jewish arms and the Jewish flag”.

Deir Yassin signaled the beginning of a deliberate programme by Israel to depopulate Arab towns and villages – destroying churches and mosques – in order to make room for incoming Holocaust survivors and other Jews. In any language it was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, the knock-on effects of which have created an estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees today.

In July 1948 Israeli terrorist troops seized Lydda, shot up the town and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported, as part of the ethnic cleansing, the Israelis massacred 426 men, women, and children. 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

The remainder were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way.

Of all the blood-baths they say this was the biggest. The great hero Moshe Dayan was responsible. Was he ever brought to book? Of course not.

By 1949 the Zionists had seized nearly 80 percent of Palestine, provoking the resistance backlash that still goes on.

Even if the UN Partition had been legitimate – which many people doubt – the Israeli state’s greedy ambition immediately overran the generous borders gifted to the Zionists. Few, if any, of the Jews imported into Palestine can trace ancestral connection with the Jews who were driven out by the Roman occupation. As Lord Sydenham warned when he opposed the Balfour Declaration, they are an alien population dumped on an Arab country. “What we have done,” he predicted, “by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

Israel’s numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, and its continual defiance of international law and the UN Charter, together forfeit all claim to legitimacy as far as Arabs and non-Arabs around the world are concerned – at least, those that haven’t been bribed to say otherwise.
UN Resolution 194 called on Israel to let the Palestinians back onto their land. It has been re-passed many times, but Israel still ignores it. The Israelis also stand accused of violating Article 42 of the Geneva Convention by moving settlers into the Palestinian territories it occupies, and of riding roughshod over international law with their occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

As Plan D shows, “expulsion and transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing) were always a key part of the Zionists’ scheme. According to historian Benny Morris no mainstream Zionist leader could conceive of future co-existence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples. Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, is reported to have said in 1937: “New settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin…” The following year he declared: “With compulsory transfer we have a vast area [for settlement]… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

On another occasion he remarked: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.” Ben-Gurion reminded his military commanders that the prime aim of Plan D was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He was well aware of his own criminality.

It is high time the Palestine solidarity movement circulated Plan D/Plan Dalet far and wide and, in particular, brought it to the attention of political half-wits who stooge for and support the Israeli regime and turn a blind eye to its unbridled terrorism.                                              

DALET: another dirty word in the conspiracy to steal the land of Palestine

Zionist terror plan is still legitimized by political half-wits in the West 

By Stuart Littlewood
I have to admit, I was only dimly aware of the Dalet Plan before reading Alan Hart’s latest article, “The green light for Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine”.
The Dalet Plan, or Plan D, was the Zionist terror mob’s diabolical blueprint for the violent and blood-spattered takeover of the Palestinian homeland – some call it the Palestinian holocaust – written 65 years ago and based on three earlier schemes drafted between 1945 and 1948. It was drawn up by the Jewish underground militia, the Haganah, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, then boss of the Jewish Agency.

Blood-splattered diabolical blueprint

Plan D was a carefully thought-out, step-by-step plot choreographed in advance of the British mandate government’s withdrawal and the Zionists’ declaration of Israeli statehood. It correctly assumed that the British authorities would no longer be there. Indeed, the British had completed their departure by 15 May 1948.
The Plan’s intention, on the surface, was to gain control of the areas of the Jewish state and defend its borders. But it also aimed to do much more. It included measures to control the areas of Jewish settlements and concentrations located outside Jewish borders and ensure “freedom of military and economic activity” by occupying and controlling important high-ground positions on a number of transport routes.
This would be achieved by, among other things, applying economic pressure on the enemy by besieging some of his cities”, “encirclement of enemy cities” and “blocking the main enemy transportation routes… Roads, bridges, main passes, important crossroads, paths, etc. must be blocked by means of: acts of sabotage, explosions, series of barricades, minefields, as well as by controlling the elevations near roads and taking up positions there.
Jewish forces would occupy the police stations, described as “fortresses”, fifty of which had been built by the British throughout Palestine after the Arab unrest of 1936-39.
The plan discussed “operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force”. These operations included:

Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously.
Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

Villages emptied in this way were then fortified. “Outside the borders of the state” seems a curious thing to say since nobody was saying then where Israel’s borders ran, and nobody is saying now.
If they met no resistance, “garrison troops will enter the village and take up positions in it or in locations which enable complete tactical control”, said the plan.

The officer in command of the unit will confiscate all weapons, wireless devices and motor vehicles in the village. In addition, he will detain all politically suspect individuals… In every region, a [Jewish] person will be appointed to be responsible for arranging the political and administrative affairs of all [Arab] villages and population centres which are occupied within that region.

And here are the chilling guidelines for besieging, occupying and controlling Arab cities…

1. By isolating them from transportation arteries by laying mines, blowing up bridges, and a system of fixed ambushes.
2. If necessary, by occupying high points which overlook transportation arteries leading to enemy cities, and the fortification of our units in these positions.
3. By disrupting vital services, such as electricity, water and fuel, or by using economic resources available to us, or by sabotage.
4. By launching a naval operation against the cities that can receive supplies by sea, in order to destroy the vessels carrying the provisions, as well as by carrying out acts of sabotage against harbour facilities.

It is one of the sickest documents in history and shows why so many people question Israel’s legitimacy. Jewish terror gangs committed a massacre at Deir Yassin to set the tone and “soften up” the Arabs for expulsion. More atrocities followed the declaration of Israeli statehood on 14 May 1948. Some 750,000 Palestinians were put to flight as Israel’s forces obliterated hundreds of Arab villages and towns. The village on which Sderot now stands was one such. To this day they have been denied the right to return and received no compensation. Thirty-four massacres are said to have been committed in pursuit of the Jewish nation’s racist and territorial ambitions.

Was Israel ever “legitimate”?

The UN Partition of Palestine in 1947 cannot stand close scrutiny. At that time, UN membership did not include African states, and most Arab and Asian states were still under colonial rule. It was pretty much a white colonialist club. The Palestinians themselves had no representation and they weren’t even consulted.

…15 May marks the dark day in 1948 remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe) brought about by the military terror that forced them off their homeland.

The first vote failed to reach the two-thirds majority required. To ensure success in the second vote a good deal of arm-twisting was applied to the smaller countries, but again it fell short. At the third attempt France was persuaded to come “on board” after the US threatened to withdraw desperately needed post-World War II aid, and on 29 November the UN voted to partition Palestine into three parts: a Jewish state on 14,000 sq km with some 558,000 Jews and 405,000 Palestinian Arabs; and an Arab state on 11,500 sq km with about 804,000 Palestinian Arabs and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem, including major religious sites, was to be internationally administered.
No sooner had Britain packed its bags than Israel declared statehood on 14 May 1948 and immediately began expanding territorial control across all of Palestine to accommodate a new Jewish state expanding on all fronts. The date of 15 May marks the dark day in 1948 remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe) brought about by the military terror that forced them off their homeland.

Two of many massacres

Atrocities occurred at Deir Yassin, Lod and Ramle. The massacre at Deir Yassin was carried out by the two Zionist terror groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. On an April morning in 1948 (before the Israeli state declaration) 130 of their commandos made a dawn raid on this small Arab town with a population of 750, to the west of Jerusalem. The attack was initially beaten off, and only when a crack unit of the Haganah arrived with mortars were the Arab townsmen overwhelmed. The Irgun and the Stern Gang, smarting from the humiliation of having to summon help, embarked on a “clean-up” in which they systematically murdered and executed at least 100 residents – mostly women, children and old people. The Irgun afterwards exaggerated the number, quoting 254, to frighten other Arab towns and villages.

Deir Yassin signalled the beginning of a deliberate programme by Israel to depopulate Arab towns and villages – destroying churches and mosques – in order to make room for incoming holocaust survivors and other Jews.

The Haganah played down their part in the raid and afterwards said the massacre “disgraced the cause of Jewish fighters and dishonoured Jewish arms and the Jewish flag”.
Deir Yassin signalled the beginning of a deliberate programme by Israel to depopulate Arab towns and villages – destroying churches and mosques – in order to make room for incoming holocaust survivors and other Jews. In any language it was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, the knock-on effects of which have created an estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees today.
In July 1948 Israeli terrorist troops seized Lydda, shot up the town and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how, as part of the ethnic cleansing, the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque. The remainder were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat, leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way.
Of all the blood-baths they say this was the biggest.The great hero Moshe Dayan was responsible. Was he ever brought to book? Of course not.
By 1949 the Zionists had seized nearly 80 per cent of Palestine, provoking the resistance backlash that still goes on.
Even if the UN Partition had been legitimate – which many people doubt – the Israeli state’s greedy ambition immediately overran the generous borders gifted to the Zionists. Few, if any, of the Jews imported into Palestine can trace ancestral connection with the Jews who were driven out by the Roman occupation. As Lord Sydenham warned when he opposed the Balfour Declaration, they are an alien population dumped on an Arab country. “What we have done,” he predicted, “by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

…as part of the ethnic cleansing, [in Lydda] the Israelis massacred 426 men, women and children. Some 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque.

Israel’s numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, and its continual defiance of international law and the UN Charter, together forfeit all claim to legitimacy as far as Arabs and non-Arabs around the world are concerned – at least, those that haven’t been bribed to say otherwise.
UN Resolution 194 called on Israel to let the Palestinians back onto their land. It has been reiterated many times, but Israel still ignores it. The Israelis also stand accused of violating Article 42 of the Geneva Convention by moving settlers into the Palestinian territories it occupies, and of riding roughshod over international law with their occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
As Plan D shows, “expulsion and transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing) were always a key part of the Zionists’ scheme. According to historian Benny Morris, no mainstream Zionist leader could conceive of future coexistence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples. Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, is reported to have said in 1937: “New settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fallahin [peasants]…” The following year he declared: “With compulsory transfer we have a vast area [for settlement]… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”
On another occasion he remarked:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

Ben-Gurion reminded his military commanders that the prime aim of Plan D was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He was well aware of his own criminality.
It is high time the Palestine solidarity movement circulated Plan D/Plan Dalet far and wide and, in particular, brought it to the attention of political half-wits who stooge for and support the Israeli regime and turn a blind eye to its unbridled terrorism.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

MASSAD: Palestinians, Egyptian Jews and propaganda

January 8, 2013

“The statements made by Issam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,
calling on Egyptian Jews in Israel to return home, are hardly novel,” writes author [AFP]

by Joseph Massad –   7 January 2013

The current propaganda war in Egypt about the Palestinians and about Egyptian Jews, which was provoked by the recent pronouncements of Issam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is nothing but a distraction from the real problems that the country faces with the increasing incompetence of the Morsi government and the opportunism of his vocal opposition.

If this propaganda war did not have major implications with regards to Israel and US plans to undermine the Egyptian uprising and to control its outcome so as to serve US and Israeli interests, it would be nothing but a storm in a teacup. That it has many regional and international implications is what produces the ongoing media frenzy in the country and internationally.

The statements made by al-Aryan calling on Egyptian Jews in Israel to return home, however, are hardly novel. Indeed Egypt had already done so under Anwar Sadat’s rule back in 1975 at the urging of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

In 1975, and based on its understanding that the departure of Arab Jews to go to Israel under the Arab anciens regimes was a boon to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, the PLO undertook to call for the repatriation of Arab Jews and demanded that the current Arab leaders (none of whom had been in power when Arab Jews left their countries in the 1950s and 1960s) issue an open invitation to them.

Morocco, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Iraq and Egypt responded to the PLO call and issued an open invitation to Arab Jews to return home. Despite these efforts, neither Israel nor its Arab Jewish communities heeded the call.

Discriminating against Arab Jews

Indeed, it would not be until the last couple of decades that Israel began to exploit the question of Arab Jewry as a counterweight to Palestinian demands for their internationally supported right of return to Palestine from which the Zionists had expelled them.

The same Ashkenazi Jewish leadership that discriminated and discriminates against Arab Jews in Israel began to lead the effort of demanding compensation for Arab Jewish property losses while liberal Zionist commentators and their supporters in the West began to issue statements which summarised what happened in 1948 and after as an equitable “population exchange” between “Arabs” and “Jews” (often compared to the situation of India and Pakistan), and calling on the Palestinians to relinquish all their demands for return and compensation.

That the Palestinians were massacred and forcibly expelled from their homeland while Arab Jews left the Arab world in their majority due to Zionist harassment and endangerment of their lives is often forgotten by such propaganda.

Zionists and Israeli propagandists saw in this comparison another venue to prove how civilised Israel is and how barbaric the Arabs are. The argument goes as follows: The Arab countries mistreated the Palestinian refugees and refused to grant them nationalities and settle them in their new homes and kept them languishing in refugee camps while civilised Israel gave Arab Jews Israeli nationality, and indeed settled them outside refugee camps.
The Zionist contradiction on this question is a bit scandalous. On the one hand, Israel claims that it is the homeland of all Jews, and on the other it argues that Arab Jews came as refugees to the country, rather than “returned” to it.

The Israeli claim about the Palestinian refugees is only partly true, as many Palestinians have been given nationality in some Arab countries (notably Jordan), but unlike Israel, which gave the stolen land and property of the Palestinians it expelled to its Jewish colonial settler population, including to Arab Jews (though the latter received the less valuable lands and property in accordance with Israel’s European Ashkenazi racism against Arab Jews), Arab countries did not settle the Palestinians on Jewish property or in Jewish homes.
Thus, the Israeli crime of stealing Palestinian property and giving it to Jews, which is prohibited by international law, is trotted out as the actions of the civilised Jewish settler-colony compared to the barbaric Arabs. In this context, it is important to affirm that it is the Palestinians who are owed compensation for their stolen property by all the Jewish colonial settlers who have been living on it for some six decades, including Arab Jews.

The fact that Arab Jews were not expelled from any Arab country, even from those where some of them suffered from harassment by the authorities or even from segments of society at large is central to this narrative. In Yemen and Iraq, Israel undertook to remove the Jewish communities through various criminal means, most notably through Mossad bombings of Jewish locations in Iraq, and secret deals with varying Arab regimes, including that of Yemen.

In Algeria, Israel recruited members of the 100,000-strong Jewish community (all of whom carried since 1870 French nationality by virtue of the Crémieux decree issued by France, keeping in mind that a good percentage of them by then were European settlers) to spy on the National Liberation Front revolutionaries and report back to the French authorities.
Indeed, Israeli military forces would carry out military training on occupied Algerian soil with the French occupation authorities in the 1950s. This hardly endeared Algerian Jews to Algerian Muslims, who were suffering under one of the most brutal European occupations in Africa. This situation was of course brought about by French colonial policy of divide and rule, as Algerian Jews had fought in the resistance to the French in the mid-19th century with Emir Abd al-Qadir and Muslim Algerians.

Anger against Egyptian Jews

In Egypt, Egyptian Jewish interests would be attacked in 1948 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the non-Islamist Young Egypt Party (Misr al-Fatah), which led to the departure of a small number of Jews (especially those with foreign nationality). Israel would later recruit Egyptian Jews as spies who would undertake a bombing campaign in 1954 to undermine Nasser’s standing in the West. Israel would also invade the country in 1956 along with the French and British and occupy Egyptian territory.

At the time, the Egyptian government expelled all French and British nationals in the country (about 17,000), including the Jews among them, as enemy citizens. When Nasser undertook a policy of nationalisation, families who owned big businesses, which were slated for nationalisation, began to leave the country. This included rich Egyptian Muslims, Christians and Jews (many of whom held foreign nationalities), and it also included Syrian Christians, Armenians, Greeks and Italians.

In the wake of the Lavon Affair (in Arabic, it is significantly called the “Lavon Scandal”) in 1954, much popular anger ensued against Egyptian Jews, which was hardly surprising, even though the government discourse tried to maintain the distinction between the community and the terrorist recruits during the ensuing trials of the terrorists.

This should be contrasted with American anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, which, as As’ad Abukhalil recently noted, continues to target Arab Americans and Muslim Americans eleven years after 9/11, even though not a single one of the terrorists who committed the crimes of that day was an Arab American or a Muslim American.

Indeed just a few weeks ago, a racist New Yorker pushed a young Indian man (who was Hindu) in front of a subway train to his death. “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers,” the suspect told prosecutors. This was the latest victim of American racist violence against Arab and Muslim Americans and of Indian Hindus and Sikhs mistaken for them.

We must also keep in mind that a substantial percentage of the Jews in Egypt were not legally Egyptian, as they did not carry Egyptian nationality and many did not even speak Arabic and carried European passports (Italian, Russian, British and French), a fact that intensified the perception in some popular quarters that they were not loyal to the country. This of course was not the case with the old Egyptian Arab Jewish community (especially the Qarra’in Jews) whose lives were eclipsed by the large and powerful Ashkenazi and Sephardi families who arrived in Egypt in the 19th and early 20th century.

That the Nasser regime did not do enough to safeguard members of the Jewish community from harassment by its own agencies and to shield it from popular anger is true enough and should be subject to much blame, but this is not the same as expelling a population, or deporting it.

This situation also coincided with the ongoing Israeli campaign to bring Arab Jews to Palestine through various criminal means and secret deals, which were successful in Iraq and Yemen and were ongoing in Morocco and which resulted in the destruction of these communities altogether. Israel’s direct efforts to bring about the departure of half of Egypt’s small Jewish community of some 60,000 to Israel (the rest went to France and the Americas) is still not fully known but should not be ignored in analysing the situation.
That most of the terrorist attacks against Jewish interests in Egypt took place under the rule of the Egyptian King Farouk in the 1940s and early 1950s seems irrelevant to the few Egyptian Zionist propagandists today, who appeared this week on Egyptian television and wrote articles in the Egyptian press, insinuating that all that went wrong with Egyptian Jews should be blamed on Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Indeed, such propagandists completely factor out Israeli actions from bringing about the departure of Egyptian Jews. One propagandist referred to the departure of Egyptian Jews as “nuzuh” or “flight”, and agreed with al-Aryan, whom he opposes otherwise, that Jews were indeed “expelled” from Egypt.

We are even treated to the strange claims by the same propagandist that Egyptian Jews he met in the US and France continue to love Egypt, Arabs and Muslims. While there is no doubt that many Egyptian Jews, wherever they may be, harbour positive feelings towards Egypt, many of those prominent among them in the West have expressed much hatred towards Egypt and the Arab world.

Indeed, many among the latter have become prominent because of their hateful views of Egypt while those Egyptian Jews who love Egypt are ignored and given less prominence in the West and Israel.

‘Silent’ about the country of origin

Propagandists on behalf of Zionism often cite the Sephardi Cicurel family, which held British citizenship (a fact they forget to mention), as an asset to Egypt. What is forgotten often is that Moreno Cicurel who immigrated to Egypt from Smyrna (Izmir) and started the major family business, Les Grands Magasins Cicurel, was the maker of the first Zionist flag which flew over Jerusalem in December 1917 for 20 minutes before being taken down by the British.

His granddaughter Lili would marry future French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, whose socialist government fell in 1955, though he would serve as foreign minister in the Guy Mollet government (of the Radical Socialist Party to which Mendes-France belonged) until May 1956.

It was during Mendes-France’s term as prime minister in 1955 that Israeli nuclear scientists were invited to participate in France’s nuclear programme. Israel’s later deal with the French in 1956 to participate in the tripartite invasion of Egypt was concluded with one of the rewards being that France would build Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor where Israel’s nuclear bombs would be manufactured.

It was Israel’s current president Shimon Peres, who supervised the deal then, who tells us:

Before the final signing [of the Sevres Protocol where the plan was hatched to invade Egypt], I asked Ben-Gurion for a brief adjournment, during which I met Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury alone. It was here that I finalised with these two leaders an agreement for the building of a nuclear reactor at Dimona, in southern Israel… and the supply of natural uranium to fuel it. I put forward a series of detailed proposals and, after discussion, they accepted them.

In 1973, Golda Meir would threaten to nuke Egypt using these bombs. Throughout this period, Lili Cicurel, to my knowledge, not once made a public statement, either opposing the French invasion of Egypt or its alliance and nuclear assistance to Israel (she died in 1967).
Indeed, the Cicurel business was not even nationalised. Lili’s uncle Salvator, whose assets were all already outside Egypt, sold the business to the Muslim Gabri family before leaving the country in 1957. The Cicurel business, which was by then owned by the Gabris, would be nationalised by Nasser in 1961.

As for the propaganda that the Cicurels were harassed by the Nasserist government, it is just that: propaganda. As for Mendes-France, he would become a sponsor of Palestinian-Israeli “peace dialogues” in the 1970s in his own home.

Not only did many prominent Egyptian Jews in the West remain silent about their country of origin, many of them are part and parcel of the Western campaigns against Egypt, the Arabs, and Muslims more generally.

Today, the Alexandria-born Haim Saban, the American Likudnik billionaire, is hardly a friend of anything Arab and is a major supporter of extreme Israeli racist and colonial policies.

The Cairo-born Nadav Safran, the former Harvard professor on the CIA payroll, propagandised against Arabs and Muslims and was an early Zionist since before 1948 and was already a colonial settler living in a kibbutz in 1946. He fought in the 1948 Zionist war for the conquest of Palestine.

Propagandistic generalisations

As for Egyptian Jews in the US who have written memoirs about their time in Egypt, one of them complains in his memoirs about the disgusting smells of Egyptians who “smell” of fenugreek.

Of course, there are other Egyptian Jews who are not as prominent and who continue to love Egypt, but propagandistic generalisations of the sort being pushed by the few non-Jewish Egyptian Zionists today that “all Egyptian Jews” in the US and France, at least, if not those in Israel as well, love Egypt and the Arabs, are hardly apt when so many prominent Egyptian Jews expressly manifest their anti-Egyptian and anti-Arab attitudes in the West, let alone in Israel.

Another major commentator in the US on Egyptian Jews is one Lucette Lagnado, who along with her Jewish parents left Egypt in 1963. She would come back to visit after 2005 and published a memoir. She had a book-reading in Zamalek at the Diwan Bookstore where she befriended one of the owners, Hind Wasef, who welcomed her to Cairo and introduced her to Diwan’s customers who welcomed her in turn.

In the meantime, however, Lagnado propagandises like many other Zionists, about the “population exchange” formula, among other Zionist myths. She tells us, towing the Israeli line, of how Jews were “forced out” of their homes in the Arab world while Palestinians simply “fled” Israel. 

Since the revolution, however, and despite the hospitality shown to her by Egyptians when she visited, Lagnado has been propagandising against the new order and tells her Wall Street Journal readers that she will not go back to the country given that the new government is led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Who knows, maybe after al-Aryan’s invitation she will, even though his invitation seems to include only Egyptian Jews in Israel.
As for half of the Egyptian Jewish community who ended up in Israel, many of them would fight in the wars against Egypt and the Arabs, and some became military spokespersons for the Israelis, who often appear on Al Jazeera and speak Egyptian Arabic. It is unclear if those too are being invited back to Egypt.

That all of this was provoked by al-Aryan is not coincidental. In the last few months, the Egyptian remnants of the Mubarak regime and anti-Muslim Brotherhood liberals have continued to market Mubarak’s anti-Palestinian campaigns in the country by claiming that President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are planning to give Sinai to Gaza Palestinians. Even such illustrious figures as the economist, Galal Amin, participated in spreading these false rumours.

That many of these people (Amin excepted) who fulminate about Sinai and the Palestinians have been silent for three decades on the fact that Sinai remains outside Egyptian sovereignty as a result of the Camp David Accords, and who do not give a hoot about Sinai’s Egyptian population is quite telling of their suspicious agenda. That they have suddenly sprung to attention defending Sinai against a fictional propaganda story that Sinai would be given to the Palestinians is reprehensible at best. Other rumours about the Palestinians abound, such as Morsi’s alleged depriving Egyptians of electricity, which he is allegedly giving for free to Gaza Palestinians.

Concomitant with these rumours is the Egyptian government’s and the opposition’s race to please the United States and its Zionist lobby. While the very same Issam al-Aryan spoke about the tragedy of the Jewish holocaust while in the US on a Muslim Brotherhood promotional trip in May 2011, the naïve and charisma-less Mohamed el-Baradei upped the ante by telling a German newspaper that elected Salafi and Brotherhood members of parliament should not be trusted to draft the Egyptian constitution because they allegedly deny the holocaust!

Al-Aryan’s recent pronouncements on Egyptian Jews are part of this campaign of who can prove to the Americans and the Zionists that they can better serve US and Zionist interests.
This unfortunate level which the post-revolutionary Egyptian protagonists have reached tells us how successful counter-revolutionary forces in Egypt have become, and how they are undermining revolutionary gains and distracting Egyptians from the real economic, social and political challenges facing the country.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University and he is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question published by Routledge.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Mleeta, Khiam, Sabra, Shatila and Resistance In General

 

By Gilad Atzmon

Lebanon is incredible – an intoxicating blend of natural beauty, rebellious spirit, pious clarity, tolerance, wild night life and unbelievable hummus. I landed in Beirut four days ago. The purpose of my visit wasn’t all that clear. I knew that a talk and a musical performance were scheduled by Almayadeen TV, but I never expected such a spiritually transforming experience.

It was my second visit to the country. 30 years ago I crossed the Lebanese border along with an IDF convoy escorted by tanks and armed vehicles.

Then I was an occupier, this time I came with only my saxophone and a desire to share my thoughts and deliver some beauty.

But it didn’t take me a couple of hours to realise that Lebanon is much more than just humus, shisha, the sea and some captivating rural scenery. Early on Friday we left Beirut for the south. Our first stop was Mleeta – a Hezbollah frontline outpost and a symbol of Lebanese defiance. Mleeta is located on top of a mountain, surrounded by the South Lebanese Massif which, until 2000, was controlled by the Israelis. From Mleeta, the Lebanese Mujahedeen launched daily attacks against the Israeli invader and gave the Israelis a true taste of their own medicine.

Now Mleeta is a Jihadi tourist resort, there to tell the story of the heroic Hezbollah, those brave paramilitaries that confounded the ‘best army in the world’. The truth is, though armed only with light weapons, they were well supplied with Shia, spiritual ammunition.

Mleeta provides an overview of three decades of Islamic resistance in Lebanon and, in exhibiting all that the fleeing IDF soldiers have left behind, it proudly demonstrates the reality of Israeli cowardice. Mleeta is a symbol of confidence – confidence that the IDF is gone, never to return. Because when, in the summer of 2006 Hezbollah routed the IDF, it also demolished their confidence forever. The Jewish state was taught a lesson it would never forget – their phantasmic expansionist dream had come to an end.

But Mleeta was just a beginning. South Lebanon is dripping with defiance – every village, house and person is an emblem of Shia’s heroic resistance with the villages bedecked with Hezbollah posters featuring Leader Hasan Nasrallah and the many martyrs who taught the IDF those very necessary lessons.

Like Mleeta, Khiam the notorious Detention Centre is also a monument to Israeli brutality. Khiam is where Israel detained and tortured its political opponents, in some cases, for as long as 14 years. My visit there reminded me of a devastating memory, which on occasion, I share with my audience. It concerns Ansar, an Israeli concentration camp located in South Lebanon. It was back in 1984, on a piece of flat land in the middle of the camp, I noticed a dozen concrete boxes with small metal doors, they looked like dog kennels being only about 80 cm high, 100 cm long and probably about 80cm wide. When I pointed out to the commanding officer that these concrete construction weren’t suitable for dogs, he told me not to worry: no one would even think of putting dogs in them.  “Put a Palestinian in one of those for 24 hours,” he laughed, “And he’ll come out singing the Hatikvah.”  They were solitary confinement units for Palestinian prisoners. That was it. Then and there, I realised that Israel was not my country.

In Khiam this week I saw the exact same Israeli torture facility where the Israelis would shove their political opponents into tiny metal boxes, lock them in for days and then occasionally hit the top with a heavy stone. This time I took a picture.

But someone in Israel must have felt some shame at what Israel was leaving behind in Lebanon. In 2006 the IDF attempted to erase all trace of the detention centre at Khiam. In a desperate attempt to hide Israeli brutality, Israel sent in its engineering squads to blow up the cells and all remaining evidence of torture. But that clumsy effort to conceal the true reality of Israeli inhumanity achieved only the complete opposite. It now only affirms that Israel has, indeed, a lot to conceal.

The journey to occupied Palestine’s Border is over the most beautiful, wild and rural terrain. But then, suddenly, we were there, faced with the Jewish ghetto walls, guarded by cameras, army posts and barbed wire. Israel clearly doesn’t even try to convince its neighbours that it belongs in the region. It looks different, it smells different, it sounds different – it is in fact, just one extended Jewish European shtetl that has matured into a neurotic, psychotic and murderous collective fuelled by PRE traumatic stress. In that regard, the Israelis indeed have great deal to keep under wraps.

Inspired by Lyotard’s “Heidegger and the Jews” and my visit to the south, I decided, in my talk in Beirut, to speak about ‘History as a form of concealment.’ Instead of telling us ‘what really happened’, I argued that history is there to hide our shame, to repress that which we cannot even utter. It is, in effect, there to make us forget. Jewish history, for instance, is there to suppress Jewish shame, to disguise that which Jews prefer to hide from themselves. Jewish history is an attempt to talk about the past while avoiding the horrendous and embarrassing fact that Jews, throughout their history, have been bringing on themselves one Shoa after the other.

But concealment wasn’t invented by the Jews. The Brits also find it hard to cope with their past chain of murderous imperial genocides. This may explain why they entrusted the writing of Churchill’s biography to Jewish Zionist Sir Martin Gilbert, and why their historians have dedicated a whole floor of the Imperial War Museum to the Nazi Holocaust. As if Brits do not have enough shoas and suffering inflicted on others to remember. One of those British-inflicted shoas is obviously the Palestinian Nakba. Britain should own up to this disaster and perhaps find a little room for it also in its Imperial Museums. And like Britain, the Israelis have yet to acknowledge their own role in the original sin of 1948.

Looking at the state of the refugee camps in Lebanon, it became very clear to me that the Lebanese also might engage in some soul searching. For 65 years Palestinian refugees have lived in Lebanon and in other Arab countries in unbearable conditions and have suffered terrible discrimination.

Palestinian refuge camps in Lebanon are nothing short of hell on earth. Palestinians cannot be naturalized. They are banned from certain professions and jobs such as medicine and law. In some ways, their situation is worse even than their brothers’ in Gaza or The West Bank, because for them there is not even any prospect of hope or change.

Those endless solidarity discussions about ‘One State’, ‘Two States’ or ‘BDS’ have zero significance or impact on their lives or their livelihoods. These displaced and dispossessed people need immediate change in their political status, but, being excluded from the political process, they lack the wherewithal to bring such change about.

Not able to travel, their voice is hardly heard within the Western solidarity discourse and the International Palestinian solidarity movement is hardly engaged, or even concerned with their tragedy. Even that most absolute of rights, the right to return to their land has been compromised by the BDS in Ramallah and other prominent Palestinian leaders.

On my last day in Beirut I visited Sabra and Satilla. I saw the mass graveyards, I saw the poverty, I saw the piles of rubbish in the streets, the outcome of the complete absence of even the most elementary municipal services. I have been traveling around the world for many years but this is, without doubt, one of the saddest sights I have seen. But, in those camps, I also saw some of the kindest people on this planet. People who against all odds, in spite of being crushed, humiliated and tortured from more than six decades, still look forward, still live their lives. They raise their kids and care about their education. They greet you in the warmest possible manner and, no sooner have you approached their shop, they have invited you for coffee. Surely, their suffering must be our primary concern.

The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics  Amazon.com  or Amazon.co.uk

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
 

Fatima Hajj: Every Palestinian Woman

By: Louisa Lamb
Al-Manar

I woke up early that Sunday morning last May to attend the Nakba Day at Kass-Kass Park, just outside of Shatila Palestinian refugee Camp in Beirut. I made a promise to Doha Abou Jamous—a young Palestinian resident of the Shatila Camp who I interviewed earlier in the week—that I would attend the festival to see her perform her dance recital. This festival war organized by Palestinian camp committees to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the Nakba Catastrophe. The Palestinian Pride festival proved to be especially significant, because in addition to attending the inspiring Kaas-Kass event I accompanied my friend Zeinab to join her on a trip to Saida, where we would interview her grandmother, a 1948 Nakba survivor, in the Mieh Mieh Camp, one of 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. I’d met Fatima Hajj once before at Zeinab’s home in Shatila when she was visiting her children and grandchildren and the trip to her home in Mieh Mieh turned out to be an exciting adventure considering that it was my first visit to that particular Camp where approximately 7000 refugees mainly from northern Palestine resided. It was the third Palestinian Refugee Camp I visited during my visit to Lebanon. When we arrived, Fatima greeted us with kisses, hugs, handshakes and tea. After we finished our proper Arab-style greeting, we settled in and I began asking Fatima some questions as Zeinab interpreted for us. Born January 1st 1937, Fatima seemingly remembered everything about her life and the Nakba. When I asked about her childhood, Fatima said she remembered going to the gardens as a little girl and picking flowers and fruit. The village where she lived, Daishoum, was located in Northern Palestine in the town of Safad and Fatima recalled a village of many happy families. Her father was a farmer who worked the fertile soil and provided for his family without ever needing to sell their produce. The family owned the farm and had many cows and goats in addition to their bountiful gardens.Fatima is the oldest in her family and had four brothers and one sister. She lived on her parent’s farm with her siblings and her husband and baby. Fatima was married at fifteen to a thirty-five year old man from Safad and gave birth to her first child at eighteen years old. I asked her if she knew any Jewish people in Palestine and she responded that while she didn’t personally know any Jews, they would often visit the village to picnic and trade goods with some of the Muslim farmers in her village but there was never any conflict. She was unaware with the conflict with the Jews until they attacked her village on May 15th, 1948. Fatima explained that she didn’t know outsiders invaded her country, because she was from a small village and news didn’t travel fast; given the roles of women and the fact that she was a twenty-year old woman with a two-year old child, she didn’t pay attention to politics—the men were more involved with community—women generally stayed at home to cook, clean and raise children. She had no idea that the British and Jews clashed with the Palestinians—it was only when there was a sudden attack on her village that she knew about the Zionists. Bombs seemed to drop from planes and suddenly explode with no indication, and hostile Zionist soldiers stormed through Daishoum and started killing people at random without explanation. Her neighbors fled for their lives—Fatima’s family included—leaving all their possessions and seeking a safer place. Fatima described leaving her home as chaos—violence was around every corner, and the fear of being killed motivated the Palestinians to move quickly. In this frantic rush, Fatima’s ten-year old brother was left behind. She told me that her family never knew what happened to him and they never saw him again. Her family walked from Daishoum, Palestine to Aitroun, South Lebanon, a distance of roughly 40 miles, where they rested for five days. Travelling was a struggle for Fatima, because while she already faced so much stress and fear she was also carrying a small child while pregnant with her second baby (my friend Zeinab’s mother.) After five days in Aitroun, the Zionist soldiers attacked inside Lebanon too and her family fled to Bint Jbeil where they stayed for two days. Given the uncertainty and awareness of what was happening, her family moved as quickly as they could away from the killing in Palestine. A week after being forced from their home in Palestine, Fatima and her family finally arrived in Tyre, South Lebanon where they stayed at the new camp, Bourj Al Shemali. al-Burj al-Shamali R.C. – مخيّم برج الشمالي : Palestinian art work hanged at the center – 2003 The United Nations provided shelter (tents) for these Palestinian refugees, and Fatima stayed in Tyre for thirty years until 1978. During this time she established a home and had several more children, but after the Israeli’s attacks in 1978 on the Palestinian Refugee Camps at Ein el-Hilweh, Nabatiyeh, Mieh Mieh, El Buss, Rashidiyeh and Bourj el-Shemali, she moved to Shatila camp and stayed for seven years. When  Amal militia attacked Shatila and Bourj Al Barajneh in the 1985 “Wars of the Camps”, ( they were massacres not wars—the camps had been virtually defenseless since the September 1982 Israeli facilitated massacre at Sabra-Shatila and  the new Amin Gemayal government’s military intelligence (Deuxieme Bureau)  targeted Palestinians across Lebanon). Fatima Hajj fled again to Mieh Mieh, where she’s lived ever since. After hearing all of this, I was astonished by how one person could endure such violence and still be one of the most pleasant and hopeful individuals I’ve ever met. When I asked her about the future of Palestine, she replied hopefully that one day her family will be able to return to their homeland. After living in Lebanon for sixty-four years, Fatima insisted that she too would like to return to her country, before she died. I asked her how she felt about the efforts of the resistance group Hezbollah, and she replied the she doesn’t know much about them, but she hopes that the Palestinians, forced to live in refugee camps, will return home regardless.   The author with Fatima Hajj at Mieh-Mieh Palestinian refugee camp in Saida, Lebanon. Three days before the Nakba survivor’s death. Photo: Zeinab Hajj When it comes to the future of Palestine, Fatima hopes that the Muslims and Jewish people can live in peace. She explained that there were many Jews in Palestine before the Nakba, and that they lived peacefully. “They are good people,” she said, “and the problem with Israel has nothing to do with the people of Jewish faith, but rather with the Zionists who use religion and the claimed territorial history of the land as a self-entitled right to occupy Palestine and to establish a Jewish-only country.”   While the Israelis reign over Palestine and occupy her homeland, Fatima Hajj reiterated her wish that one day the Palestinians will return and together all people—regardless of religion or ethnic background—will live in peace in Palestine. Fatima’s story affected me in a way I cannot compare to anything else. The passion of an old woman, who, despite the struggles of her tumultuous life, believed in the best of humanity even in a terrible situation, was awe-inspiring. I admired her good nature especially considering most of her life was spent feeling anxiety—the kind that I, as a privileged American student, perhaps can never understand. Fatima Hajj died three days after our meeting, and while I am not a particularly spiritual individual, she instilled in me some mercy for all people, regardless of the propaganda we’re exposed to. I felt an honest connection between us, and the opportunity I have to write this is a remarkable experience for me as an aspiring writer as well as a human residing on this planet. Fatima was the quintessential Palestinian woman, and her story—which parallels so many others—makes the quest for Palestinians to return to their ethnically cleansed homes in Palestine much greater. Louisa Lamb studies at Salisbury University in Maryland. She is reachable at louloulovesyou37@yahoo.com River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Danny Ayalon and the Jewish refugee fallacy

By Daniel Haboucha

The Israeli government has recently launched a campaign to win international recognition for the plight of the approximately 700,000 Arab Jews, or Mizrahim, who fled their homes during the 20-odd-year period following Israel’s establishment in 1948. Speaking with much fanfare at a symposium hosted by Israel’s UN delegation in New York last week, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon stated that there will be no peace (between Israel and the Palestinian Authority) until the Arab League compensates these Jewish refugees. He has indicated that abandoned Palestinian holdings in Israel might be somehow balanced against abandoned Jewish holdings in Arab countries. The Israel lobby in the US and Canada — including all of the usual suspects — has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon. Comparing the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries to the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, Alan Dershowitz proclaimed, “The situation faced by Jews in Arab countries was much worse than that faced by Palestinians in Israel.”

My father and his entire family were forced to leave Egypt in the early 1960s, abandoning their community, their country of birth, and much of their property. Their traumatic uprooting after centuries of life in the Middle East is an egregious example of systemic religious persecution, and one that unquestionably merits redress. Yet, efforts to equate my “plight” today with the plight of a Palestinian of my age who grew up in a refugee camp (mere kilometers from my beautiful Jerusalem apartment) are manifestly absurd.

The first immediately obvious question is, why is this happening now? Why is the government of Israel suddenly seeking to reopen an issue that has been closed for the better part of a century? And why has it consistently refused to pursue such claims in the past, despite decades of lobbying by a group calling itself the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries?

I believe there are two answers to this question, the first pragmatic and the second ideological.
1. Victims of Zionism

Israel, through its entire history, has maintained a position of non-responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The official Israeli narrative, as stated in a Ministry of Foreign Affairs publication, is that the Palestinian refugees left Israel voluntarily or at the behest of Arab leaders. When Yitzhak Rabin wrote a description in his memoirs of how he personally oversaw the expulsion of nearly 70,000 Palestinian civilians from Lydda and Ramle during a week of fighting in June 1948, Israeli authorities went so far as to censor the testimony of their former prime minister. Now, however, in drawing a direct parallel between the Jews who were forcibly dispossessed by Arab governments and the Palestinians, the Israeli government finally appears to be acknowledging its role in creating the Palestinian refugee crisis, with all of the political and diplomatic consequences this implies.

Shining a spotlight on the plight of Arab Jews risks raising some uncomfortable questions about Israel’s own role in the creation and perpetuation not only of the Palestinian refugee issue, but also the Jewish one. Israel’s founders knew long before 1948 that the establishment of a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world would spell catastrophe for the Jews living in the region. In declaring Judaism to be a nationality, Zionism transformed Jews in Arab countries from members of a deeply rooted religious minority into “enemy nationals.” When made aware of the impending danger faced by the Jews of Iraq in the 1940s due to mounting hostility toward Zionism, David Ben Gurion felt responsible for the harm he suspected would befall them; he referred to these Arab Jews as potential “victims” of the Zionist movement (quoted in Meir-Glitzenstein “Zionism in an Arab Country” p. 140).

The State of Israel in many cases actively precipitated Jewish emigration, sending emissaries to Arab countries in order to persuade Jews to leave. Their methods were not always sanguine. For example, in Egypt, the position of Jews deteriorated markedly in 1954 after a group of local Jews was caught carrying out acts of terrorism and sabotage at the behest of Israel. Israel publicly acknowledged responsibility for this only in 2005. Similarly, Jewish emigration from Iraq accelerated in 1951 after the bombing of a synagogue; this act was blamed at the time (by British consular officials and many Iraqi Jews) on Zionist agents. To my knowledge, there is no conclusive evidence supporting this claim, yet it is lent credibility by the recent admission by a former member of the Iraqi Zionist underground that members of his group did employ such tactics. The passage in Ben Gurion’s diary that discusses the report he received on this matter from his intelligence chief remains buried under censors’ ink.

Compounding their hardships, Arab Jews who settled in Israel were subjected to deep systemic discrimination, economically disenfranchised, and treated as culturally inferior. This phenomenon is still something of a sore wound in Israel, and is documented extensively in an emerging field of literature.

“You wanted to fit in. You even changed your names. Jojo was no longer worthy. And Farha became notorious. You tasted the Honey; It wasn’t always sweet. You spilled the Milk, But didn’t cry over it” – Lehakat Sfatayim, “From Morocco to Zion”

2. How many homelands?

On an ideological level, equating Jewish refugees from Arab countries with Palestinian refugees from Israel fundamentally undermines the Zionist narrative, according to Iraqi-Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav. According to Shenhav, a central element in the Zionist mythos is the idea that the Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries did so not out of compulsion but because of their “Zionist yearnings” for their homeland. Zionism’s foundational tenet is that Jews are a nation, and that their homeland is not in Egypt, or Ethiopia, or Yemen, but rather in Israel. Mizrahim who settled in Israel were treated at the time by the government — at both a legal and a rhetorical level — not as refugees who had been forced from their homeland, but as compatriots returning to their homeland after years in exile. Ayalon’s initiative prompted Palestinian-Israeli member of parliament Ahmed Tibi to ask glibly, “How many homelands do [Jews] get to have?”

Belief in the voluntary and ideologically driven nature of the Mizrahi migration to Israel is not only deeply ingrained in the Zionist narrative, it is also central to the personal narratives of many of those who were displaced, who forcefully reject Ayalon’s take on history:

“I have this to say: I am not a refugee. I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee.” – Iraqi-Israeli parliamentarian Ran Cohen

“We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations” – Yemeni-Israeli speaker of Knesset Yisrael Yeshayahu.

“I do not regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists.”– Iraqi-Israeli Knesset speaker Shlomo Hillel

“You, who left your faraway village. You, who ascended from your verdant town […] You left your parents, your friends, and your brothers When you decided to emigrate Out of your love, for Zion!”– Lehakat Sfatayim

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Jonathan Cook: Israel’s impossible plan for refugees is just a stalling tactic

 

By Jonathan Cook,

– 1 Oct 2012
www.jkcook.net/Articles3/0597.htm
In the shadow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s theatrics at the United Nations last week, armed with his cartoon Iranian bomb, Israeli officials launched a quieter, but equally combative, initiative to extinguish whatever hopes have survived of reviving the peace process.

For the first time in its history, Israel is seeking to equate millions of Palestinians in refugee camps across the Middle East with millions of Israeli citizens descended from Jews who, before Israel’s establishment in 1948, lived in Arab countries.

According to Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, whose parents were originally from Iraq and who has been leading the government campaign, nearly a million Jews fled countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Morocco and Yemen. That figure exceeds the generally accepted number of 750,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war.

Israel’s goal is transparent: it hopes the international community can be persuaded that the suffering of Palestinian refugees is effectively cancelled out by the experiences of “Jewish refugees”. If nothing can be done for Arab Jews all these years later, then Palestinians should expect no restitution either.

Over the past few weeks that has been the message implicit in a social media campaign called “I am a refugee”, which includes YouTube videos in which Jews tell of being terrorised while living in Arab states after 1948. Mr Ayalon has even announced plans for a new day of national commemoration, Jewish Refugee Day.

This month, the Israeli foreign ministry and US Jewish organisations formally launched the initiative, staging a conference in New York a few days before the opening sessions of the General Assembly.
Israel’s choice of arena – the UN – is not accidental. The campaign is chiefly designed to stifle the move announced by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in his General Assembly speech last week to begin seeking UN status for Palestine as a non-member state.

After opposition from the US forced the Palestinians to abort their bid for statehood at the UN Security Council last year, Mr Abbas is expected to delay making his new request until November, after the US presidential election campaign to avoid embarrassing President Barack Obama.
Mr Abbas’s move has spurred Israel to take the offensive.

Anyone who doubts that the Israeli government’s concern for Arab Jews is entirely cynical only has to trace the campaign’s provenance. It was considered for the first time in 2009, when Mr Netanyahu was forced – under pressure from Mr Obama – to deliver a speech backing Palestinian statehood.
Immediately afterwards, Mr Netanyahu asked the National Security Council, whose role includes assessing strategic threats posed by the Palestinians, to weigh the merits of championing the Arab Jews’ case in international forums.

The NSC’s advice is that Arab Jews, known in Israel as Mizrahim and comprising a small majority of the total Jewish population, should be made a core issue in the peace process. As Israel knows, that creates a permanent stumbling block to an agreement.

The NSC has proposed impossible demands: contrition from all Arab states before a peace deal with the Palestinians can be reached; a decoupling of refugee status and the right of return; and the right of Arab Jews to greater compensation than Palestinian refugees, based on their superior wealth.

Israel is working on other fronts too to undermine the case for Palestinian refugees. Its US lobbyists are demanding that UNRWA, the UN agency for the refugees, be dismantled. And bipartisan pressure is mounting in the US Congress to count as refugees only Palestinians personally displaced from their homes in 1948, stripping millions of descendants of their status.

The Palestinians are deeply opposed to any linkage between Arab Jews and Palestinian refugees. Not least, they argue, they cannot be held responsible for what took place in other countries. Justice for Palestinian refugees is entirely separate from justice for Arab Jews.

Moreover, many, if not most, Arab Jews left their homelands voluntarily, unlike Palestinians, to begin a new life in Israel. Even where tensions forced Jews to flee, such as in Iraq, it is hard to know who was always behind the ethnic strife. There is strong evidence that Israel’s Mossad spy agency waged false-flag operations in Arab states to fuel the fear and hostility needed to drive Arab Jews towards Israel.

Likewise, Israel’s claim that it has a right to represent Arab Jews collectively and lay claim to compensation on their behalf ignores the reality that Israel was compensated handsomely for absorbing Jews, both through massive post-war reparations from countries such as Germany and through billions of dollars in annual handouts from the United States.

But there is a more fundamental reason to be sceptical of this campaign. Classifying Arab Jews as “refugees” skewers the central justification used by Zionists for Israel’s creation: that it is the natural homeland for all Jews, and the only place where they can be safe. As a former Israeli MP, Ran Hacohen, once observed: “I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee.”

Mr Netanyahu’s government is making a deeply anti-Zionist argument, one it has been forced to adopt because of its own intransigence in the peace process.

Its refusal to countenance a small Palestinian state in the 1967 borders means the global community feels compelled to reassess the events of 1948. For most Arab Jews, that period is now a closed chapter. For most Palestinian refugees, it is still an open wound.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

ANG: A lesson on hope on the 30th anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila massacre 2Sep12

by Dr Swee Chai Ang – MEMO-Middle East Monitor – 1 September 2012

This year, while Palestinian refugees in Lebanon prepare to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila massacre, the country is receiving thousands of refugees fleeing from Syria. We pray that, with international resolve, the conflict will end soon and the Syrian refugees will be able to return home.

Sixty-four years ago, in 1948, Lebanon received another group of refugees; some of the 750,000 Palestinians fleeing the massacres and the destruction of the villages and towns in Palestine. They were put in tents and promised the right of return to their homes. But most of Palestine was renamed Israel and so the refugees and their descendents remain in Lebanon, dispersed in 12 official UN-run refugee camps, forming part of the 4 million-strong Palestinian diaspora worldwide today. For them, there was no enthusiasm from the Western powers to address the root cause of their dispossession and no practical support for their right to return to their ancestral homeland.

Every September, hundreds of Palestinians and friends from around the world meet in Shatila, at Martyr’s Square, where a thousand of those killed in Sabra-Shatila are buried. We mourn and remember those whose lives were cruelly cut off. In so doing we ensure that they will not be forgotten; we also pay homage to their families.

30 years after the Massacre at Sabra-Shatilla Lebanese politicians still block Palestinian rights

Thirty years ago, in August 1982, I arrived as a young volunteer surgeon to work in Gaza Hospital in Sabra-Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in South Beirut. As a born-again fundamentalist Christian I grew up an ardent supporter of Israel. That summer I watched on television the relentless bombardment of Lebanon by Israeli war planes. Countless people were killed, among them many children. Hospitals, factories, schools and homes were reduced to heaps of rubble. My pro-Israel Christian friends were unable to convince me that the people of Lebanon deserved to suffer and die because they harboured a terrorist group known as the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation).

I wanted to help the people in Lebanon, so when Christian Aid sent an appeal asking for a surgeon to help look after the wounded, I resigned from my hospital in Britain, and left for Beirut.

That was my first visit to the Middle East; I never knew Palestinians existed until then. The western popular press only told of the terrorist PLO, which hated Jews, planted bombs and hijacked planes. They said that this group had built their base in Lebanon and that Israel was helping Lebanon to flush them out, even if Lebanon had to be flattened in the process. One Israeli spokesperson announced, “To make an omelette, one has first to crack eggs”!

I arrived in a Beirut that was devastated after 10 weeks of heavy bombardment. There was scarcity of food, water and medicine due to the military blockade. Homeless families flooded abandoned car parks and schools, and even slept on the road-side. I was taken past Akaa Hospital, a five-storey building reduced to rubble and mangled wires. This hospital was at one end of Rue Sabra, the main street of Shatila Camp. At the other end was Gaza Hospital, which was still standing, despite the tenth and eleventh floor being wrecked by artillery. Both were state of the art Palestine Red Crescent Society hospitals, and both were targeted despite flying International Red Cross flags. I was placed in Gaza Hospital to head the orthopaedic department and facilitate its re-opening.

Soon after my arrival the PLO was evacuated from the city. It was the price that Israel demanded to stop further aerial bombardment of Lebanon and lift the military blockade. Fourteen thousand able-bodied men and women from the PLO left Beirut with guarantees from the Western powers that their families left behind would be protected. Some of those leaving were fighters, but others were PLO civil servants such as doctors, lecturers, trade unionists, media personnel, engineers and technicians; the PLO was the government in exile of the Palestinians. Thus, fourteen thousand families in Lebanon lost their breadwinner – often the father or the eldest brother in addition to those killed by the bombs.

32d MAU Marines board their LST on 10 September 1982 following the PLO evacuation from Beirut.

This ceasefire lasted only three weeks. The multinational peace-keeping force, entrusted by the ceasefire agreement to protect the civilians of Beirut, withdrew abruptly.

On 15 September several hundred Israeli tanks drove into South and West Beirut. Some of them ringed and sealed Shatila Camp to prevent the inhabitants from fleeing. The Israelis sent their allies, a group of Christian militiamen, into the camp. When the tanks withdrew from the perimeter of the camp on the 18 September, they left behind 3,000 dead civilians.

Our hospital team had worked non-stop for the previous 72 hours, but we were ordered at gun point to leave our patients and were marched along Rue Sabra out of the camp. As I emerged from the basement operating theatre, I learnt the painful truth. While we were struggling to save a few dozen lives, people had been killed by the thousands. Some of the bodies were already rotting in the hot Beirut sun.

The images of the massacre are seared on my memory.

They include dead and mutilated bodies lining the camp alleys, bodies which only a few days before were living human beings full of life and hope, rebuilding their homes, trusting that they would be left in peace to raise their young ones after the evacuation of the PLO. These were the people who had welcomed me into their broken homes, serving me Arabic coffee and whatever food they found; it was simple fare but given with warmth and generosity. They shared with me their broken lives and how they came to be refugees in Lebanon. They showed me faded photographs of their homes and families in Palestine before 1948 and the large house keys they still treasured. The women shared with me their beautiful embroidery, each with motifs of the villages they left behind. Many of these villages were destroyed by the nascent Israeli state after they left.

There were patients we failed to save and those brought in dead to the hospital. They left behind orphans and widows. A wounded mother begged us to take down the hospital’s last unit of blood from her to give to her child. She died shortly afterwards. The rape of women before they were killed left cruel psychological scars on their children who survived.

More

The frightened faces of families rounded up by gunmen; the desperate young mother who tried to give me her baby to take to safety; the stench of decaying bodies as mass graves continued to be uncovered day after day, will never leave me. The piercing cries of women who discovered the remains of their loved ones from bits of clothes or refugee identity cards as more bodies were found continue to haunt me.

The people of Sabra-Shatila returned after the massacre to rebuild their homes once more. Gaza Hospital re-opened. But their courage was rewarded with yet more violence. Shatila, Burj-el-Barajneh, and Rashiddyeh camps were besieged and attacked from 1985 to 1988, during which time 2,500 refugees were killed and 30,000 were made homeless.

Nahr-el-Bared Camp in the north of Lebanon, home to 40,000 Palestinians, was flattened by the Lebanese Army in 2007 and is yet to be rebuilt completely. The Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon are the most squalid and deprived in the Middle East.

Add to this the Lebanese law prohibiting Palestinians from taking up 30 professions and 40 artisan trades outside the refugee camps, and it is not difficult to see how the younger generations despair; some youngsters drop out of school to look for manual labouring work. Palestinians are also prohibited from owning or inheriting properties.

With these unjust laws in place, they are confined to the refugee camps with no escape. Denied the right of return to their homes in Palestine, they are not only born refugees, they will also die refugees and so will their children.

For me, one painful question needs to be answered. Not why they die, but why did they die as refugees? After 64 years, how can we allow a situation where a person’s only claim to humanity is a refugee identity card? This question has haunted me for 30 years. It has yet to receive an adequate answer.

However, in recent years, as we journey along Rue Sabra as part of our annual commemoration of the Sabra-Shatila massacre, our weary footsteps have been lightened by the participation of hundreds of young Palestinians. They are the post-massacre generation, reminding us that there is life after that horror. Full of eagerness and courage, in defiance of those who worked so hard to obliterate them, they have survived and will continue to survive.

Is there hope for the Palestinians? They lost their country 64 years ago and found themselves in alien land which would not even grant them basic civil rights. Those who live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip find themselves under siege and imprisoned behind the Wall. Palestinian land is stolen daily for illegal Israeli settlements and military use. In Shatila, the younger generation enter this world in the shadow of the ugly massacre. The wounds have not healed.

But there is hope. As a people the Palestinians have survived against all the odds. If you talk to the youngsters in the refugee camps, you will know that they have never forgotten Palestine. They will tell you that even though they might not make it back to Palestine in their life-time, their children will. Supporters and friends around the world increase in number daily, inspired by their courage and resilience.

For those of us who are privileged to enter their lives and receive their generous hospitality, our gratitude knows no bounds. We discover true friendship. We have learnt that poverty and deprivation are no obstacles to human dignity. We admire their courage in their daily struggles. When their children embrace us, new life and hope return.

One such occasion happened last year when a group of young Palestinians put on an event for those of us who came to join the commemoration of the Sabra-Shatila massacre. They had no money and no sponsors, so they held the event in Martyr’s Square in the evening. It was poetry reading with hip-hop; instant painting of the silhouettes of their friends onto the whitewashed walls; and traditional dabkeh dancing. Nearly all of them were born after the massacre, so they asked me to give them my firsthand account.

I recalled the events of 1982, ending with the following:

“A few days after the massacre, I walked down Rue Sabra towards Gaza Hospital. The stench of decaying human flesh was unbearable. Survivors were identifying the remains of their loved ones. A group of kids spotted me and called out ‘Doctora Sine’ (Chinese Doctor). Most of them were orphans, destitute and homeless. Suddenly they stood in front of me and asked for their pictures to be taken. As I released my camera shutter, they raised their hands in a victory sign and said ‘We are not afraid’. That picture has as background broken buildings, mass graves, and hopelessness but the children in the foreground defied them with their hands raised in a victory sign. I have been back to Lebanon many times but have never found those children again. They might have perished. But they will always be my inspiration. During the darkest hour, I will see them with their hands raised up, defying intimidation and death, poised to regain the dignity they had been robbed of.”

Since then, I have met many more children in Gaza and the West Bank. They are just as courageous and precious as their peers in Lebanon. They have suffered so much but remain fearless and steadfast.

On this, the 30th anniversary of the Sabra-Shatila massacre, we need to reflect on how the Palestinians have built and rebuilt their lives courageously over the last 64 years, and how we as friends can support them in their struggle for justice. We will look through our tears to see the wonderful young generation. Life has returned to Shatila. After thirty years with the Palestinians, I have learnt this lesson on hope.

Dr Swee Chai Ang is the author of “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, and the Patron and co-founder of British charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Jeff Blankfort Speaking of Zionists in Disguise

Jeff Blankfort Speaking of Zionists in Disguise

Speaking of disguises, Mark Richie has been operating behind one for the 30 years I have known him.

In practice, while pretending to be a friend of the Palestinians, he has functioned as an agent provocateur whose sole goal is to cause divisions in the solidarity movement and was banned years ago from every Palestinian email list (before there were blogs).
He does this cleverly, as shown here, making legitimate criticisms of JVP, IJAN and ANSWER while hiding his real target, MECA, the Middle East Children’s Alliance, which is not Zionist, does not support the state of Israel and supports the Palestinian right of return and is one of the most effective organizations working on behalf of the Palestinians which is why Richie aka Richey aka PONeill aka Mark Hiver is continuously attacking it. In other words, he is working for Israel.
One of his other pastimes, illustrated here, is defending Noam Chomsky, who is an admitted Zionist, who supports Israel as a Jewish state, opposes the Palestinian right of return (but approves it for Jews!) and who opposes BDS against Israel. How does Richie reconcile that with his own stated views? He doesn’t try, hoping readers won’t see his ridiculous coupling of Chomsky with Gilad Atzmon who does support the right of return and doesn’t believe in a Jewish state.
I have publicly accused him of being an agent for the Anti-Defamation League and I have material in my files backing that up. A lawyer who, strangely, has never practiced, Richie threatened to sue me years ago if I continued to call him that and I have challenged him to do so since there are a number of questions I’d have my lawyer pose to him.
Anyone wishing more info on this creature should contact me at jblankfort@earthlink.net

5:02 AM, August 14, 2012

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