BY NIKOLAI HADDAD
On May 14, Palestinians and solidarity activists around the world marked the 55th anniversary of al Nakba — the Catastrophe. Al Nakba reached its climax during the events of May 1948, when the State of Israel was established on the expropriated land and homes of the Palestinian people.
Zionist military and paramilitary forces expelled more than 750,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes to clear the land for the future "Jewish state" of Israel, in an attempt to "solve" its "demographic problem" — the fact that indigenous Palestinian population remained a majority. Al Nakba was one of the most calculated acts of ethnic cleansing to ever be inflicted on a people.
The origins of al Nakba reach back further, to European colonialism and the World Zionist Congress of 1897, which called for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Britain was the colonial power in Palestine after World War I and supported the Zionists' plan. London facilitated the large-scale migration of European Jews to colonise Palestine, ignoring the wishes of the indigenous inhabitants who saw their land being expropriated and their dreams for independence crushed.
Despite this, in 1947 Jews remained a minority — about a third of the population of Palestine — and owned only 7% of the land. Yet in the same year, the UN Security Council voted to partition Palestine, giving 56% of the land to the future Zionist State of Israel.
On April 1, 1948, Zionist forces implemented "Plan Dalet", the aim of which was to establish a Jewish state beyond the boundaries set up by the UN partition plan and clear the area of its Palestinian population. Zionist forces, with the tacit support of the British, seized several hundred villages and many Palestinian cities and towns before the termination of the British mandate on May 15, 1948.
After the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, the war intensified and the Israeli forces continued their unrelenting campaign to drive the Palestinian people from their land. The belated "invasion" of the weak and divided Arab armies on May 15 did nothing to save the Palestinians from disaster. Outnumbered and outgunned, they were swiftly defeated.
The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, wrote in his War Diary: "During the assault, we must be ready to strike the decisive blow: that is, either to destroy the town or expel its inhabitants so our people can replace them."
The aim of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population from the newly declared state was achieved through mass expulsion, executions, massacres and terror, perpetrated by the regular Zionist forces, the Haganah, as well as by terrorist groups like the Irgun and Stern gangs. This terror campaign resulted in:
- the systematic destruction of more than 530 villages and localities;
- the expulsion at gunpoint of the inhabitants of at least 122 Palestinian localities, and the evacuation of at least 270 others under assault;
- massacres of civilians in at least 110 towns and villages;
- atrocities such as rape and forced labour;
- psychological warfare and military pressure, which forced people to flee their homes to escape massacres and atrocities
The result of this brutality is still with us today. The State of Israel now covers 77% of Palestine, with the remaining 23%, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, still under occupation by Israeli forces and armed paramilitary Zionist "settlers". The survivors and descendants of al Nakba now number more than 5.5 million, who languish in poverty in overcrowded refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and in neighbouring Arab countries.
The right of return
The "right of return" refers to the inalienable right of Palestinian people forcibly expelled from their land in 1948, 1967 and other times to return home.
The right of return is a legal right that has been recognised many times by the UN. UN resolution 194 affirms the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their place of origin. The international community has affirmed UN resolution 194 more than 100 times over the last 54 years, most recently in December 1999. Today, only the US and Israeli governments reject it.
For Palestinians, the right of return is sacred and can never be negotiated away. Around 86% of Palestinian refugees live in the West Bank or Gaza, or within a 160-kilometre radius of historic Palestine. Even today, refugee children register in schools by their village of origin, not their refugee camp address.
After 55 years of hardship, the proximity of Palestinian refugees to their homes indicates their unbreakable bond to their land. In September 2000, a joint statement of the Popular Organisations of the Refugee Camps of the West Bank made this clear: "The negotiators should not bother returning if they bring anything less than the right of return. We are going home — home to Palestine. Our olive trees and oranges await us. We will not accept anything less no matter who signs the next of the infinite agreements."
The right of return, as well as being a legal and moral right, is also possible. Salman Abu Sitta has demonstrated convincingly that much of the land from which the Palestinians were expelled is vacant or is being farmed by a small minority of Israelis for ideological purposes, heavily subsidised by the Israeli state.
Despite this, Israel has categorically rejected any notion of the right of return. Israel does not allow Palestinians to return because it may upset the "demographic balance" in Israel. In fact, Tel Aviv insists that Palestinians drop this demand in any "peace" negotiations.
On May 7, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon again demanded that Palestinians entirely give up the right of return before Israel would consider the US-backed "road map" to peace. He stated: "The right of return is a recipe for the destruction of Israel, because it would flood the country with Arabs. We will not accept such a thing."
In contrast, Israel's blatantly racist "law of return" allows anyone who can claim Jewish ancestry, wherever they live in the world, the right to automatic Israeli citizenship and the right to live in occupied Palestine.
Still under occupation
The daily brutality of the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine continues unabated. The more than 3.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue to suffer under strict military curfews and are subjected to arbitrary arrest and house demolitions.
The devastation to Palestinian civilian life extends beyond the more than 2200 people killed and 20,000 injured by the Israeli army and paramilitary settlers since September 2000.
The Israeli military occupation, with its checkpoints and wanton destruction of Palestinian farmers' crops, have disrupted trade and access to food — to the extent that many families go hungry.
Palestinian poverty has increased dramatically since September 2000, with most Palestinians living on around US$2 per day. A staggering 65% of Palestinians are unemployed due to the social and economic cost of Israeli occupation. According to 2002 figures released by the US government's Agency for International Development, 9.3% of Palestinian children aged between six months and five years suffer from malnutrition; 13.2% of children in the Gaza Strip suffer chronic malnutrition.
Palestinians live almost 10 times below the UN-declared "water poverty line" of 1000 cubic metres per year. They do not have any control over this most basic of resources.
Disruption to Palestinians' education has reached endemic proportions: at least 298 school and 149 tertiary students have been killed since September 2000, while a further 3451 have been injured; almost 600 students remain imprisoned in Israel's jails; 1125 schools, colleges and universities have suffered periodic suspensions of study due to the occupation, some of them being forced to shut permanently, including three schools that have been taken over for use as barracks by the Israeli army.
In 2002, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza rose by 6% to 226,028, according to the Palestine Media Centre. Such settlements confiscate badly needed Palestinian land and water resources and disrupt the social, cultural and economic life of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli-only roads and highways, constructed for the settlers and the military, encircle and divide Palestinian land, cutting off towns and cities from each other. Heavily armed settler paramilitaries harass and terrorise local populations, killing people, disrupting markets and destroying crops.
'Road map' to peace?
The latest US plan to achieve "peace" in the Middle East was first announced in the lead-up to the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq. The aim of the "road map" is not to secure a just and lasting peace, but rather to keep the Palestinians divided and living in a state of permanent neo-colonial dependence on Israel.
The road map does not offer justice, nor does it offer peace. Palestinians are being asked to first stop resisting the Israeli occupation of their homeland, give up the right of refugees return, give up claims to their historic capital, Al Quds (Jerusalem), and accept as fact the imposition of illegal settlements and military roads on what is left of Palestine.
In return for this "peace", Palestinians are offered self-rule of their townships in a series of cantons that cover much less than 60% of the West Bank and Gaza, which amounts to only 23% of historic Palestine. The newly independent "state" of Palestine will not control water resources, foreign affairs and who can come into and out of their country.
In effect, the road map proposes a peace predicated on Palestinians giving up their legitimate rights, and the rights of future generations, in return for existing in a Bantustan-like state. The Palestinian government of this state will have to commit to looking after Israel's security needs. The so-called "Palestinian state" would be surrounded by armed Israeli settlements, army installations and will be intersected by roads that only Israelis are permitted to travel upon.
The basic premise upon which the road map is based ensures its failure. Instead of calling for an end to the illegal, 36-year military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the first condition of its implementation, the plan calls for Palestinians to halt all resistance against the occupation. This is despite the fact that the tanks of the Israeli army surround every major Palestinian town and city and are often outside the very homes of the people.
Peace can never be achieved in Palestine until the Israelis occupation ends and a viable, fully independent Palestinian state is established. There can be no peace until the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their homes is recognised.
[Nikolai Haddad is a member of Sawiyan-Coaliton for Palestine, a solidarity group based in Sydney. For more information, see Salman Abu Sitta's "The Right of Return: Sacred, Legal and Possible" at <http://www.caabu.org/press/briefings/right_of_return.html>. Visit the Arab Gateway web site's Palestinian refugees page at <http://www.al-bab.com/arab/countries/palestine/refugees.htm>. See also Salman Abu Sitta's The Palestinian Nakba, The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine (Palestinian Return Centre, London 1998).]
Pics at <http://desip.igc.org/AlNakbaExpulsionPhotos.html>.
From Green Left Weekly, May 28, 2003.
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