The Catastrophe

IN MAY 1948, during al Naqba when hundreds of thousands were killed in ethnic cleansing and 800,000 became refugees after their villages and cities were destroyed. Here, Palestinians march with raised hands during the surrender of the town of Ramle.-ELDAN DAVID/AP

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians 60 years ago continues to haunt Israel despite its best efforts to get the world to forget it.

As the state of Israel celebrated the 60th anniversary of its War of Independence on May 14, the Palestinian people in Israel, the occupied territories and the diaspora also marked the 60th year of their displacement, occupation and suffering. The Palestinians observe May 15 as the day that signalled the beginning of al Naqba (the catastrophe). The word was first coined by the eminent historian Qonstantin Zreik to describe the plight of a people dispossessed.

When the state of Israel was formed with the active connivance of the United States and Britain, Palestinians comprised two-thirds of the population and the Jews one-third. Yet, on August 1, 1948, when the British mandate over Palestine ended, 58 per cent of the territory was given to the Jewish state. The first British census of Palestine in 1922 showed that 78 per cent of the population was Muslim, 11 per cent was Jewish and 9.6 Christian. By 1945, the Jewish population had grown to 31 per cent.

On March 10, 1948, two months before the formal creation of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and top Zionist leaders met secretly to finalise the plan, code named Plan Dalet (Plan D), to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which began in the 1930s with the formation of terrorist Jewish outfits such as the National Military Organisation and the Stern Gang. As part of Plan D, Palestinian villages and cities were bombed, pillaged and depopulated in order to establish a Jewish state with minimal Arab presence.

Ben-Gurion, the long-serving Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in 1937: The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war. He issued strict guidelines that every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion. It was no surprise that massacres like Der Yassin followed. Around 800,000 Palestinians were turned into refugees as entire villages and cities were ransacked and destroyed in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem and other areas. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed, most of them in cold blood. Community leaders were targeted for extermination.

The naqba in all its severity had begun for the Palestinians. Moshe Dayan, Israeli war hero, noted gleefully that Jewish villages were built in place of Arab ones. You do not know the names of the Arab villages because they no longer exist. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

It was the systematic and brutal cleansing of Palestinian Muslims and Christians that produced the Jewish majority state of Israel 60 years ago. Though formal ethnic cleansing ended after the declaration of independence, Israels terror campaign against the rest of the Palestinians inside Israel continued unabated. Israel emerged triumphant in its first war with its Arab neighbours in 1948. The Arab countries fought half-heartedly in that war. Jordan, which had the most disciplined and well armed army at the time, stayed out, satisfied with the control of the West Bank, handed over to it by the British.

The 150,000 Palestinians who chose to stay on in the newly created state of Israel were ghettoised and stripped of many of their fundamental rights. For instance, the law of the Land of Israel forbids Jews from selling or leasing land to non-Jews. The Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote in 2004 that it was necessary to uproot 700,000 Palestinians. He said that there are circumstances in history which justify ethnic cleansing. Today, one in four Palestinian citizens of Israel is either a refugee or has descended from one. They have been denied their right of return despite the guarantees provided by the United Nations Security Council and international law.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has described Israels policies towards Palestinians as akin to apartheid. The Jewish state has constructed a wall to separate Palestinian areas and there are separate roads for Jewish settlers. Palestinians in the occupied territories have been condemned to live in Bantustans of the kind that existed in South Africa during the apartheid era.

Even worse, the state of Israel, with the backing of the U.S., has turned Gaza Strip into an open-air jail and firing range for the past two years. The million and a half population there is being systematically starved and their living conditions are worse than in a prison. Eighty per cent of Gaza citizens are refugees who were uprooted from their homes in Israel. Along the West Bank, Israeli settlers pump raw sewage into Palestinian land, where it enters groundwater. The sewerage system in Gaza has broken down completely and the Israeli authorities have forbidden the import of pipes and cement necessary for its repair.

Between September 2000, when the second Palestinian intifadah (uprising) began, and the beginning of 2008, more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces, 982 of them children. Since 1967, Israel has demolished more than 18,147 Palestinian homes and arrested 650,000 Palestinians, accounting for 20 per cent of the population. Currently, 20,000 Palestinians remain incarcerated in Israeli jails.

President George W. Bush, who has cast himself in the improbable role of an honest mediator in the Arab-Israel conflict, showered praise on Israel during his recent visit there to commemorate its 60th anniversary. He portrayed the creation of Israel as the fulfilment of a biblical prophecy. In a speech to the Knesset (Parliament), Bush said the establishment of Israel was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Israel.

Preceding him were other Western leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. They too were full of praise for Israel and offered their unqualified support to its expansionist policies and police-state methods. There was scarcely a word of commiseration for the plight of the Palestinians. Bush, according to the Israeli historian Ilan Pape, was endorsing the act of memorycide that Israel was trying to propagate. Israel wants the world to forget the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages before its creation and the continuing expansion of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

But Palestinians have not forgotten their goal of achieving freedom. They have decided to counter Israels memorycide by focussing even more relentlessly on their oral history, writings and literature. Their determination has only become stronger after the fiasco of the Oslo accords and the Camp David initiative of 2000. Both these events showed to the Palestinian people the duplicity of Israel and its mentors. In his speech, President Bush added more insult to the Palestinian psyche by even denying their past. The West continues with the pretension that it is the aggressor, and not the oppressed, who is being victimised.

As Israel goes on unhindered with its expansionist policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinians have been accused of undermining the peace process. After Bushs latest speech, even the most optimistic observer has realised that the peace process is a grand hoax on the Palestinian people. Palestinians had seen through the game a long time ago, which is not surprising for a people who live amid barricades and checkpoints manned by Israeli security forces and who are subjected routinely to targeted attacks and assassinations by helicopter gunships and jet fighters.

Despite the seeming stranglehold of the Israeli state on all aspects of Palestinian life, the people of Israel are getting more pessimistic about the future of their country. Before the country celebrated its 60th anniversary, many Israeli intellectuals forecast a bleak future for the Zionist state. Amnon Rubinstein, a respected intellectual who once held senior ministerial posts in the government, told Israel Radio in April that the state of Israel would not survive.

Nahom Burnei, a prominent political commentator, said Israeli society had lost its confidence. Burnei is of the view that Israels much-vaunted military and economic strengths are misleading. He said that despite the strong trappings, the state had not been able to provide security to Jews and had not allowed them to lead a natural life. In contrast, he said, the Palestinian national movement, though much younger than Zionism, had much more credibility. No one in the world doubts the right of the Palestinians to a state. Meanwhile, the right of the Jews to a state is a source of doubt, and not only among Arabs and Muslims, he wrote in Yediot Aharanot, Israels largest circulated newspaper.

Abraham Tayrosh, a conservative commentator, pointed out that the number of Jews coming to Israel had dropped drastically. He noted that Jews around the world had evidently concluded that living in Israel was more dangerous than living in the diaspora. This is a serious matter, as the future of the Jewish state depends on numerical superiority. The number of people leaving Israel exceeds those coming in. This forces Israel to look for more missing Jewish tribes such as the Falashas in Ethiopia and among Mizos and Manipuris in Indias north-eastern region. Demographers have forecast that by 2050 Arab citizens will constitute 30 per cent of Israels population making it a de facto bi-national state. As much as 20 per cent of Israels Jewish population is Russian. Many of them came to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, many of them are heading for the West.

The chief Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qurei, recently told visiting U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that if Israel refused to withdraw to its 1967 borders, Palestinians would have no option but to revert to the one-state solution.

In the third week of May, the Palestinian One State Forum, comprising Palestinians from different parties, issued a manifesto calling for the creation of a unitary democratic state in the historical land of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan, in which all Israelis and Palestinians would be able to live as equal citizens. The manifesto emphasised that Palestinians forced to flee had an inalienable right to return as well as receive compensation and reparations for the psychological, economic and social losses they had incurred. The one-state solution could serve as the beginning of a historical reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians that would ease the destructive effects of decades of occupation and colonisation, the manifesto stated.

Mahatma Gandhi had written a famous editorial in the Harijan of November 11, 1938, expressing his total disapproval for the Zionist state. He emphasised that Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.