[News] The moral travesty of Israel seeking Arab, Iranian money for its alleged Nakba

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  The moral travesty of Israel seeking Arab, Iranian money for its
  alleged Nakba

Jan. 15, 2019
By: Ramzy Baroud - http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=782267

Ramzy Baroud <http://www.maannews.com/Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, 
author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last 
Earth: A Palestinian Story.> is a journalist, author and editor of 
Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story.

The game is afoot. Israel, believe it or not, is demanding that seven 
Arab countries and Iran pay 
<https://www.jns.org/israel-to-officially-demand-250-billion-from-arab-countries-which-expelled-jews/>$250 
billion as compensation for what it claims was the forceful exodus of 
Jews from Arab countries during the late 1940s.

The events that Israel is citing allegedly occurred at a time when 
Zionist Jewish militias were actively uprooting nearly one million 
Palestinian Arabs and systematically destroying their homes, villages 
and towns throughout Palestine.

The Israeli announcement 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-set-to-seek-250b-compensation-for-jews-forced-out-of-arab-countries/>, 
which reportedly followed “18 months of secret research” conducted by 
the Israeli government’s Ministry of Social Equality, should not be 
filed under the ever-expanding folder of shameless Israeli 
misrepresentations of history.

It is part of a calculated effort by the Israeli government, and namely 
by Minister Gila Gamliel, to create a counter-narrative to the rightful 
demand for the ‘Right of Return’ 
<https://www.afsc.org/resource/palestinian-refugees-and-right-return> 
for Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Jewish militias between 
1947-1948.

But there is a reason behind the Israeli urgency to reveal such 
questionable research: the relentless US-Israeli attempt in the last two 
years to dismiss the rights of Palestinian refugee rights, to question 
their numbers and to marginalize their grievances.

It is all part and parcel of the ongoing plot disguised as the ‘Deal of 
the Century’, with the clear aim of removing from the table all major 
issues that are central to the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

“The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms 
(against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore, to 
hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property, what is 
rightfully theirs,” said 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-set-to-seek-250b-compensation-for-jews-forced-out-of-arab-countries/> 
Gamliel.

The language - “.. to correct the historic injustice” - is no different 
from language used by Palestinians who have for 70 years and counting 
been demanding the restoration of their rights per United Nations 
Resolution 194 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_194>. 


The deliberate conflating between the Palestinian narrative and the 
Zionist narrative is aimed at creating parallels, with the hope that a 
future political agreement would resolve to having both grievances 
cancel each other out.

Contrary to what Israeli historians want us to believe, there was no 
mass exodus 
<http://www.palestineremembered.com/Articles/General/Story2127.html> of 
Jews from Arab countries and Iran, but rather a massive campaign 
orchestrated by Zionist leaders at the time to replace the Palestine 
Arab population with Jewish immigrants from all over the world.

The ways through which such a mission was achieved often involved 
<http://www.palestineremembered.com/Articles/General/Story2127.html> 
violent Zionist plots - especially in Iraq. In fact, the call on Jews to 
gather in Israel from all corners of the world remains the rally cry 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-to-french-jews-israel-is-your-home/> 
for Israeli leaders and their Christian Evangelical supporters 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-armageddon-bring-it-on-the-evangelical-force-behind-trump-s-jerusalem-speech-1.5628081> 
- the former wants to ensure a Jewish majority in the state, while the 
latter is seeking to fulfill a biblical condition for their long-awaited 
Armageddon.

To hold Arabs and Iran responsible for this bizarre and irresponsible 
behavior is a transgression on the true history in which neither Gamliel 
nor her ministry are interested.

On the other hand, and unlike what Israeli military historians often 
claim, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947- 48 (and the subsequent 
purges of the native population that followed in 1967) was a 
premeditated act of ethnic cleansing 
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2006.36.1.6?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents> 
and genocide 
<https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hls.2014.0076?journalCode=hls>. 


It has been part of a long-drawn and carefully calculated campaign that, 
from the very start, served as the main strategy 
<http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/021020_pappe.html> at the heart of 
the Zionist movement’s ‘vision’ for the Palestinian people.

“We must expel the Arabs and take their place,” wrote 
<https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/the-ben-gurion-letter/> Israel’s 
founder, military leader and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion in a 
letter to his son, Amos in October 5, 1937. That was over a decade 
before Plan D - which saw the destruction of the Palestinian homeland at 
the hands of Ben Gurion’s militias - went into effect.

Palestine “contains vast colonization potential,” he also wrote, “which 
the Arabs neither need nor are qualified to exploit.”

This clear declaration of a colonial project in Palestine, communicated 
with the same kind of unmistakable racist insinuations and language that 
accompanied all western colonial experiences throughout the centuries 
was not unique to Ben Gurion.

He was merely paraphrasing what was, by then, understood to be the crux 
<https://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/42231> of the Zionist 
enterprise in Palestine at the time.

As Palestinian professor Nur Masalha concluded in his book 
<http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/021020_pappe.html>, the ‘Expulsion 
of the Palestinians’, the idea of the ‘transfer’ - the Zionist term for 
“ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinian people - was, and remains, 
fundamental in the realization of Zionist ambitions in Palestine.

Palestinian Arab “villages inside the Jewish state that resist 'should 
be destroyed .. and their inhabitants expelled beyond the borders of the 
Jewish state,” Masalha wrote quoting the ‘History of the Haganah’ by 
Yehuda Slutsky.

What this meant in practice, as delineated by Palestinian historian, 
Walid Khalidi was the joint targeting by various Jewish militias to 
systematically attack all population centers in Palestine, without 
exception.

“By the end of April (1948), the combined Haganah-Irgun offensive had 
completely encircled (the Palestinian city of) Jaffa, forcing most of 
the remaining civilians to flee by sea to Gaza or Egypt; many drowned in 
the process, ” Khalidi wrote in ‘Before Their Diaspora’.

This tragedy has eventually grown to affect all Palestinians, everywhere 
within the borders of their historic homeland.

Tens of thousands of refugees joined up with hundreds of thousands more 
at various dusty trails throughout the country, growing in numbers as 
they walked further, to finally pitch their tents in areas that, then 
were meant to be ‘temporary’ refugee encampments.

Alas, these became the Palestinian refugee camps of today, starting some 
70 years ago. None of this was accidental. The determination of the 
early Zionists to establish a ‘national home’ for Jews at the expense of 
the country’s Palestinian Arab nation was communicated, openly, clearly 
and repeatedly throughout the formation of early Zionist thoughts, and 
the translation of those well-articulated ideas into physical reality.

70 years have passed since the Nakba’ - the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1948 - and 
neither Israel took responsibility for its action, nor Palestinian 
refugees received any measure of justice, however small or symbolic.

For Israel to be seeking compensation from Arab countries and Iran is a 
moral travesty, especially as Palestinians refugees continue to languish 
in refugee camps across Palestine and the Middle East.

Yes, indeed “the time has come to correct the historic injustice,” not 
of Israel’s alleged ‘pogroms’ carried out by Arabs and Iranians, but the 
real and most tragic destruction of Palestine and its people.
-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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