[News] Second Nakba; Same Israeli Lies; Same Western Narrative

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://popularresistance.org/second-nakba-same-israeli-lies-same-western-narrative/>
Second Nakba; Same Israeli Lies; Same Western Narrative
By Jonathan Cook, Consortium News.
November 26, 2023
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[image: 20231126-1.jpg]

Above photo: Gazans outside Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, north of the
Gaza Strip, on October 9, 2023, following Israeli airstrikes. Palestinian
News and Information Agency/Wafa, with APAimages, Wikimedia Commons.
Israel is openly carrying out ethnic cleansing inside Gaza.

*And yet, just as during the first “Nakba,” Israel’s lies and deceptions
dominate the West’s media and political narrative.*

History is repeating itself — and every politician and establishment
journalist is pretending they cannot see what is staring them in the face.
There is a collective and wilful refusal to join the dots in Gaza, even
when they point in one direction only.

There has been a consistent pattern to Israel’s behaviour since its
creation 75 years ago — just as there has been a consistent pattern to the
“see no evil, hear no evil” response of western powers.

In 1948, in events the Palestinians call their “Nakba,” or Catastrophe, 80
percent of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their lands in what
became the self-declared Jewish state of Israel.

As Palestinians maintained at the time — and Israeli historians later
confirmed from archival documents — Israel’s leaders lied when they said
Palestinians had fled of their own volition, on the orders of neighbouring
Arab states.

As the historians also discovered, Israeli leaders lied when they claimed
that they had pleaded, first, with the 900,000 Palestinians inside the new
state’s borders to stay and, later, with the 750,000 forced into exile to
return home.

Rather, the archives showed that the new Israeli state’s soldiers had
carried out terrible massacres to drive out the Palestinian population. The
overall ethnic cleansing operation had a name, Plan Dalet.

Later, Israeli leaders even lied in minimising the number of Palestinian
agricultural communities they had destroyed: there were more than 500 wiped
from the face of the earth by Israeli bulldozers and army sappers.
Paradoxically, this procedure was popularly known by Israelis as “making
the desert bloom.”

Extraordinarily, reputable scholars, journalists and politicians in the
West — those who dominate the mainstream conversation — ignored all this
evidence of Israeli deceit and mendacity for decades, even after Israeli
historians and archival documents supported the Palestinian account of the
Nakba.

Various strategies were adopted to keep the truth out of view. Prominent
observers continued peddling discredited Israeli talking points. Others
threw up their hands, arguing that the truth could not be definitively
determined.

And yet more declared that, even if bad things had happened, there was
blame enough to go round on both sides and that, anyway, it was an
excellent thing the Jewish people had a sanctuary (even if Palestinians
paid the price rather than the antisemites and genocidaires in Europe).

These defences started to crumble with the advent of social media and a
digital world in which information could be disseminated more easily.
Western elites hurriedly tried to shut down any critical discussion of the
circumstances in which the state of Israel was birthed by labelling it as
antisemitism.
Ever-Shrinking Space

All of this is the context for understanding the current “mainstream”
debate about what’s happening in Gaza. We are seeing the same disconnect
between actual events and the establishment’s crafting of a narrative to
excuse Israel, except this time the deception and gaslighting are occurring
while we, the audience, can see for ourselves the horrifying facts unfold
in real time.

We don’t need historians to tell us what is going on in Gaza. It is live on
television (or at least the more sanitised version is). Let’s just recount
the known facts.

Israeli officials have called for the eradication of Gaza as a place where
Palestinians can live, and said all Palestinians are viewed as legitimate
targets for Israel’s bombs and bullets.

Palestinians have been ordered out of the northern half of Gaza. Israel has
attacked Gaza’s hospitals, the last sanctuaries for Palestinians in the
north. Gaza was already one of the most crowded places on Earth. But
Palestinians have been forced into the southern half of the strip, where
they are being subjected to a “complete siege” that denies them food, water
and power. The U.N. warned last week that Gaza’s civilian population faced
the “immediate possibility” of starvation.

Israel has now ordered Palestinians to leave much of the largest city in
southern Gaza, Khan Younis. Palestinians are gradually being forced to
huddle in the narrow corridor at Rafah, next to the border with Egypt. Some
2.3 million people are being packed into an ever-shrinking space.

The majority have no home to return to, even if Israel lets them head
north. The schools, universities, bakeries, mosques and churches are mostly
gone. Much of Gaza is a wasteland.

For years Israel has had a plan to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, across
the border, into the Egyptian territory of Sinai.
Media Blindness

After its mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, Israel tried
to manage the remaining Palestinian population through the traditional
apartheid model of herding the natives into reservations, as its
predecessors did with the remnants of the “locals” who survived their
efforts at extermination.

Any caution on Israel’s part derived from the different political climate
it had to operate in: international law became more central after World War
II, with clear definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The West wilfully mischaracterises Israel’s process of dispossessing and
ghettoising these remaining Palestinians as a “conflict” because they
refuse to submit quietly to the apartheid, ghettoisation model.

Now, Israel’s management approach to the Palestinians has broken down
completely — for two main reasons.

First, the Palestinians, aided by new technologies that have made it more
difficult to keep them out of view, have attracted ever widening popular
support – and most problematically, among Western publics.

The Palestinians have also managed to bring their cause to international
forums, even gaining recognition as a state by a majority of members of the
United Nations. Potentially, they even have redress in the West’s
international legal institutions, like the International Criminal Court and
the International Court of Justice.

As a result, subduing the Palestinians — or maintaining “calm”, as Western
establishments prefer to call it — has become more and more difficult and
expensive.

And second, on Oct. 7, Hamas proved that Palestinian resistance cannot be
contained even under a siege enforced by drones, and an Iron Dome
interception system protecting Israel from retaliatory rockets. In such
circumstances, Palestinians have shown they will seek surprising and
creative ways to break out of their confinement and bring their oppression
into the spotlight.

In fact, given the West’s dulled sensitivities to Palestinian suffering,
militant factions are likely to deduce that headline-grabbing atrocities —
mirroring Israel’s own historic approach to the Palestinians — are the only
way to gain attention.

Israel understands that the Palestinians are going to continue being a
thorn in its side, a reminder that Israel is not a normal state. And the
struggle to correct Israel’s decades of dispossessing and brutalising
Palestinians will become ever more a defining moral cause among Western
publics, as the fight against apartheid South Africa once was.

So Israel is taking advantage of this moment to “finish the job”. The final
destination is clearly in view, as, in truth, it has been for more than
seven decades. The crime is unfolding step by step, the pace quickening.
And yet senior politicians and journalists in the West, like their
predecessors, continue to be blind to it all.

*This article is from the author’s blog *Jonathan Cook.net
<https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/>
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