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<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/70-israel-bellicose-regional-giant/24291">https://electronicintifada.net/content/70-israel-bellicose-regional-giant/24291</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">At 70, Israel is a bellicose regional
giant</h1>
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ghada-karmi">Ghada
Karmi</a></span> <span class="field field-publisher">-</span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2018-05-17T19:43:00+00:00">17 May 2018</span></span>
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<figure id="file-62066"><source media="(min-width:
72rem)"><figcaption><small><span></span></small></figcaption></figure>
<p>Between 30 March and 11 May Israeli forces shot dead
more than 40 unarmed Palestinians and wounded over
2,000 during the Great March of Return series of
protests in Gaza. On 14 May alone, in protests
coinciding with the opening of the US embassy in
Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israel-slaughters-palestinians-marching-return">killed
a further 58 Palestinians</a> and wounded nearly
2,800.</p>
<p>Palestinians have not been the only target. On 12
April, a senior Israeli official, housing minister
Yoav Galant, again called publicly for Syria’s
President Bashar al-Assad to be assassinated, a call
he first made last year. On 10 May, Israel attacked
what it claimed were Iranian missile launchers inside
Syria, a sovereign state, in the latest of more than <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/omar-karmi/israel-strikes-syria-iran-target">100
such attacks</a> on targets in Syria over the past
few years.</p>
<p>Such words and deeds – enacted and expressed with
impunity, unhindered by international sanction or even
rebuke – represent the swaggering self-confidence of a
state that fears no law or retribution.</p>
<p>Israel today has one of the world’s strongest
militaries, some of the globe’s most advanced drone
technology and is among the world’s top exporters of
weapons. It enjoys the support of all Western states,
especially the US, and has made significant political
inroads into Africa, India, and to a certain extent,
China. Its military, economic and political power has
never been so great.</p>
<p>No one imagined in 1948 that the state created on the
homeland of another people and at their expense – an
ethnic cleansing justified as a moral act to salve the
world’s conscience for crimes committed against the
Jewish people – would grow into this terrifying and
bellicose regional giant.</p>
<h2>A trauma still unappreciated</h2>
<p>Certainly, no such thought was in our minds as we
fled our homes during the Nakba of 1948. Mine was an
ordinary family with ordinary lives until we found
ourselves one day catapulted into a nightmare with no
end. As children, we were three siblings, who did not
understand why we had to leave all that was familiar
and made up the life we knew – our house, our school,
our family dog.</p>
<p>My memories of that time, fragmented as they are, are
all of fear and anxiety, reflecting the feelings of my
parents. Like all Palestinians at the time, we
believed that we would soon return, when “things
settled down.” The idea that we were losing everything
we possessed to make way for a people alien to us so
they could find refuge in the homes we had vacated was
preposterous and unthinkable.</p>
<p>We fled to Damascus first and then to London. The
view my parents clung to was that our exile was
temporary and we would soon be back. But as the years
passed the hope faded and then turned into an ideal we
aspired to but feared would never be realized.</p>
<p>I used sometimes to wonder what the Jewish immigrants
who were settled in our house in Jerusalem did with
our belongings. Did they throw them away or keep them?
And did they feel anything about the family whose
place they had so obviously taken? Hundreds of
thousands of other Palestinians like us must have had
the same thought.</p>
<p>In the first years after the Nakba, Palestinians did
nothing but struggle to survive. It was a trauma of a
severity still unappreciated to this day, a time of
sadness and loss. We were defeated and friendless
until the rise of the Palestine Liberation
Organization and the resurrection of the Palestinian
national movement.</p>
<p>There then followed a heady period of hope and
self-assertion. It reached its zenith in the late
1970s, but Israel’s invasion of Beirut in 1982 led to
a decline in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s
fortunes, and the Oslo accords of 1993 compounded that
decline. The last 20 years of Palestinian history have
been punctuated by Palestinian uprisings and brutal
Israeli repression, while Israel’s colonization has
continued relentlessly. The Palestinians have been
unable to stop it, their leadership divided and weak.</p>
<h2>An unstoppable wave</h2>
<p>Today the Palestinians, who were a homogeneous
society when I was born, are fragmented: nearly 5
million live under Israeli occupation in the West
Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza; some 1.5
million are second-class citizens in Israel; there are
over 3 million refugees in Arab countries registered
with the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA, and
an unknown number of exiles further afield. Meanwhile,
Israel, to us an illegitimate usurper and standing
affront to all that was decent, has only grown in
strength and international acceptance. Its defeat,
economically prosperous as it is and basking in
American adulation, seems far away.</p>
<p>Maintaining an optimistic outlook in the face of
Israel’s blanket impunity is a difficult challenge. A
disinterested observer of this scene in 2018 might
well conclude that the Palestine cause is hopeless.</p>
<p>But that would be wrong.</p>
<p>While Israel has been consolidating its power, the
Palestinians, in their different locations, have been
increasingly asserting their existence and right to
resist. It is as if they have awoken from a long
torpor.</p>
<p>The last decade has seen an extraordinary revival of
national consciousness. Each locality where
Palestinians live has developed its own form of
resistance activity, whether inside Palestine or out.
The <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/bds">boycott,
divestment and sanctions</a> movement is but one of
these. A ferment of creativity in Palestinian art,
literature and culture has taken hold, and political
activism has assumed new forms.</p>
<p>This wave, which is now unstoppable, draws on the
young, a generation of fresh, committed supporters of
the cause of their parents and grandparents. Seeing
this in action has been the most uplifting experience
of my life. It has infused new energy into a cause
that may have faltered from time to time, but never
died.</p>
<p><em>Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian physician, academic
and writer. Her latest book is entitled</em> Return:
A Palestinian Memoir.</p>
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