<div dir="ltr">
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<font size="1"><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/21/how-israel-wages-war-on-palestinian-history/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/21/how-israel-wages-war-on-palestinian-history/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How Israel Wages War on Palestinian History<br></h1>
<span class="gmail-post_author_intro">by</span> <span class="gmail-post_author"><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/" rel="nofollow">Jonathan Cook</a></span>- August 21, 2020<br></div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<div id="gmail-attachment_126449" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/dropzone/2020/08/2560px-West_Bank-13.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="452" height="289"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-126449" class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Photograph Source: A street in Jenin, 2011 – Almonroth – Template:Hey – <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">CC BY-SA 3.0</a></p></div>
<p>When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about
Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed
rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in
its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute
Palestinian youth.</p>
<p>Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as
the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its
population.</p>
<p>Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently
between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where
Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes,
sometimes on their inhabitants.</p>
<p>It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to
their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent
witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse.</p>
<p>The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since
Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of
his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless
legal battles to keep it off screens.</p>
<p>Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of
defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high
personal price. Deaths threats, loss of work and endless legal bills
that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him –
this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the
next few weeks.</p>
<p>Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war
on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples.</p>
<p>For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern
West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials
characterise them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians
are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army
firing zone.</p>
<p>The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.</p>
<p>These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating
Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show
that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of
establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass
evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.</p>
<p>The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially
verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli
occupiers’ court.</p>
<p>Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent
any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted
Palestinian history.</p>
<p>Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that
more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even
though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some
have slipped through the net.</p>
<p>The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale
massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel
was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.</p>
<p>In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today
fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were
executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider
population to flee.</p>
<p>Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel
destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass
expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to
return.</p>
<p>Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it
pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact,
as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing
of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who
commanded Palestinians to leave.</p>
<p>The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.</p>
<p>A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv
University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful
about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers
in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.</p>
<p>Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” –
the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater
Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade
all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of
international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians
differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.</p>
<p>Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and
Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.</p>
<p>Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.</p>
<p>Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get
both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the
West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage.
Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritised on these digital
maps.</p>
<p>Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark
on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete
barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian
territory in violation of international law.</p>
<p>And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign,
#GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be
labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognised
the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to
follow suit.</p>
<p>Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind
of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and
that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid
laws in the occupied territories.</p>
<p>Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of
activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion
– are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.</p>
<p>Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli
archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as
Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to
destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their
homeland, to be replaced by Jews.</p>
<p>The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the
lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.</p>
<p>But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can
understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by
refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.</p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.</em></p>
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
</div>