It began 76 years ago on the Day of the Disaster
May 15 is an ordinary day in our country. But not in Palestine.
For Israel, it is their founding day, and for the Palestinians it is a day of disaster.
Forty-eight years ago, at the beginning of the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionist military operatives ethnically cleansed and destroyed more than 530 Palestinian villages and towns, killing more than 10,000 Palestinians in a series of civilian massacres. With Zionists occupying more than 78% of historic Palestinian land, nearly 1 million Palestinians among the indigenous Palestinians of 1.9 million people have been expelled from their homes and become refugees for life.
The Great Tribulation did not unfold overnight. It was carried out in different stages – or "planned" as Zionists call it. Plans A, B aim to prepare the Zionist forces in trusteeship of Palestine for military and offensive operations against Palestinian targets, with the aim of intimidating the local population of Palestine and making them flee their homes and make Israel a truly Jewish-majority state.
Plan C clearly stipulates punitive actions against Palestinians, including the killing of Palestinian political leaders and senior military and government officials; destroying Palestinian transportation, infrastructure and sources of livelihood, such as wells and mills; Destroying the social life of Palestinians through attacks on clubs, cafes and meeting places. Project C began collating documents such as "leaders, activists, lists of potential human targets, precise layout of villages" in the village archives, providing Zionist commanders with all the data they needed to carry out the subsequent atrocities.
Plan D (Hebrew for Dalet) was the final plan, yes, similar to the German Nazi settlement of the Jews in the final plan. The aim is to systematically and completely expel Palestinians from their homes. In the words of Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, "It was this plan that determined the fate of the Palestinians in the territory that the Zionist leaders were concerned about for their future Jewish state." ”
1948, Great Tribulation Day
The Holocaust was a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, characterized by widespread and brutal atrocities.
For example, on April 9, 1948, some 130 fighters from the Zionist terrorist organization Irgun and Raisi stormed Deir Yassin, a village of about 600 people near Jerusalem, massacring more than 200 Palestinians – men, women, and children. An Israeli soldier later bluntly described Zionist tactics: "We are putting in explosives and running away. The explosion then moved on, the explosion then the ongoing, and within a few hours, half of the village was no longer there. ”
Fahim Zaydan, who was 12 years old at the time of the massacre, recalled how Zionist fighters murdered his family before his eyes: "They took us one by one; They shot an old man, and when one of his daughters was crying, she was also shot. Then they called my brother Mohammed and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled and bent down — holding my sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her — they shot her as well.
Jewish paramilitary organization in Deir Yassin
On July 11, in what came to be known as the "Lida Death March," Israeli forces stormed the Arab town of Lida, where they massacred hundreds of residents and expelled some 70,000 Palestinians. Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that during what Israel calls Operation Danny, the Israeli 89th Battalion, riding in armored vehicles and jeeps, raided the city, "spraying machine-gun bullets on anything that moves." When he was asked what to do with Lida's population, Israeli leader (and future first Prime Minister) David Ben-Gurion waved his hand and said, "Get them out!"
On 29 October, the 89th commando battalion of the Israel Defense Forces, comprising former Irgun and Raisi paramilitaries commanded by Moshe Dayan, invaded the Palestinian village of al-Dawayima, where they killed hundreds of civilians and raped dozens of women. "There was no fighting, and there was no resistance," an Israeli soldier witness later said. "The first conquerors killed between eighty and a hundred Arabs, including women and children. The children were killed by sticks smashed into their skulls. There is not a single house without dead people. ”
Loading...
Former Israeli occupying soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade inhumanely recounted their experiences of ethnic cleansing and mass murder of the Palestinian population in the village of Tantura during the 1948 Holocaust
Pape wrote: "The incident in al-Dawaymeh is probably the worst incident in the history of Nakba's atrocities. The Zionist atrocities in Dawaima were so appalling that Palestinian leaders tried to stop news of the massacre from reaching other Palestinian towns, fearing that it would intimidate more people into leaving Palestine, as happened in the aftermath of the Deiryassin massacre. ”
On 30 October, the 7th Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces stormed the village of Salih in northern Palestine and massacred 100 Palestinians. The next day, Zionist forces executed more than eighty villagers in the nearby village of Hula.
Zionist leaders proudly spread the news of their massacre to warn all Palestinians that a similar fate awaits them if they refuse to abandon their homeland and flee. As Ben-Gurion declared in October 1948: "The Arabs of the land of Israel have only one function left – to escape."
These atrocities have set off a wave of terror in Palestinian towns and villages, forcing thousands of people to flee quickly, leaving behind warm beds and brewed coffee, damp clothes hanging from windows, millstones on the doorstep of their homes – from which they will never return. By the time of the establishment of the State of Israel, entire Palestinian communities in cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Safard, and Tiberias had either been expelled or forced to flee in fear. In Jaffa, the largest Palestinian city in the Palestinian Mandate, only about 3,000 of the 75,000 Palestinians living there remained after ethnic cleansing. Of the more than 70 massacres perpetrated by Israel, hardly a single Palestinian village or town has survived. As Zionist commander Moshe Dayan later admitted:
The Jewish village was built on the location of an Arab village. You don't even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because the geography books don't exist anymore. Not only do books do not exist, but neither do Arab villages. Nahlal appears in place of Mahlul; kibbutz gwat instead of jiboutta; Kibbutz Sarid replaces Hunefis; and Kefar Yehushu'a instead of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place in this country that does not have a pre-Arab population.
These mass executions and mass deportations meant massive destruction of Palestinian society, with its flourishing culture all but wiped out.
It has also shaped Gaza's historical position for more than 70 years. Many uprooted people poured into Gaza, tripling the population overnight, turning this small strip into a huge concentration camp for refugees.
The massacre "leaves an indelible mark of terror on the memory of Palestinians". Every year on Naba Day, Palestinians hold symbolic processions to commemorate these events, returning to the towns and villages where they disappeared.
Second Disaster Day
The story of 76 years ago is far away, and we thought that human civilization could successfully prevent such tragedies from happening again.
But we were wrong.
In the eight months since October last year, Israel has killed and displaced more than three times as many Palestinians in Gaza as there were in all of Palestine during the Holocaust. More than 35,000 Palestinians, including more than 15,000 children, have died among civilians in the besieged areas, and thousands remain buried under the rubble.
Some 2 million Palestinians have been displaced, most of whom have taken refuge in Rafah, which has been under constant Israeli bombardment and is now facing ground attacks. Since the Israeli army invaded the refugee town, more than 300,000 terrified Palestinians have fled Rafah into uncharted places – some 30,000 a day – reminiscent of the tragic spectacle of the 1948 catastrophe.
Once again, Palestinians are forced to choose between death and ethnic cleansing. The same forces that commanders shouted "erase it" in Tantura 76 years ago are now clamoring for the complete elimination of Gaza. Ironically, Israel is now bombing and expelling Palestinians who were forced into Gaza as refugees more than seven decades ago. Israel is probably the only country in living memory that has twice ethnically cleansed its indigenous people.
This is the second catastrophe unfolding before our eyes: refugees marching on foot under constant bombardment and intensifying siege, leaving behind destroyed homes and lives. Civilian massacres, unfolding on a daily and hourly basis. Palestinian life, culture and society have been completely wiped out. Gaza's razed streets, littered with rubble and the smell of blood, trampled by heartbroken survivors. The bodies of dead children were scattered in the streets and under the rubble.
However, the Gaza genocide is only the latest chapter in decades of Israeli oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people, which is why for the nearly 15 million Palestinians, the catastrophe never really ends. For them, whether they are in permanent exile, under apartheid in the West Bank, under siege in Gaza, on the brink of statelessness in Jerusalem, or as an involuntary minority in Israel, the Holocalypse is an ongoing event.
For decades, Israel has demanded that the Palestinian people surrender without question. It denies Palestinians the right to nonviolent resistance, even as Israel's own "right to self-defense" has become a euphemism for the systematic killing of civilians. Western leaders have watched as the nation-state continues to swell in size. They stand idly by and allow Israeli settlers to devour Palestinian land bit by bit and violently force Palestinians into submission. They scoff at the injustices suffered by the Palestinians: the brutal occupation, the apartheid system of separation and inequality, the relentless siege of Gaza. By supporting Israel, they allow the imagination of Palestinians as a stateless people denied basic human rights and freedoms to become the norm; In fact, imagine that the Palestinians are inferior to humans.
For more than seven decades, Israel has ethnically cleansed Palestinians while evading justice and with impunity, encouraged by Western support and international indifference.
Today, we can no longer tolerate it.