17 May 2024 12:54 am Views - 490
Palestinian protesters take to the streets of the West Bank city of Ramallah on Wednesday to mark the 76th anniversary of the “Nakba” or “Catastrophe”, which sparked the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948. (AFP)
Nakba is indisputably a living testimony to the brutality of the beast among humans. The fact that it has been committed against victimised Palestinians for the past 76 years, again and
Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic. The horrendous event in the annals of Palestinians happened just three years after the end of World War II and the setting up of the United Nations to bring about a world order based on peace and justice. Soon it became clear that the UN system was a sham because the United States had little intention of surrendering its newly acquired superpower status to the world body. The UN was structured in such a way to preserve US hegemony and imperialistic interests. The existence of such a world body is the antithesis of peace and justice; dissolve it. The UN has little or no power to bring about peace and justice for the victimised Palestinians. The UN process is undermined by Washington’s villainous use of the veto, which brags about value-based policies in what is seen as a grand global deception.
Nakba is a process that began in 1948, ahead of Israel declaring itself an independent state following UN General Assembly Resolution 181 on November 27, 1947. In Rafah, where some 800,000 people have been re-displaced in the past seven days, equaling the number of Palestinians displaced in the first Nakba, a Palestinian mother told Al Jazeera that she had gone through Nakba countless times. From Rafah, she is moving into another area where water is scarce and the food crisis is more acute than what she experienced in Rafah, but Israeli bombs abound. The word Nakba is itself an understatement. What Palestinians have been experiencing for the past 76 years is much worse than the word’s stated meaning—catastrophe. Nakba today means genocide aimed at not only the physical annihilation of Palestinians but also their cultural and civilisational annihilation. As explained by George Orwell in his highly acclaimed book ‘1984’, Israel and its vicious Western allies resort to newspeak, erasing the Palestinian identity, history, and Semitic roots.
The Palestinians have a longer history in their land than the European Jews who are occupying it now. With their newspeak and the Orwellian Truth Department, Israel and Zionism-worshipping Western nations erase the Semitic origins of Palestinians and Arabs.
As part of this exercise, Zionism invented and popularised the term ‘Islamic Terrorism’. The terror group ISIS is pro-Zionist, for it refuses to fight Israel. Islamophobia is a Zionist-run global industry that is strategically employed to dehumanise the Palestinians so that Nakba can continue until Palestine is totally de-Palestined.
Zionist newspeak rejects the claim that most of these European Jews who are now occupying Palestine are of questionable Semitic origin. Research that points to their origin in the Kingdom of Khazeria in Eastern Europe is suppressed. Historical documents that warn of harm in Zionism are often dismissed as forgeries. Historians and academics whose version of the Holocaust is different from that of the Zionists have been sent to jail. The truth is yet to emerge as to who masterminded the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, for he opposed Israel’s nuclear weapons programme and wanted to cleanse US domestic politics of the undue and anti-democratic influence of the Zionist lobby, particularly the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The human lexicon has yet to invent a word to describe the continuous Nakba horror, as seen in Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza. Moreover, Israel’s genocidal campaign desecrates Holocaust memories. Several Holocaust survivors have condemned Israel’s war on Gaza and said, “Not in our name.”
It was then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who, in 1998, set May 15—the day Israel celebrates its independence—as the official day for the commemoration of Nakba, which marks the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians and the expulsion at gunpoint of some 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in some 500 Palestinian villages. The culprits were Jewish terror gangs like the Irgun, Haganah, and Israeli troops.
The award-winning movie Farha, which was screened on Nakba Day in Colombo at a film festival organised by the Palestinian embassy, vividly captures Nakba through the horror a 14-year-old girl witnessed when Israeli forces ravaged her village. From the outside kitchen where her father locked her inside before he fled, only to be arrested and used as a hooded identifier, she sees a pregnant woman in labour pain, her husband, and two daughters finding shelter in her abandoned house in her deserted village. Minutes after the woman delivered a baby boy, Israeli troops raided the house, killed the family, and let the newborn die of hunger.
The film was based on a true story, which is no different from the ongoing horrors in Gaza, where families are killed in one go and children are starved to death. The Zionists try to dehumanise the Palestinians as human animals, but it is they who behave beastly, as has been seen in viral social media video clips that show hardline Zionists setting fire to trucks carrying aid and destroying food items meant for the besieged people of Gaza. At the Israeli-controlled Karem Abu Salem crossing on Rafah’s eastern border, too, Zionist extremists continue to block trucks carrying aid to Gaza, with Israeli authorities making no effort to arrest them.
The deception with which the West furthers Zionism’s cause made credulous people across the world accord those who have committed or are committing the Nakba terror the respect worthy of statesmen.
World-renowned Palestinian scholar Edward Said in his compelling book ‘The Question of Palestine’ says: “For years and years, {Menachem} Begin has been known as a terrorist and has made no effort to hide the fact. His book, The Revolt, is to be found in any university or medium-sized public library as part of the standard Middle East collection. In this book, Begin describes his terrorism, including the wholesale massacre of innocent women and children in righteous (and chilling) profusion.
“He admits to being responsible for the April I948 massacre of 250 women and children in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. Yet a few weeks after his election in May 1977, he emerged in the press with his terrorism forgotten, as a ‘statesman with implied comparison to Charles De Gaulle’…. Yet so strong is the consensus decreeing that Israel’s leaders are democratic, Western, incapable of evils normally associated with Arabs and Nazis...”
No wonder that the West stubbornly refuses to condemn the Gaza genocide, although it acknowledges that a large number of civilians and children have been killed. Perhaps these hardcore Zionist Western leaders, such as US, British, and German leaders, clear their conscience by believing that what Israel is doing in Gaza, even if it is seen as genocide by others, is in accordance with international law. Perhaps, this is why US President Joe Biden, derided by critics as Genocide Joe, has resumed arms shipment to Israel after the suspension of the Israel-bound 2000-pound bomb package.
With leaders like these, justice is like a needle in the haystack for Nakba victims.