In 1917, when Arthur Balfour decided to establish the Zionist federation [who gave him the right to do so?], he wrote "a national home for the Jewish People". I am sure, though, whether he had the privilege or not, that when he wrote, it was not equivalent to erasing Palestine and installing a Jewish State.
By Hiba Kilany
I am sure it did not mean cancelling a whole population and tagging the women, kids and men defending the right to their homes as terrorists. Passing laws preventing Palestinians from their rights to return to their lands…
So, the story goes like this:
You come to my home, because someone decided to gift it to you. That someone had no keys, no legal right; someone who did not possess any wall of that place… and you come, wipe me, my family, my story and my history away. Now you sit there, over the bones of the dead people who decided to stay. If I decide to defend my right to that space:
I am a terrorist.
Let’s speak numbers: a land where Zionists did not exist is now a territory of 22,145 km². Whereas Palestine, the original country- is now 6,220 km2. Any child that attends kindergarten could do the math. By all means…
The 1948 Palestinian exodus occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs
fled or were expelled from their homes around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (half of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes. About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948.
Later, a series of laws passed by the first Israeli government prevented Arabs who had left from returning to their homes or claiming their property. They and many of their descendants remain refugees, stateless, rejected and unwanted.
To make a long story short: they expel the land owners, they put laws to prevent them from coming back, they kill the ones that decide to stay… and they claim to be defending themselves.
I say: In life there is black and there is white, there is right and there is wrong, there is an occupier and the occupied one, there is a murderer and a victim. There was Palestine now there is Israel: did anyone ask himself on what number of dead bodies was this “Modern” state built? Did anyone count the number of villages destroyed?
If the expulsion of the Palestinians out of their own homes, is not a clear ethnic cleansing I am not sure what is.
What is sadder?
Is it the failed Arab unity? The Human rights defenders who failed humanity? Or the is it the global support for such a failed non credible “mise-en-scène”?
I don’t buy it, do you?
