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Articles
By
Khalid Amayreh
Accredited -
Associated |
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Corrupt analogy: Exposing Israel’s
Attempts To Equate The Palestinian
Refugee Plight |
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Posted By Khalid Amayreh September 16, 2008
“The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by
Israel was not an unintended consequence, or
fortuitous occurrence, or even a ‘miracle’, as
Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann later
proclaimed; it was the result of long and
meticulous planning,” Ilan Pappe, Professor of
Political Science at Haifa University, in his
book ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’.
This week, the outgoing Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert sought to rewrite history by
equating the violent uprooting and dispersal
across the four winds of the native
Palestinian community at the hands of Zionist
Jews with the ideologically-motivated
immigration of Jews from the Middle East to
Palestine.
Zionist massacre of Palestinian Arabs in 1948
Speaking during a meeting of the Knesset
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on 13
September, Olmert was quoted as saying that he
felt sorry for the plight of both Palestinian
and Jewish refugees.
“I join in expressing sorrow for what happened
to the Palestinians and also for what happened
to the Jews who were expelled from Arab
states.”
Olmert’s largely facetious remarks coincided
with highly controversial statements made by
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas
on the sensitive subject of the right of
return for Palestinian refugees uprooted from
their country more than sixty years ago.
The American-backed Abbas reportedly said he
wouldn’t press Israel to allow the return of
all Palestinian refugees to their original
homes and towns in what is now Israel and that
he would have to negotiate with Israel the
number of refugees to be repatriated.
Olmert is knowingly and deliberately lying
because the Palestinian refugee plight and
the immigration of Jews from the Arab world to
Israel were two entirely different
occurrences.
In the final analysis, the big-lie tactic is
aimed at downplaying, banalizing and
ultimately scuttling the primordial issue of
the right of return for millions of people
uprooted from their ancestral homeland at the
hands of the Nazi-like movement known as
Zionism.
Olmert and other Zionist leaders obviously
think that this inalienable right can be
vanquished by spreading lies and making
corrupt analogies.
I am afraid I have bad news for the Israeli
premier. The Palestinian people, irrespective
of what people like Abbas are saying, are
now more committed to the right of return than
ever before.
Even the Fatah movement, which Israel and the
US might be tempted to think that it has been
thoroughly eviscerated of patriotism and
national dignity still retains an iron-clad
commitment to the right of return.
Yes, there are certainly some Fatah
opportunists here and there who would be
willing to accept anything as long as their
pockets remained stuffed with American
dollars or European Euros.
But it is also true that the vast bulk of
Fatah followers and supporters would condemn
as traitors their own leaders should they
adopt a slack attitude toward the right of
return.
This is not to mention the estimated 4.5 – 5
million refugees themselves who view the
abandonment of the right of return as the
ultimate treachery.
Hence, I dare challenge Abbas to utter his
scandalous remarks about the right of return
in the presence of refugees in one of these
refugee camps in Gaza or Lebanon or Syria or
even the West Bank.
Going back to Olmert’s hallucination about
Palestinian refugees vs. Jewish refugees, it
is important to set the record straight, not
so much to make Olmert and fellow Zionists
change their minds, but rather to give the
potential victims of Zionist lies the
opportunity not to be deceived by the masters
of deception and mendacity.
To begin with, we should remember that the
Palestinian refugees were expelled from their
ancestral homeland as a result a partial but
real genocide at the hands of Zionists gangs
such Irgun, Hagana, Lehi, Palmach, Itsel, etc.
This expulsion is now readily recognized by
Israeli historians, including the staunchly
racist ones such as Benny Morris.
For example, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli
foreign minister, wrote the following in a
book published in 2006:
“The reality on the ground was that of an Arab
community in a state of terror, facing a
ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory
was paved not only by its exploits against the
regular Arab armies, but also by the
intimidation and at times atrocities and
massacres it perpetrated against the civilian
Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab
community was uprooted under the impact of
massacres that would be carved into the Arab’s
monument of grief and hatred.”
Ben Ami, of course, can’t be expected to tell
the whole truth, but his words are nonetheless
very telling.
Indeed, unlike Jewish immigrants from the Arab
world, whose aliya (or immigration to Israel)
was the most important strategic goal of
Zionism and the newly-established Jewish
state, the Palestinian refugees were coerced
and massacred into fleeing, very much like the
victims of Nazism in Europe during the Second
World War.
But unlike the more complicated situation in
war-time Europe, in Palestine the Zionist
movement carried out the war in 1948 mainly in
order to expel and ethnically cleanse the bulk
of the native Palestinians.
In other words, the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine, as Illan Pappe says, had been
meticulously planned and systematically
implemented.
In fact, the Zionist movement not only
expelled 90% of the native Palestinians
(because they are not Jews), but also made
sure that their homes and villages are
destroyed and obliterated. Those homes not
destroyed were simply given to Jewish
immigrants as an everlasting patrimony while
the rightful owners were agonizing in squalid
refugee camps across the Middle East.
Well, I would like to confront Zionist liars
with the following questions:
How many Jewish villages and towns did the
Arab states destroy and obliterate?
How many massacres of Jews did the Arabs
perpetrate which one might think would have
forced Arab Jews to flee?
Let us be honest and not allow ourselves to be
duped by Zionist propaganda. The Jews of the
Arab world came to Israel in order to fulfil
Zionism. Their flight to Israel, which Israel
calls Aliya, meaning moving from an inferior
position to a higher or superior position, was
“wanted, desired and aggressively sought
after.”
In some Arab countries like Morocco, the
immigration of Jews occurred as a result of
secret agreements between Israel and the
respective Arab government.
To be sure, some Arab Jews, like in Iraq, were
actually harassed, even terrorized by Zionist
agents into leaving their native homelands as
testified by some Iraqi Jewish immigrants in
recent years.
In the context of rabid Zionist efforts to get
the Jews to immigrate to Israel willy nilly,
synagogues were bombed, cultural centres
attacked, and Jewish figures threatened by
Zionist agents masquerading as “Arabs.”
In some cases, anti-Jewish riots were secretly
organized by Zionist agents in order to create
an atmosphere of fear amongst Jews which
eventually did prompt them to leave. (Several
anti-Semitic incidents in France and North
America have recently been committed by
Zionist agents in order to induce Jews to flee
to Israel).
Yes, public dismay at Zionist Jews in some
Arab countries was rife after the Nakba, the
near destruction and expulsion of the
Palestinian people from their ancestral
homeland.
But there never was a Jewish Dir Yasin in
Iraq, or a Jewish Tantura in Tunis, or a
Jewish Dawaymeh in Algeria or a Jewish Kafr
Qassem in Yemen.
The opposite is true. In the course of the
Second World War, Arab governments actually
made strenuous efforts to protect their Jewish
communities form the haunting spectre of
annihilation by the Nazis. Ask any elderly Jew
from Morocco or Egypt and he or she would
relate to you how Jews were enjoying their
rights as citizens. In fact, in many cases,
Jews were granted preferential treatment and
given foreign, especially French, passports,
which allowed them to prosper in comparison to
other citizens.
Non the less, if Arab Jews, or Jews
originating in the Arab world, insist that
they are bona fide “refugees,” the right thing
to do is to demand the right to return to
their original native countries.
Justice ought to be done for both Palestinian
refugees and Jewish immigrants from the Arab
world by granting both sides the opportunity
to return to their native homelands from which
they were uprooted, as in the case of the
Palestinians, or duped into leaving, as in
the case of Arab Jews.
This is certainly better and fairer than
indulging in corrupt analogies with the aim of
trivializing the Palestinian refugee plight
which represents the heart and soul of the
Arab-Israeli conflict. |
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