Desertpeace

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)
Israel celebrating evil

Comment by Khalid Amayreh

Normal nations, like normal people, don’t celebrate their days of infamy. In fact, they struggle to forget them. Some countries with
troubled past try hard to deal with their shameful legacies, often by openly acknowledging their sins and apologizing to their victims and to their victims’ descendants.

However, in Israel, which encapsulates evil and racism, ethnic cleansing is celebrated with utmost pride as a consummate national achievement and a glorious success story. “This is our manifest destiny,” many Zionists would ostentatiously argue, with glee and deep satisfaction apparent in the tone of their voices.

Sixty years ago today, one of the greatest thefts in history took
place in Palestine: when armed Zionist gangs launched a massive
campaign of murder and terror against the native Palestinians.

The marauding vandals of Zionism murdered thousands of innocent
people, destroyed thousands of homes, bulldozed hundreds of villages,
and expelled the bulk of the Palestinian people from their ancestral
motherland.

This campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing, as Israeli historian and
political analyst Ilan Pappe argued in his recent book “The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine,” was not an unintended consequence or
fortuitous occurrence, or even a “miracle,” as Israel’s first
president, Chairman Weizmann, proclaimed; it was actually the result
of long and meticulous planning.

Now, sixty years later, the victims, these suffering and
long-tormented Palestinian refugees, are still waiting to be
repatriated and compensated for their seemingly unending nightmare.

Predictably, Zionism called the barbarian drive of ethnic cleansing
“war of independence” and “national fulfillment”.

Zionism, a Godless and manifestly racist ideology to which many Jews
have converted rather blindly, viewed the dispossession of the
Palestinian community as a proper response to Nazism and the
holocaust.

For their part, Europe in particular and the West in general saw the
creation of Israel in Palestine as a long-awaited opportunity to
dispose of the remaining European Jewry and also to atone for
centuries of anti-Semitism, culminating in the holocaust.

As to the fate of the Palestinians, whose homeland was stolen from
them in order to create a state for the victims of European racism,
it was of none of anyone’s concern.

Bertrand Russell illustrated this inhumanity in a message he sent to
the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo, in
February 1970.

“The tragedy of the people of Palestine,” he wrote, “is that their
country was given by a foreign power to another people for the
creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of
thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With
every new conflict their number increased.”

Russell then asked: “How much longer is the world willing to endure
this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the
refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were
driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the
continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept
being expelled en masse from their country. How can anyone require
the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else
would tolerate?”

Today, Israel is celebrating sixty years of ethnic cleansing, home
demolitions, land seizure, racism, murder and terror which continue
to haunt those courageous Palestinians who are still clinging to
their homeland despite the high price they pay, mostly in their own
blood and the blood of their innocent children.

True, Palestinian resilience and tenacity have almost transcended
reality in the face of the sheer evilness of Zionism.

But Israeli criminality continued to assume Nazi proportions as is
evident from the ongoing genocidal blockade of the Gaza Strip, where
1.5 million Palestinians are constantly bombed, starved and murdered
for electing a government that both Israel and the Bush
administration didn’t like.

And in the West Bank, Israeli has effectively transformed Palestinian
cities, towns and villages into virtual detention camps as
Gestapo-like Israeli soldiers are having an open season on helpless
and unprotected Palestinians commuting to their homes, schools,
colleges and workplaces.

I don’t really know if it is possible to count on an awakening of
Zionist conscience. But, do Zionists have a conscience? How can
“conscience” and “Zionism” be used in the same phrase?

Well, in order to have conscience, one has to believe in the
difference between right and wrong, a characteristic that is
conspicuously nonexistent in the collective Zionist mindset.

I really wonder how these self-absorbed Zionists could look at
themselves in the mirror, knowing that they are living in stolen
homes, built on stolen land whose lawful owners were banished and
condemned to live a miserable life in squalid refugee camps for sixty
years and continuing?

Ask any person with a minimal sense of honesty what he would call
these depraved squatters and he or she wouldn’t hesitate to tell you
that they are “thieves and criminals.”

Yes, undoubtedly, many of these same people had lost homes and
businesses and other property in Poland, Germany, and Eastern Europe
and also in some Arab countries. But do they have the right to kill
or displace the innocent Palestinians and take over their homes,
farms, orchards, to steal their homeland and banish them to the four
winds?

This obscene injustice can’t be accepted, neither by the laws of man
nor the laws of heaven. And wrongs must be corrected and injustices
must be rectified, or there will be no peace.

There is no doubt that the creation of Israel was an act of rape of
the highest order. It continues to be an act of rape and will always
be as such till the end of time.

True, Israel is today an imposing reality that no one can deny. And
it does enjoy certain political legitimacy in the eyes of many
people.

But as a child of rape and a brat of oppression, Israel has no iota
of moral legitimacy since it was founded at the expense of another
people, the Palestinian people.