[media-dakwah] The great catastrophe

Fri, 12 May 2006 20:15:41 -0700


http://musliminsuffer.blogspot.com/

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful


=== News Update ===

The great catastrophe

Monday marks the 58th anniversary of the founding of Israel in 1948 - and
the expulsion of Palestinians from their land. With millions still living
under occupation or in exile, what Palestinians call their 'nakba' remains
at the heart of their national identity, argues Karma Nabulsi

By Karma Nabulsi


05/12/06 "<http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1773020,00.html>The
Guardian" -- -- In the last week of April 1948, combined Irgun-Haganah
forces launched an offensive to drive the Palestinian people out of the
beautiful port city of Jaffa, forcing the remaining inhabitants to flee by
sea; many drowned in the process. My aunt Rose, a teenager at that time,
survived the trip to begin her life in exile on the Lebanese coast. Each
Palestinian refugee family grows up hearing again and again the stories of
those final moments in Palestine, the decisions, the panic, as we live in
the midst of their terrible consequences.

Throughout 1948, Jewish forces expelled many thousands of Palestinians from
their villages, towns and cities into Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria,
Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of others fled in fear. The
purpose was to create a pure Jewish state, ethnically cleansed of the
original inhabitants who had lived there for centuries. The creation of the
state of Israel was the heart of this cataclysmic historical event for the
Palestinians - the mass forced expulsion of a people; the more than 50
massacres carried out over the summer of 1948 by various armed Jewish
forces; the demolition of villages to ensure the refugees could not return
- all this is summed up in a single word for Palestinians: nakba, the
catastophe.

"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return
... The old will die and the young will forget," said David Ben-Gurion, the
founder of Israel, in 1949. But the young have not forgotten. The event is
remembered every year on May 15, and the youth are at the heart of it: at a
rally on the site of the destroyed village of Umm al-Zinnat near Haifa,
Salim Fahmawi, now 65, a primary school student when the soldiers entered
the village 56 years ago to expel them, told an Israeli reporter: "The
presence of so many young people, many of whom are third- and
fourth-generation post-1948, gives me a sense of relief - because I know
the torch has not been extinguished and is passing from generation to
generation."
Nakba day has now become a profoundly political event - unlike other
cultural and social manifestations of our national identity - because it is
all about resistance to the current Palestinian situation rather than
enshrining past memories of victimhood. The project against the
Palestinians begun at the start of the past century had two purposes:
first, to deny the very concept of Palestine and destroy its political and
social institutions, and second, to annihilate the spirit of the
Palestinians as a people, so that they would forget their collective
identity once scattered far from home. But the relentless and dynamic
nature of the catastrophe - it is an ongoing daily Palestinian experience -
binds this generation directly to the older one, and binds the exiled to
Palestine. Indeed, the past few years have witnessed a violent acceleration
in this process of attempted destruction - hence the title of this year's
event: The Nakba Continues.

The nakba is being lived again today in the brutal thrust of the current
policies of the Israeli state. More than 10,000 Palestinian refugees have
been created by the construction of the concrete separation wall that has
cordoned off huge new tracts of occupied land. This wall, condemned as
illegal by the International Court of Justice, has turned West Bank cities
such as Qalqilya into ghost towns, and thousands of refugees have been
created for the third and fourth time in the refugee camps in Gaza. Yet it
is not simply in the building of the walls and checkpoints by Israel's
occupying forces, or the different roads created for Jews and Arabs on
Palestinian land, or the use of specially constructed bulldozers that rip
up Palestinian orchards and olive groves and demolish hundreds of homes, or
the imprisonment of thousands of political prisoners, or the daily murder
of Palestinian civilians, that demonstrates the continuing nature of the
nakba. It is also in the dedication of Israel's military and political
machinery to the destruction of Palestinian resistance to their project.

This resistance operates on two levels, just as the nakba operated - and
operates today - on both. The first is the Palestinians' physical effort to
resist Israeli attempts to dispossess, disinherit and physically control
them and their land, to get rid of its people and to militarily control and
legally disenfranchise those they cannot. The second lies in the
Palestinians' existential affirmation of their identity in the face of a
systematic Israeli effort to fragment and destroy it, so that Palestinians
will surrender, submit, forget. But no matter how violently the first
method is used by Israel, the second has been a failure: Palestinian
identity is stronger than ever in 2006.

Nevertheless, the denial of the Palestinians' right to resist what has been
imposed on them has been demonstrated dramatically in recent weeks. We have
witnessed the astonishing international policy of imposing sanctions as a
form of collective punishment on an occupied people - rather than on their
occupier who is maintaining that occupation through brute violence. Vital
international aid for basic services has been cut off by the European Union
and the US - from Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel since
1967 - because they elected Hamas, voting for representatives who had
campaigned on a platform promising to hold the line against this
destruction of their national identity and rights.

The most malicious aspect of this policy is the fact that the money being
withheld is only needed because the occupation tactics of curfews, closures
and checkpoints have destroyed the Palestinian economy. The financial
catastrophe triggered by these sanctions is created entirely by the Israeli
occupation itself, as World Bank and British parliamentary select committee
reports have made clear. The punishment of starving the Palestinians is
quite blatant: to force them to their knees and make them repudiate their
elected representatives. Even more absurdly, Israel has not accepted - or
even been asked to accept - any of the parallel conditions being demanded
of the Palestinians for a resumption of aid: an end to violence; the
acceptance of the 1993 Oslo agreements; or the recognition of a Palestinian
state in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967: the West Bank, East
Jerusalem and Gaza. Instead they build expand settlements, denounce the
Oslo accords, and have used increasingly indiscriminate violence in both
Gaza and the West Bank. The west's response in a conflict it helped created
58 years ago has fallen to a truly cruel, but also bizarre level.

This denial of Palestinians' worth has been demonstrated again in the way
western media studiedly ignore their daily suffering. In April and May,
more than 40 Palestinians have been killed by the army - most of them
civilians, at least eight of them children - with the most perfunctory
coverage in the western press. Schoolchildren blown to bits while playing
in Beit Lahia, like Mamdouh Obeid; Eitan Youssef, a 41-year-old mother from
Tulkarm, shot in front of her children because troops "thought they saw a
suspicious movement"; an old man, Musa Sawarkah, herding his flock in Gaza,
gunned down; a taxi-driver, Zakariya Daraghmeh,"accidentally" shot in the
back in Nablus. Each one a story unheard, untold.

The predicament of life under military occupation is usually recognised in
principle, but life in exile has its own characteristics, and continues to
create its own bitter experience for Palestinians. Most young Palestinians
today live not in the West Bank or Gaza, but in the immediate region
outside of historic Palestine in the Arab world: stateless, ID-less,
jobless, without the international legal protections of other refugees from
other countries. Theirs is often a relentless struggle to live any kind of
life at all. The younger generation, wherever they are, possess a common
character created through these harsh conditions of exile and passed on
through others' memories of place names, old liberation songs, photographs
of eternally absent relatives, intimate domestic connections and objects -
above all, the rusted key to the front door of the lost house, never seen.
As the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs first noted,
human memory is an entirely collective engagement. In his nook La mémoire
collective, published in 1949 four years after he was executed at
Buchenwald, Halbwachs was the first to recognise that memory itself is
never really individual.

In 2005, young Palestinian activists helped to organise more than 100
meetings in refugee camps and exile communities in more than 28 countries.
The idea was to bring Palestinians together - whether under occupation or
in exile - to discuss the things they want to do next. I participated in
many of these gatherings and witnessed the promise of this generation
replicating something they have no first-hand experience themselves, for it
is rarely talked about and is as yet unwritten: the secret history of the
previous generation of Palestinian resistance activists and fighters. Their
current endeavours echo the same practices, the same spirit, and the same
direction.

Although these huge meetings held last year were all organised locally, the
transcripts - from places as far apart as Australia, Iraq, Egypt, Sweden,
Lebanon, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Greece - show that a shared conversation
is happening. Palestinians are reclaiming their past - of the nakba and
dispossession - and at the same time preparing the next phase of their
fight for justice. By some miracle of the general will, every Palestinian
has somehow, through different journeys, arrived together at the same place.

· Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford University
and a former PLO representative.

source:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13015.htm

===


-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW 

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