Opinion Editorials, May  2008

Nakba Is the Palestinian Holocaust

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, May 17, 2008

	Ajjour massacre (1948) Ajjour was completely destroyed and taken over by 3 Jewish settlements

The Nakba is our Holocaust

“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.”  German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke during a visit to Ramallah in March 2007.

Basking in their usual insolence and self-absorbedness, Israeli leaders have been visibly irate over the highlighted commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian "Nakba," the destruction and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian community in 1948. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has been quoted as saying that there can be no Palestinian state unless and until the victims learn to forget the word Nakba.

“The Palestinians will celebrate their statehood when they erase the word Nakba from their lexicon,” said Livni, whose father, Eitan, who died in 1991, played an active part in effecting the genocidal campaign of murder and terror that culminated in the establishment of Israel.

Last year, Livni had the temerity to say that the creation of a Palestinian state on parts of the West Bank would have to address Israel’s Arab citizens.

For those unacquainted with Zionist phraseology, the venomous remarks were an obvious allusion to diabolic Zionist designs to ultimately expel more than 1.5 million Israeli Arab citizens whose presence in Palestine predated the establishment of Israel by hundreds if not thousands of years.

Similarly, an Israeli diplomat at the UN reportedly complained on Thursday (15 May) that the mere use and circulation of the word Nakba carried a whiff of anti-Semitism, and that the word itself ought to be banned.

The obscene raving came after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon telephoned Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and expressed empathy with the Palestinian people in honor of the Nakba anniversary.

You see the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality. They want even to ban the use of word that reminds humanity of the greatest theft and act of rape in history, carried out by a people who claim to adhere to the Torah, the Holy Scripture that taught humanity, among other things,  “thou shall not steal.”

Obviously, Livni, who is now celebrating 60 years of theft and ethnic cleansing, wants her victims, the Palestinians, to forget the Nakba and relate to their own extirpation and deportation from their native homeland, as a rosy event.

The evil-minded lady wants us to hail the massacres, the terror, the ethnic cleansing and all the Nazi acts that led to our own destruction, dispossession and dispersion. In short, she wants us to adopt the Zionist narrative and effectively become bona fide or kosher Zionists in order to be accepted as “true peace partners.”

But that obviously cannot happen and never will.  Indeed, asking Palestinians to forget the Nakba is as outrageous as asking Jews to forget the holocaust.  The Nakba, after all, was more or less the Palestinian holocaust. And it still is.

How else can the native people of Palestine be expected to relate to the violent seizure of their homeland by brutal East European Zionists, eager to avenge the holocaust?

How else can any Palestinian, indeed, any honest human being, relate to the genocidal destruction of Palestine under the pretext that “Jews have got to live somewhere.”

As far as I know, true Judaism categorically forbids all forms of theft. But Zionism, which often pays lip service to Judaism and the Torah, has stolen an entire country from its indigenous inhabitants.

And the process of stealing and ethnic cleansing is continuing unabated.

It is true that Zionism has not yet used gas chambers to liquidate its victims. But Israel is murdering Palestinians in large numbers each and every day. Does a day pass nowadays without a Palestinian child, man or woman being murdered by these thugs and child-killers who call themselves the “Israeli Defense Forces?”

Just look at how Israel, which the liar of the White House George Bush was audacious enough to call “a light upon the nations,” is reducing Palestinian towns and villages to real concentration camps, very much like Nazis did at the Ghetto Warsaw.

As diabolical as it was, the holocaust lasted only for a few years. Yes, it was a few years of utter hell. We don’t deny this fact despite cynical Zionist efforts to utilize Jewish suffering to inflict comparable suffering on the peoples of the Middle East.

But the Palestinian Nakba, although lesser in scope and slower in motion, is still ongoing sixty years later.

Palestinians are still being killed, maimed, tormented, humiliated and deported. Palestinian homes are still being demolished; Palestinian farms and orchards are still being bulldozed and decimated; Palestinians are still being blockaded and starved in ways reminiscent of the holocaust. And above all, Palestinian land is still being stolen and raped by Zionism.

Today in every junior high school in America, students read Anne Frank, while in every high school Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is requisite reading. This is the man who says brazenly that he readily identifies with Israeli crimes and that he couldn’t bring himself to say bad things about Israel.

The victims of the first Kristallnacht enjoy the world’s approbation and sympathy, while at the same time having succeeded in demonizing an entire people, for whom Kristallnacht still remains a night without end.

Israel, as Spanish Philosopher Santiago Alba-Rico wrote two years ago, may not be the most unjust and criminal State in History, but it is the one that has been at it for a longer period of time and with greater impunity.

And Palestinians may not be the most oppressed people in the history of mankind. But they are undeniably the most uninterruptedly tormented people in modern history.

As a people, Palestinians have more or less survived in spite of history. But their very survival shouldn’t be viewed as irreversible given the specter of genocide and obliteration that is still hovering over their heads every morning and every evening.

Let us not fool ourselves. The nearly daily statements and remarks and warnings that we keep hearing from Israeli rabbis, politicians and generals are a vivid reminder of similar anti-Jewish statements made seven decades ago in Germany by Nazi figures.

In fact, the Holocaust didn’t start with Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 or even with Kristallnacht in 1938. It began much earlier with a venomously racist discourse that is very much similar to the present Israeli approach toward the Palestinians. 

Israel, which has been trying to convince the world, particularly the West, that it must be perpetually dominant, hegemonic and imperial in order to survive, is slowly but surely trying to obliterate the Palestinian people in the name of the holocaust and in the name of “Never Again.”

Today, in the name of “Never Again,” Israel is transforming Palestinian towns and villages into concentration camps, where the lives of millions of hopeless and helpless citizens are at the mercy of the moods and whims of Israeli occupation soldiers and officers, very much like the lives of many Jews were once at the mercy of the moods and whims of the Gestapo, SS and the Wehrmacht.

Today, the Palestinians are a people without human rights and dignity, without civil rights, without a known fate, and virtually without a future because Zionist Jews have decided to fulfill Jewish nationalism in way similar to the manner in which German supremacists wanted to exercise their nationalism nearly seven decades ago.

And as Jews, Russians and other Europeans paid a dear price for the Nazi folly, Palestinians and other peoples of the Middle East have paid and continue to pay a dear price for Zionist madness and fascism.

But just as the Germans eventually paid even a dearer price for their own madness, Zionist Jews will undoubtedly pay a colossal price sooner for their wanton criminality and arrogance. This is if they continue to allow themselves to be duped by the big lie called Zionism.

Eventually, the dynamics and forces that caused the downfall of Nazism and Stalinism will bring about the downfall of Zionism. It may take some time, but it will happen.

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editor@ccun.org