PALESTINE
Al-Nakba: The Ongoing Palestinian Catastrophe Zionism’s settler-colonial project in Palestine started in 1882 and continues today BY TAREK M. KHALIL PALESTINIANS AS NON-PEOPLE
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s the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims were set to celebrate Laylat al-Qadr (the Night of Power), their beloved Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem was desecrated by the Israeli army and mobs. This invasion, which included forcible confiscation of Palestinian-owned dwellings in East Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities, was followed by a ferocious bombing of Gaza. Both military actions caused death, injuries and massive destruction. These May 2021 atrocities are yet another chapter of al-Nakba (The Catastrophe), which is a culmination of a colonization process that has its origin in 1882 and reached its eventual climax on May 15, 1948, when Israel declared statehood. The forcible displacement and ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from 1947-49 (https://www. unrwa.org/palestine-refugees) created space for the establishment of Israel in 78% of historic Palestine (Holy Land Studies 7, no. 2 [Nov. 2008]: 123-56). Contrary to the Zionist mythical characterization of the nakba as “a miraculous clearing of the land,” the Zionists meticulously and methodically orchestrated this ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Palestine’s landscape (https://inside arabia.com/palestinian-rejection-of-zi-
FROM 1921 TO 1948, THE BRITISH COLONIAL REGIME PROVIDED THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY UMBRELLA UNDER WHICH THE ZIONIST ENTERPRISE WAS ABLE TO DEVELOP ITS BASIC INSTITUTIONAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL FRAMEWORK, AS WELL AS SECURE THE ARAB COLLECTIVITY’S ESSENTIAL INTERESTS.
onism-is-a-historical-anti-colonial-strategy-1/). This ethnic cleansing and denationalization continues unabated.
24 ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2021
The Zionist state was created by the Ashkenazi Jewish Yishuv, a predominantly European settler community that immigrated to Palestine from 1882 to 1948. From 1921 to 1948, the British colonial regime provided the political and military umbrella under which the Zionist enterprise was able to develop its basic institutional, economic, and social framework, as well as secure the Arab collectivity’s essential interests (Baruch Kimmerling, “Benny Morris’s Shocking Interview,” https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/3166). While Palestinians were the land’s predominant majority until the nakba, their existence was irrelevant to Zionism’s founding fathers. The oft-repeated Zionist slogan popularized by Israel Zangwill, a British author at the forefront of cultural Zionism during the 19th century, of “a land without a people for a people without a land” was a necessary myth, because if the land is conceptualized as barren or empty, the moral underpinnings of its military conquest are diminished, if not eliminated — at least within the Zionist discourse. Theodore Herzl, political Zionism’s founder, initiated the Basel Program in 1897. Adopted by the first Zionist Congress, its objective was to “establish for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine” (https://azm.org/basel-program-1897). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the Palestinians were not even mentioned. Herzl’s close associate Zangwill (d.1926) expounded on the infamous slogan with shocking clarity: While it’s “literally inexact” that Palestine is a “country without a people,” it’s “essentially correct” because “there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country, [and] utilizing its resources…” His derisive and dismissive attitude continued after Israel’s declaration of statehood. In 1969, Israeli prime minister
