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Al-Nakba: The Ongoing Palestinian Catastrophe
Zionism’s settler-colonial project in Palestine started in 1882 and continues today
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BY TAREK M. KHALIL
As 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://insidearabia.com/palestinian-rejection-of-ziFROM 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. PALESTINIANS AS NON-PEOPLE 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
Golda Meir provided one of this attitude’s most infamous examples, who audaciously uttered that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people ... they didn’t exist” (https:// stationmuseum.com/past-exhibitions/madein-palestine/a-land-without-a-people-for-apeople-without-a-land-by-tarif-abboushi/). This policy of denial continues today.
CONQUEST AND DISPOSSESSION The Zionist leadership understood early on that the native population would resist this colonization and eventual conquest. In the 1920s, Zeeve Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism — forerunner to the present-day Likud, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — affirmed that, “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population — an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would be only hypocrisy” (“The Iron Wall,” 1923). He added that Zionism “is an adventure of colonization” (Nur Masalha, “Expulsion of the Palestinians,” 1992). In 1914, talking about the Zionist conquest, Ukraine-born Moshe Shertok, Israel’s future first foreign minister, said: “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it.”
Therefore, Zionism’s essential elements are conquest, dispossession and demographic change. The small minority of 160,000 Palestinians who remained in what became Israel have always been viewed as a “demographic threat,” for Zionism is predicated on establishing and maintaining Jewish demographic superiority. This explains why 65+ Israeli laws directly or indirectly discriminate against them (https://www.adalah. org/en/content/view/7771).
Israeli historian Benny Morris (BenGurion University of the Negev), a British immigrant who believed that David Ben Gurion, Israel’s primary national founder and first prime minister, didn’t go far enough, exposed Zionism’s racist nature by shamelessly averring that Ben Gurion’s “fatal mistake” was not “carr[ying] out a large expulsion and cleans[ing] the whole country. … Had he carried out a full expulsion — rather than a partial one — he would
ISNA CONDEMNS THE MASSACRE OF PALESTINIANS
ISNA HAS CONDEMNED ATTACKS PERPETRATED AT AL-AQSA Mosque, the violence against Palestinian civilians in East Jerusalem, the evictions of families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the attacks on Gaza.
These acts of brutality, especially during the holy month of Ramadan, deserve outright condemnation, and they must stop.
ISNA stands in solidarity with all Palestinians peacefully protesting the ongoing theft of their land. We call on the Israeli authorities to cease forced evictions – something for which the international community is also calling — and end their military occupation.
ISNA President Safaa Zarzour proclaimed that the U.S. must uphold the values of human rights and religious freedom. ISNA calls on the international community to uphold international law and help end Israel’s occupation and use of force against innocent civilians.
The Fiqh Council of North America, expressing its deep concern about the latest crisis in Jerusalem, especially, Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the three most sacred sites in Islam along with the Masjid al-Haram in Makkah and the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah, said “It is therefore a religious duty of Muslims to protect all places of worship. It is also a moral imperative for all that we protect places of worship of all faiths. The despicable act of attacking worshippers in the holy month of Ramadan during their prayers is rife with inhumanity and anti-religious symbolism. It is the duty of the council and all religious and interfaith communities to stop what might be a direct incitement of violence and bloodshed. The Council calls on Muslims and non-Muslims to protest those irresponsible and violent actions.” ih
have stabilized the State of Israel for generations” (“Survival of the Fittest,” Haaretz, Jan. 8, 2004).
Morris, using declassified military documents, relates the early Israeli leaders’ calculated effort to impose a Jewish majority through ethnic cleansing (“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” Cambridge University Press: 1988).
Gen. Yigael Yadin, head of the operations branch of the Israeli unified armed forces, had his own ideas about how to achieve these goals, “Actions against enemy settlements located in our, or near our, defense systems [i.e., Jewish
settlement and localities] with the aim of preventing their use as bases for active armed forces. These actions should be divided into the following types: The destruction of villages (by fire, blowing up and mining) — especially of those villages over which we cannot gain [permanent] control. Gaining of control will be accomplished in accordance with the following instructions: The encircling of the village and the search of it. In the event of resistance — the destruction of the resisting forces and the expulsion of the population beyond the boundaries of the State (Israel Studies 1, no. 2 [Fall 1996]: 98-121).
Morris’s notion of stability is premised on the Palestinians’ removal and/or political powerlessness. THE 1947 UN PARTITION PLAN On Nov. 29, 1947, the UN, through its General Assembly Resolution 181, divided historic Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, giving 55.5% of the land to the Jews (most of whom were recent immigrants), and paved the way for the depopulation of approximately 500 Palestinian villages (https://www.palestine-studies.org/ sites/default/files/jq-articles/Pages_from_ JQ_70_-_Irfan_0.pdf). In 1947, Palestine contained 1.2 million Palestinians and 608,000 Jews. Preeminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, who analyzed the resolution’s various components considering the demographics and land ownership realities, concluded that it was neither a moral, fair, nor pragmatic compromise. Aside from the fact that Jews made up less than one-third of the total population, even after decades of rigorous and foreign-sanctioned colonization, they also owned less than 7% of the land (Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 1 [Autumn 1997], 5-21). Moreover, they were awarded the best and most fertile lands.
Furthermore, the proposed Jewish state would only have a bare Jewish majority (499,000 Jews and 438,000 Palestinians), because the resolution did not incorporate the Jaffa enclave, the home of 71,000 Palestinians that the proposed Jewish state engulfed. More crucially, even within the proposed state’s borders, Jewish-owned land was about 11.2 percent. The Zionist discourse touts the partition resolution as a prime example of Arab “rejectionism” (https://mitvim.org.il/en/publication/the1947-partition-plan-the-palestinians-biggest-missed-opportunity/). However, the events leading to the resolution reveal the truth: the Zionist Yishuv’s rejectionism and the Arab League’s embrace of a legal process to determine the resolution’s competency. Arab delegations requested that the International Court of Justice decide, among other issues, if the partition contradicted the principles of the UN Charter and if the UN had the jurisdictional competence to even suggest partition.
By accepting the plan, the Zionists gained international recognition of their right to a Jewish state and a base for further expansion. Ben-Gurion’s statement that the Jewish state’s borders “will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution” (https://imeu.org/ article/the-nakba-65-years-of-dispossessionand-apartheid) remains in force, for Israel’s borders have never been unilaterally declared. THE DAVID VS. GOLIATH MYTH In our current soundbite culture, the Palestinian exodus was caused by the Arab armies’ invasion into parts of historic Palestine on May 15, 1948. However, between 250,000-300,000 Palestinians had already been driven out before Israel declared statehood on May 14, 1948.
This David vs. Goliath myth (https://ffoz. org/discover/israel-history/who-is-the-realdavid-and-goliath.html) is still prevalent in Zionist political discourse, especially given the present on-the-ground realities. Archival evidence clearly shows that Zionist forces had a clear edge in terms of manpower, military prowess, intelligence and organization. The Jewish forces’ total manpower was around 35,000 with 15,000 to 18,000 fighters and a garrison force of roughly 20,000. The numbers increased to 41,000 in mid-June
1948. The Arab armies numbered between 12,000 and 23,500 troops. TOCHNIT DALETH By March 1948, veteran Zionist leaders and other military personnel finalized the Tochnit Daleth (Plan Dalet; Plan D), according to which Zionist forces would deliberately employ violent and terror tactics to forcibly remove Palestinians. The Deir Yassin A Palestinian family being forcibly evicted from their Sheikh Jarrah massacre of April 9, 1948, led to home under Israeli supervision the mass flight of Palestinians and eventual Zionist takeover of Palestine. Ironically, just a mile away from Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem (World Center for Holocaust Research, Documentation, Education and Commemoration; est. 1953), the Deir Yassin’s martyrs lie in unknown and unmarked graves (Ilan Pappé, “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 1 [Autumn 2006]: 6-20). THE AFTERMATH Immediately after the mass expulsion and dispossession, the Judaization, Hebracization and de-Arabization of Palestine’s landscape accelerated. Depopulated villages were bulldozed and concealed by building new settlements, planting forests and turning them into natural parks. Many visitors and even ordinary Jewish families who now enjoy the parks have no idea about the bloody history underneath their feet. The new state appropriated the indigenous urban residential quarters, transport infrastructure and railways, police stations, schools and libraries, churches and mosques, as well as jewelry and furniture, art and carpets, and other personal possessions. In the Israeli collective memory, Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. Palestine’s demographic, geographic and toponymical transformation changed the course of history. The nakba lies within the Palestinians’ collective memory worldwide. In contrast to Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum, where Jewish lives are remembered and memorialized, there’s still no central collective database for nakba victims. But despite this, the world should never forget the victims, just as the Palestinians will never forget their land, their rich history, and the beauty of their landscape. ih Tarek M. Khalil is education coordinator of American Muslims for Palestine (www.ampalestine.org).
