from #TheGuardian
‘Israelis, go back to Europe’? Some on the left need to rethink their slogans
by #Jo-AnnMort
"A majority of Israel’s #Jews today are not descended from #Europe, but rather from #Arab nations. To expect them to leave #Israel is unprecedented, unrealistic and wrong."
[I don't agree with her opinion on "river to the sea", but I do agree on "go back to Europe".]
An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were either driven from their homes or fled during the Nakba in 1948. To counter attempts at Nakba denial and "memoricide" by U.S. politicians and others, it is instructive to review the archives of U.S. diplomats stationed in Palestine and surrounding Arab countries who witnessed the Nakba...
After 75 years of failure, one would imagine that a people would learn what works and what doesn’t, both from their own experience, as well as the experience of others.
#Palestinian predicament is the direct or indirect outcome of three #Arab-#Israeli wars, each about a generation apart. These are the wars that started in 1947, 1967, and 2000. Each war was a complex event with vast, unforeseen, and contested consequences for a host of actors, but the consequences for the Palestinian people were uniquely catastrophic: the first brought #displacement, the second brought #occupation, the third brought #fragmentation.
#WarOfndependence that began in 1947 was first a #civilWar between #Arabs and #Jews in #Palestine, and then a multi-state war… from at least five sovereign countries—#Egypt, #Transjordan, #Syria, #Iraq, and #Israel—as well as small contingents from others. It was a war fought village by village and town by town, and it resulted in massive population displacements on both sides.
No Jews remained anywhere in parts of Palestine that fell under #Arab control
The #ethnicSorting was most pronounced in the center of the land [where] more land was conquered by the #Arab Legion than by #IDF.
This territory included many sites with religious and symbolic importance to both sides.
It became known then as the #WestBank and it sits on a smaller patch of land that what had been allocated to a future #Palestinian Arab state in the rejected #UN#partitionProposal that preceded the war.
With few exceptions, the few places in central #Israel today with a significant Arab population were not actually conquered by the #IDF in the war; they were largely territories that were held by the invading #Iraqi army and that were ceded to Israel in the #armistice.
For the #Arabs, the defeat in this war was and remains a searing trauma.
Not only had the goal that had united the Arabs in 1948—preventing the establishment of a Jewish state in the heart of the #Arab#MiddleEast—been thwarted, but hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in #Palestine had been displaced by war.
In time, their #displacement became the enduring image of that defeat and humiliation.
The #Palestinians went from being a people defined by their dispossession at the hands of a hated enemy across a sealed border to being a people defined by their dispossession at the hands of a hated enemy that now also ruled them as an occupier.
Unlike the larger #Arab trauma of defeat, which was mostly bookended in time by the end of actual combat, for Palestinians, this remains a continuous trauma right up into the present.
These 3 wars are as different in form as any wars could be. Yet in several crucial ways they are quite similar.
For one, all 3 of these wars were preceded by months of excitement in the #Arab world & heated rhetoric that was simultaneously righteous & violent.
Righteous in that the cause of attacking #Jews was held to be an absolute good and a moral exigency infused with theological overtones. Violent in that the rhetoric was often openly #eliminationist
This pattern was set in motion by the first of the wars. The vote by the #UN General Assembly in 1947 to partition #BritishPalestine into two states, one #Jewish and one #Arab, set off an explosion of violence against local Jewish communities almost immediately in #Palestine itself.
If there were doubts about the justice of the cause being fought for—preventing the establishment of a Jewish state—there is little record for that.
What’s astonishing is that a war that was embarked on so willingly, with so much unanimity, and with so much excitement could be later remembered as a story of pure #victimhood 🔥🔥🔥
Yet before the war was even fully over, Constantin #Zureiq published a passionate #lament of the #Arab failure to defeat #Israel, The Meaning of the Disaster [#Nakba], giving birth to the word that would be used from as a shorthand for the traumatic #Arab defeat in that war.
As time passed, memories of that defeat evolved and the #Nakba became not an #Arab event but a #Palestinian one, and not a humiliating defeat—“seven Arab states declare war on #Zionism in #Palestine [and] stop impotent before it” is how it is described on the first page of #Zureiq’s book—but rather the story of shame and #forcedDisplacement.
The weeks leading up to the 1967 war were, in the #Arab world, likewise a time of public displays of #ecstasy. The hour of “#revenge” was nigh, and the excitement was expressed in both mass public spectacles and elite opinion.
The #Egyptian president Gamal Abdel #Nasser promised an elated crowd the week before the war broke out that “our basic objective will be to destroy #Israel.
As with the 1st #Arab-#Israeli war, memories expanded and hardened with time, and the mythology of the defeat came to assume much larger dimensions than the size of the war or the actual defeat itself.
Major anniversaries of the #SixDayWar were largely marked in the Arab world as “the beginning of the #occupation.”
Minimal reckoning with Arabs’ own failures was with military errors and not with the overall goal of exacting revenge and eliminating #Israel.
The common and deeper meaning to all was that #Israel’s enemies needed to be protected from the consequences of THEIR defeat in the wars THEY initiated and LOST.
A global diplomatic edifice that keeps the #Palestinians in a permanent holding pattern of misery stemming from defeated #Arab war efforts, where the Palestinians themselves weren’t even always the central actors in the descent to war or the principal combatants who lost them, is unlike anything the international community has attempted in other conflicts.
The #Arab-#Israeli conflict isn’t a normal conflict, and the cause of Arab #Palestine still isn’t a normal cause of national liberation.
The fundamental fact of this conflict, that one side believes the other’s #existence is a metaphysical crime for which a just resolution can only be #elimination, means that standard diplomatic practice is much harder to apply at best, and gets scrambled, inverted, and abused at worst 🔥🔥🔥
Arabs suffer from a long and systematic stereotyping from the West. From the Orientalist movement of the 18th century till today, Western perceptions of Arabs and by extension Muslims, are based on what they have been conditioned to believe through the media be it in the form of literature, art, and more recently, movies and...
Here, but not here. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what drove me off Mastodon. #Zionism, #Islamophobia, #AntiArabRacism (an odd one to affect me, since I am NOT #Arab, nor have I ever claimed to be) were the usual suspects.
Instance #admins & #mods did what they do best on the fediverse: they attacked. I was but one of a handful of #ProPalestine voices on here that needed to be silenced. #Dogpiling is one of their tactics. People come out of the woodwork to attack. It overwhelms.
Is "salam alaykum"/"shalom aleichem" a polytheist greeting? The word salam/shalom in Arabic and Hebrew, based on the Semitic root Š-L-M, means "peace". But its not only a peace - in the ancient Semitic polytheist tradition, there had been venerated a god of peace and dusk, named Shalim. So I see this as possible that the ancient Semites were using such greeting means not an impersonal peace, but the deity linked with the peacefulness and completion of twilight. #semiticpolytheism#arab#hebrew
Five things the United States knew about the Nakba as it unfolded (www.mei.edu)
An estimated 750,000 Palestinians were either driven from their homes or fled during the Nakba in 1948. To counter attempts at Nakba denial and "memoricide" by U.S. politicians and others, it is instructive to review the archives of U.S. diplomats stationed in Palestine and surrounding Arab countries who witnessed the Nakba...
On 2nd anniversary of Abu Akleh killing, press advocates push for justice (www.aljazeera.com)
Advocates say lack of accountability in Abu Akleh’s killing reflects pattern of impunity in Israel’s attacks on press.
STEREOTYPING ARABS – A Timeless Hollywood Tradition (youtu.be)
Arabs suffer from a long and systematic stereotyping from the West. From the Orientalist movement of the 18th century till today, Western perceptions of Arabs and by extension Muslims, are based on what they have been conditioned to believe through the media be it in the form of literature, art, and more recently, movies and...