By Julio Morejón Tartabull
From the Africa and Middle East editorial team
At the time of writing, there are nearly 3,400 dead Palestinians, most of them women, the elderly and children, massacred by Israeli bombings.
The conflict between the Israeli army and Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (Hamas), the militia of the Islamic Resistance Movement, also resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries on the Hebrew side.
The conditions of urban suffocation in Gaza City, with no fuel, water or electricity, with health units and other relief centers destroyed or functioning with bare essentials, show the scale of the humanitarian crisis and its tendency to worsen.
The 41-kilometer-long and 10-kilometer-wide Palestinian coastal region of around 2.3 million people already suffered from Zionist scorched-earth military tactics in 2014 and 2021 and still recovered from the losses, even though 63 percent of its residents live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.
BITE THE KIND HAND
Hatred characterized the relationships between Arabs and Jews who came to Palestine under a UN resolution in 1948 and were all survivors of the Final Solution – with which Nazism attempted to destroy this group of people.
Instead of receiving gratitude for being welcomed into their country, the Arabs suffered antipathy based on an ideological aberration: Zionism.
Moshe Dayan, a descendant of Jewish immigrants and later defense minister, recognized that the two communities shared their lives before the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, but everything changed when armed organizations strengthened during the British colonial mandate to destroy the Palestinians.
According to experts, the Zionist cult mixes radical nationalism with devotion to violence, insatiable geophagy, a heavy dose of racism and an unqualified reinforcement of the exclusivity of the Yishuv (with this name they identified the Jews of Palestine before the founding of the Hebrew State). ).
It is said that Zionism was an invention of Theodoro Herzl in the 19th century as an ideology of modernity to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine to create a so-called national homeland, concretized 75 years ago under the infamous motto “a land without People”. “a people without a land” that ignored the Palestinian right to their homeland.
Demographic reality belied the slogan, as in 1947 the population was 630,000 Jews compared to one million 310,000 Arabs.
On October 7, another phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict broke out, an endless process marked by the injustice of the expulsion of Palestinians from their territory.
In fact, life shows the ineffectiveness of the campaigns that try to distort the real reasons for the discrepancies, which from time to time worsen and trigger the crisis.
The reality is that Hamas’ attacks responded to the challenge of walking on Israeli-mined terrain.
PREVIOUS CHAPTER
In any case, the Nakba (catastrophe or hecatomb in Arabic) stands out in this long conflict, which consisted of the expulsion of Palestinians from their property and triggered a flow of displaced people and then refugees in the countries neighboring Palestine.
Anthropologist Susan Slymovics noted that “in April and May 1948, units of the Haganah[thepre-statedefenseforcetheforerunneroftheIDF—theIsraelDefenseForces—receivedordersexpresslytouprootthevillagersanddestroythevillagesthemselves(…)”[lafuerzadedefensadelpre-EstadolaprecursoradelaIDF–FuerzadeDefensaIsraelí-selesdabanórdenesqueestablecíanexplícitamentedesarraigaralosaldeanosexpulsarlosydestruirlasaldeasmismas(…)”[dervorstaatlichenVerteidigungstruppedemVorläuferderIDF–derisraelischenVerteidigungsstreitkräfte–BefehleerhieltendieausdrücklichbesagtendieDorfbewohnerzuentwurzelnzuvertreibenundzuvernichten“Dörferselbst(…)“[lafuerzadedefensadelpre-EstadolaprecursoradelaIDF–FuerzadeDefensaIsraelí-selesdabanórdenesqueestablecíanexplícitamentedesarraigaralosaldeanosexpulsarlosydestruirlasaldeasmismas(…)”
According to experts at Qatari broadcaster Al Jazzera, 15,000 Palestinians died during the Nakba and hundreds of thousands fled their homes to survive, many of whom still had the keys to the homes from which they were expropriated years later. which is linked to a demand for justice that the Palestinian people have never given up: the return of the refugees.
Seventy-five years ago, armed groups that were later integrated into the Israeli army carried out massacres like the one that occurred in the town of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, and that scholars say clearly defined the behavior of Tel Aviv troops. Arabic.
This village of about 700 residents was attacked on April 19, 1948 by the Zionist factions Irgun and Stern Gang, who murdered 107 residents using brutal methods – paradoxically in the style of the massacres carried out by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The perpetrators were identified as terrorists during the British colonial mandate, but later joined the Israeli armed forces.
According to “the statements of the perpetrators and the surviving victims, many of the people were massacred – from those who were tied to trees and burned to those who were lined up against a wall and killed with machine guns – they were women, children and.” older people,” recalls Al Jazeera.org, adding that Arabic sources and some Hebrew historians highlight that “before the Israeli state, the villagers had signed a non-aggression agreement with the Haganah, the Zionist army.”
The introduction of Zionism into Palestine under the British colonial mandate (1919-1948) coincided with other events that advocated the creation of a Jewish confessional state as an anti-Arab wedge in the lands of Islam; previous offers to establish it in Uganda and Argentina did not go any further because the legitimacy they claimed – they claimed – lay in the Holy Land, at the foot of Mount Zion on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
sheet/mt