Messages in Memory of the Nakba (Part 2)

Akram Awad

Thursday, 17 May 2007

This year marks the 59th anniversary of the Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe) in which the Zionist Jewish militias committed a horrendous number of massacres and crimes which led to the displacement of half of the Palestinian nation (around 750,000) from their villages and towns and the occupation of most of Palestine. In the memory of the Palestinian holocaust I have five messages that I would like to send to different people who have a lot to do with this continuing catastrophe: Palestinians living in Palestine, Palestinians living outside Palestine, Palestine solidarity movement activists, the international community and Jews worldwide. Part 1 of this article contained my message to the Palestinians. Part 2 carries my message to the rest of the world.

To the Palestine Solidarity movement activists

My third message goes to the Palestine solidarity movement activists around the world. The Palestinian nation salutes you for defending their rights, increasing the awareness of your people about the Palestinian cause and exposing the Israeli brutality and the evil face of Zionism. I can tell from my experience that there are non-Palestinians who are more Palestinian than some Palestinians. We are grateful for every single moment you spend for us and we will never forget your struggle with us.

I would just like to remind myself and you that the role of a solidarity movement is to defend the rights of a nation and mobilise people to support those rights. It is worrying though to notice a few examples where this red line is crossed by making compromises on behalf of the Palestinians and proposing "solutions" that drop some of the Palestinian rights. So that we don't lose the plot, we should always remind ourselves of our primary aim and that is to support all the Palestinians' rights (and not picking some and neglecting others). It is only the Palestinian nation -as a whole- that has the authority to decide for its future. We stood by the Black South Africans until the apartheid regime was dismantled. We did not impose solutions on them but supported the end of apartheid. Likewise, we should support all rights of the Palestinian nation including their right in their independent sovereign state and the right of all refugees to return to their original villages and towns and their right to compensation.

To the International community

My fourth message is for the international community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." It is ironic that this statement is also 59 years old and it's yet to see the light in this wild world. If you think you have no hand in the suffering of the Palestinians for 59 years -or even more- then you have to rethink about it.

Palestine was granted to the Zionist Jews through the Balfour declaration 90 years ago which was then followed by mass immigration of the Jews from Europe and USA to Palestine where their camps were secured by British forces. Although Britain had no right in the first place to offer the land of the Palestinians to someone else they still issued a white paper clarifying that the Jews had no right to form their own state in Palestine, and that is when Zionist terror escalated against both the Palestinians and the British -with the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem being one example of that terror-. When the British lost control of the Zionist Jewish terrorist groups they simply decided to leave the Palestinians to their fate and leave the country! By that time the Americans were the main source of aids and funds to the Zionist terror militias and supplied them with all their military needs including air fighters.

It was in that decade when the Holocaust was committed against the Jews and other ethnicities. The sympathy with the Jews led 33 states -of which the most were either European countries or controlled by major powers- to vote for the UN partition plan of Palestine in 1947. But hold on, what do the Palestinians have to do with all of this?! There is only one answer; European states recognised the suffering of the Jews but still didn't want to host them. This brings to my mind the Aliens Act of 1905 which was enacted by the then-prime minister Arthur Balfour -Yes the same Balfour!- to restrict the immigration of Jews to the UK.

We didn't vote for Balfour, the British people did. We didn't vote for any foreign government that supported the Zionists before or after the declaration of their illegal state in 1948, the western nations did. Unfortunately, most of us only care about what the governments would do for us and ignore their support to the Zionists and their crimes. You have been paying taxes for ages; you probably received good health and social services in return, but how many times did you question the tax money redirected by your government to fund the killing of the Palestinians by the Israeli army? You enjoyed your freedom to vote for your representative in your Parliament, but only very few were caring enough to blame their governments for starving the Palestinians for practising their right to vote for a party other than what the Zionists prefer. Palestinians do not ask for anyone’s apology; All what they ask for is to help them end their catastrophe, which they had no hand in creating, and to support their freedom and their return to the land Zionists wouldn’t have taken without getting empowered by the US and many European governments.

Is it bliss to be ignorant? Not when it makes you involved in the crime. Your favourite shop is Marks & Spenser because it offers you good value for money, but then it is also your money that helps M&S to support Israel with hundreds of millions of US dollars every year. You open your bank account with Barclays, a bank which shamelessly sponsored the celebrations of "Israel's birthday", and you still justify it for yourself believing that closing your account won't make even a tiny difference. You will still insist to buy your makeup from Estee Lauder even when you are told that its Chairman, Ronald Lauder, is a Zionist working with the land-grabbing Jewish National Fund (JNF), opposing the right of return for Palestinians. What is worse is that you may be donating to the JNF charity in your country to help them erase any remaining signs of the Arab villages flattened by the Zionists since 1948. If you want to be passive and do nothing to help the Palestinians and pressure your government, the minimum I can ask you for is not to take part in their killing and daily suffering with your money… BOYCOTT!

To all Jews worldwide

My fifth and final message is dedicated to the Jews worldwide. Our problem is not with you; it's with Zionism. We lived in Palestine hundreds of years in peace and harmony as one Palestinian nation: Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze and others. We understand the suffering many of you had to undergo in Europe and the US but this should never give the Zionists the justification to cause another nation even worse suffering in your name. Muslims, Christians and Jews believe in the same God, a just and merciful God, a God who will never give one nation the right to expel another nation from their land and replace them, a God who will never allow a Jew to kill an Arab to secure a "Jewish state", a God whose wrath is sure to be provoked by the racist Zionist ideology and its adopters and implementers, specially when they claim to speak in the name of God.

As a Jew you may be thirsty to speak against Zionism, and I do understand the risks you will have to undertake considering the Zionist attempts to silence you, but believe me it's worth the risk. You won't be alone; the majority of silent Jews are non-Zionists, and all what you need to do is to break your silence and add your name to the honour list of Jewish heroes who dare to speak out for Judaism and against Zionism. It may sound a bit pragmatic for a Palestinian to encourage non-Zionist Jews to speak out the truth about their faith to unveil the lies of the Zionists who pretend to represent the Jews, but I'm sure even the non-Zionist Jew dreams of the day when, for people all over the world, the word "Judaism" becomes attached to peace, justice and equality instead of Zionism, racism, occupation, war and "Nakba".