Opinion Editorials, May 2015

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The Palestinian Nakba, Catastrophe, Will Disappear When Israel Does

By Khalid Amayreh  

A Palestinian refugee camp after eviction of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948

This week marked the passage of 68 years since the occurrence of the Palestinian Nakba, the extirpation and expulsion of the bulk of the Palestinian people from its ancestral homeland at the hands of Zionist Jews.
 
Since then, Palestinian suffering has been consistently increasing and hopes for undoing the Nakba, e.g. repatriating Palestinian refugees back to their native country, have been dwindling.
 
Today, Israel, the manifestly racist Jewish –Zionist state has been morphing nonstop into a fascist state, hell-bent on repressing Palestinians in both Israel proper and the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, for the express purpose of forcing them to leave their homeland.
 
In order to expedite the Israeli strategy of ridding rid of as many Palestinians as possible, Israel has enacted a huge body of brazenly discriminatory laws designed to make the non-Jewish presence in mandatory Palestine as precarious and untenable as possible.
 
One of these laws defines Israel as a Jewish state or state for all Jews. This law automatically renders non-Jews, e.g. Muslims and Christians who constitute nearly a quarter of Israel's total population, as second-class citizens, or worse.

And to deceive the world, the definition also incorporates the word "democratic" into the definition of Israel.
 
However, it is amply clear that Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic since this constitutes a stark contradiction in terms.
 
Besides, the brazen policy of ethnic cleansing, carried out rather shamelessly in full view of the international community, has failed to make a breakthrough toward emptying the land of Palestine of Palestinians, who continue to be more than just a thorn in Zionism's side.
 
Killing the two state solution
 
In addition to consolidating racism and apartheid in all walks of life, Israel has effectively killed all remaining chances for the so-called two-state solution.
 
The phenomenal proliferation of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank has simply eradicated any possibility for the establishment of a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state.
 
Even President Obama seems to have come to terms with this fact. He told Gulf leaders whom he met with in Washington this week that the achievement of peace in Palestine was "very very difficult."
 
Leaders of the European Union (EU) are also, though reluctantly, coming to terms with this reality.
 
A western diplomat whom this author met recently in Hebron intimated that "we do know that the chances for establishing a true Palestinian state in the West Bank is virtually nil, but we dread thinking of the alternatives."
 
In other words, Israel has consciously and deliberately killed whatever remaining prospects for the two-state solution.
 
Needless to say, Israel, not the Palestinians, must bear the consequences because the Palestinians are not going anywhere.
 
Palestinian Demographic growth
           
According to well documented historical data published by a variety of sources, 1.4 million Palestinians lived in 1,300 Palestinian towns and villages spreading over all of historic Palestine in 1948.
 
Between 750,000 and 800,000 thousands of them were forcibly displaced from their original towns and cities into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, neighboring Arab countries, and other countries of the world. Along with the displaced, some thousands remained in their hometowns in the so-called ‘1948 areas’. Documentary evidence shows that the Zionist troupes laid hand on 774 towns and villages and destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages during the Nakba. The atrocities of Israeli Zionist forces also included over 70 massacres in which 15 thousand Palestinians were killed.
 
According to data published last week by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 6.1 million Palestinians lived in historic Palestine (between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean) by the end of 2014, and this number is expected to rise to 7.1 million by the end of 2020 based on current growth rates.
 
This is certainly bad news for Israel and Zionism. It means that Palestinians are either already a numerical majority or going to be a majority in a few years. I know too well that Israel is not going to allow the Zionist enterprise to fall down before its eyes. But Israel's choices are limited and utterly unattractive.
 
Israel is really at loss as to what to do to prevent the Palestinians from becoming a solid majority in Israel/Palestine, and most observers would agree that time is not on Zionism's side.
 
Jews committed many blunders throughout their long history, but none is greater than building the Zionist enterprise at the expense of an innocent Semitic people whose only guilt was his weakness.
 
Surely time will prove the validity or invalidity of this view.
 
In the final analysis, Israel will disappear as many other entities will. I don't claim to know the timing of this eventuality. But I am convinced that it will happen, perhaps sooner than many people think. And when Israel disappears, the Nakba will also disappear.

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah & ccun.org.

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