MyDD :: Jewish Voice for Peace commemorates Nakba Day

Jewish Voice for Peace commemorates Nakba Day

by shergald, Fri May 09, 2008 at 08:47:36 AM EST

Jewish Voice for Peace asks Americans, during the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, not to forget the "catastrophe" or Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of two thirds of the Palestinian population from their homes, lands, and villages and towns just before and after May 15, 1948.

Remembering the Nakba during Israel's 60th anniversary

Today, Jews around the world are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. These celebrations reflect the understandable joy of Jews who view Israel as the symbol of 60 years of freedom from centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, not all Jews will be celebrating.

While Israel provided a safe haven for countless Jewish refugees who had nowhere else to go, many of them members of our own families, the terrible fact is that over 700,000 Palestinians were made into refugees to make room for the future state of Israel. Sixty years and several generations later, that number has swelled to an estimated 7 million. Many live in 58 registered refugee camps dispersed throughout the Middle East, and some 4 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories continue to endure reprehensible collective punishment to this day.

That is why the creation of the state of Israel, an occasion marking great celebrations for many Jews throughout the world, is known as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, to Palestinians.

And that is why many of us will not be celebrating, for as long as Palestinians are still fighting for their fundamental human rights, we can not rejoice.

Any peaceful future depends on recognizing both the Palestinian and the Israeli narrative. And yet, just as the names of over 400 pre-1948 Palestinian towns and cities have been deliberately erased from maps, the history of the Palestinian Nakba itself has been all but erased from consciousness.

At Jewish Voice for Peace, we cannot participate in celebrations that erase both the history and modern-day injustices experienced by Palestinians. It is precisely this rendering invisible of Palestinian experience and claims for justice that makes reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians impossible. We choose instead to remember, to know, and to work towards justice and self-determination for both peoples. As Jews and Palestinians, our pasts are intertwined, and so too are our futures.

Today, because much of the world has forgotten, we remember that:

·    In April, 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin, Plan Dalet was put into operation. It authorized the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state.

·    On May 22, 1948, Jewish soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade entered the house of Tantura residents killing between 110-230 Palestinian men.

·    On October 28, 1948, in the village of Dawayameh, near Hebron, Battalion 89 of the 8th Brigade occupied the village. Israeli soldiers said of the massacre that babies... skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, men stabbed to death. 145 men, women and children were killed. Over 450 went missing, of which 170 were women.

Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every person "has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." Israel has never accepted the legitimacy of this basic human right as a basis for peace negotiations, whether by return, compensation, or resettlement. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-Semitism and Hitler's genocide. As the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said emphasized, "Like it or not, this is the historical reality. We must better understand them, and they must better understand us. We must make clear the link between the Shoah (the European Jewish Holocaust) and the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948). Neither experience is equal to the other, and neither should be minimized."

Many of us will not celebrate as long as Israel continues to violate international law, inflicts a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza, and continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.

We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.

Lest one think that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians ceased in 1948, a further 100,000 were driven out of the West Bank and Gaza en masse during the 1967 war, where some Palestinians, who were refugees from the 1948 exodus became refugees again (see below). Since 1967, continual slow ethnic cleansing has enabled Israel to wrest 42% of West Bank land from the Palestinians.

Jewish Voice for Peace has prepared a RESOURCE CENTER and footnoted downloadable fact sheets about both the Nakba and the story of Jews of the Middle East.

BADIL, the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights also has publications available that educate about the Nakba.

Tags: Israel, Palestine, Nakba (all tags)

Permalink :: 11 Comments :: Post a Comment

Re: Tips for Jewish Voice for Peace (none / 0)

This decent organization, JVP, recognizes that civil and human rights injustices cannot be covered up by censorship and propaganda, such as demeaning the Palestinians by calling them terrorists. They continue to be an occupied people, who for 41 years have had their national identity stolen through false propaganda, in which the US government is complicit.

Click on Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and learn the truth about the I/P conflict.

by shergald on Fri May 09, 2008 at 08:55:22 AM EST

I always wondered... (2.00 / 1)

Why couldn't a new Israel have been carved out of some more resonable portion of the world? Perhaps a place where they have lots of space and don't try to kill each other much. Montana?

Regardless, the current state of affairs in Israel and Palestine do weigh on me heavily, and my older Jewish relatives are not reasonable on the issue. Given what they and their friends and family endured, I understand... but where does it end?

You can't stop the signal.

President "That One"

by Dracomicron on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:17:01 AM EST

Re: Jewish Voice for Peace commemorates Nakba Day (none / 0)

It ends when Arab countries recognize the Jewish people, slaughtered and destroyed for thousands of years, have a right to live in a country of their own in a land area the size of New Jersey. For everyone here under the false impression that Arab terror against Jews started only afer 1948 or 1967, take a look into the 1930's when Arabs began murdering Jews in British Palestine. Also, in the 1940's during WW 2, the Palestinian leader the Grand Mufti recruited Muslims in Bosnia to kill Jews alongside the Nazis and pledted support to Hitler in spreading the Final Solution if the Nazis overtook the Mid East.

But yeah, let's bash the Israel for retaliation and defense! DUH!

Hillary 2008!

by New York Democrat on Fri May 09, 2008 at 09:50:34 AM EST

I understand the conflict, yes. (none / 0)

I feel for the plight of the Jews, I do. I also greatly admire Israel's toughness.

The fact of the matter is that it's a two-way street, and both sides have reason for anger and anguish. Arab countries must acknowledge Israel's right to exist, and Israel must reciprocate.

The last time I thought they truly had a chance to end the conflict, a Jew murdered Yitshak Rabin and hardliners set them back years again.

You can't stop the signal.

President "That One"

by Dracomicron on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:02:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I understand the conflict, yes. (none / 0)

The Arab League, consisting of 22 Arab countries, and Iran, believe it or not, offered Israel full recognition and acceptance in return for a Palestinian state based on UN 242. That occurred in 2002, 2003 (Iran, under the moderate PM), and again in 2006.

Israel refused all of these offers, preferring instead to continue its colonial effort to create the Greater Israel including the West Bank, the Golan, and East Jerusalem.

Click on Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and learn the truth about the I/P conflict.

by shergald on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:57:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Jewish Voice for Peace commemorates Nakba Day (none / 0)

Dimishing the Palestinian people and identity by implying they are just Arabs, who have no rights in the land of Palestine where they lived for over a thousand years, is part of Israeli propaganda.

The Arab countries attack Israel because they saw the ethnic cleansing that was occurred already before the declaration of independence, the 250,000 Palestinians who came across their borders. You never hear about the reasons the Arab League attacked, only that they were antiSemitic or something like that.

There were terrorist activities before 1940 on both sides.

The Grand Mufti, a title created by the British, was exiled from Palestine in 1937. He did visit Nazi Germany and did create a small company of Muslim fighters, but fortunately, they were never involved in the war. Like American soldiers who went over to the Nazis, they marched in parades and did nothing more.

Finally, the Palestinians had nothing to do with European antiSemitism or the Holocaust; in fact, small numbers of Jews lived in Jerusalem for centuries in safety and with respect by the Muslims who predominated. That was also true of numerous Arab countries: Jews living under protection and in peace. That is to say, until the Zionists entered Palestine and through the British, received a mandate to develop a state on Palestinian land.

Click on Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and learn the truth about the I/P conflict.

by shergald on Fri May 09, 2008 at 10:53:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Jewish Voice for Peace commemorates Nakba Day (none / 0)

It is always a pity this sort of diary can not be posted without the fraudulent propaganda.

Tantura? Nobody even heard of it until 2000, when a particularly dishonest grad student, with an even more dishonest Mentor, Ilene Pappe, made up the story.

The grad student, Teddy Katz, was taken to court by the Israeli veterans he accused of murder.

During the December 2000 trial, attorney Erdinast discredited Katz's so-called evidence. For example, in his thesis Katz had quoted a central witness called Abu Fahmi saying that the IDF had rounded up villagers, lined them up against the walls and murdered them. Erdinast, having obtained a court order forcing Katz to hand over the tapes of his interviews, demonstrated that there were no such quotes. On the contrary, Abu Fahmi had repeatedly asserted that the IDF did not murder the villagers after they surrendered.

Confronted with many such gross discrepancies between the quotes in his thesis and the recorded interviews, Katz insisted under oath that he had been misunderstood and that he had never believed there was a massacre. Under court order, he later signed an apology and agreed to publish ads at his own expense publicizing his disavowal of the massacre claim. He wrote:

After checking and re-checking the evidence, I am now certain beyond any doubt that there is no basis at all for the allegation that after Tantura surrendered, there was any killing of residents by the Alexandroni Brigade, or any other fighting unit of the IDF. I would like to clarify that what I wrote was misunderstood, and that I did not mean to suggest that there had been a massacre in Tantura, nor do I believe that there ever was a massacre at Tantura.

But within a day, Katz recanted his apology, claiming that because he was in poor health he was pressured by his family to sign an apology in exchange for dropping the charges against him. He insisted now that he was "sure there was a massacre even if I can't know because I wasn't there." The judge refused to accept Katz's retraction, and his appeal to a higher court was similarly dismissed.

Apologists for this sort of propaganda fall back on his retraction. They usually fail to note what happened next:

Meanwhile, University of Haifa appointed a committee to re-examine Katz's thesis. The committee discovered fabrications and distortions of quotes in Katz's work and disqualified the thesis, removing it from the university's bookshelves. Katz accepted the offer to revise his thesis, and resubmitted it in 2002 to five new university-appointed examiners, but the new, lengthier thesis did not receive passing grades; Katz was awarded a "non-research" degree.

Curious that this "massacre" stayed entirely under the radar for two generations, until a sloppy grad student who manufactured quotes "discovered" it, don't you think?

by dhonig on Fri May 09, 2008 at 12:28:20 PM EST

Hi dhonig. (none / 0)

One down two to go as far as these quote. Do you have a disclaimer as well about the 750,000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed?

As for Katz, he is a member of Gush Shalom, Uri Avnery's organization, and knowing his honesty, I still wonder about this Tantura incident. As you know, there has been considerable misinformation propagated by Israel to play down them down or deny them. In fact, the most disingenuous observer of the Hakba, Weisel, still insists that Arab radio created it even though the British, who monitored radio communications, found no such broadcasts exhortating Palestinians to leave their villages.

Are you claiming along with Weisel that the Nakba did not occur? That 10 thousand Palestinians were not killed in its wake?

Click on Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and learn the truth about the I/P conflict.

by shergald on Fri May 09, 2008 at 02:26:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Hi dhonig. (none / 0)

Additional information about Tantura:

Click on one or more of the below hyperlinked eyewitness names to read their corresponding testimony about the mostly unknown massacre at Tantura:

This site is a Palestinian one and may be biased, but the testimonies deserve consideration as there are so, so many. Link here:

http://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa /al-Tantura/Story560.html

The witnesses are:

·    Muhammad Abu Hana
·    Muhammad lbrahim Abu' Amr
·    Salim Zaydan Umar al-Sarafandi
·    Amina al-Masri (Umm Mustafa) and Tamam al-Masri (Umm Sulayman)
·    Farid Taha Salam
·    Musa ' Abd ai-Fattah al-Khatib
·    'Adil Muhammad al-'Ammuri
·    Mahmud Nimr 'Abd al-Mu'ti
·    Muhammad Qasim Daqnash
·    Rahma Salih Abu Salim
·    Yusuf Mustafa al-Bayrumi
·    Ali Mustafa al-Bayrumi
·    Yahya Abu Madi
·    Yusuf Salam
·    Muhammad Kamil al-Dassuki
·    Abd al-Razzaq Nasr
·    'Abdallah Salim Abu Shakar
·    Sabira Abu Hana
·    Yusra Abu Hana
·    'lzz al-Din al-Masri
·    Wurud Sa'id Salam

Example testimony:

Muhammad Abu Hana, born in 1936, resident of the Yarmuk camp.

We were awakened in the middle of the night by heavy gunfire. The women began to scream and run out of the houses, carrying their children, and gathered in several places in the village. I went out of the house too and began running around the streets to see what was going on. Suddenly a woman shouted to me: "Your uncle is wounded! Quick, bring some alcohol!" I saw my uncle bleeding heavily from the shoulder. Being young, I was unconscious of danger. I grabbed an empty bottle and ran to the dispensary nearby. Zahabiyya, the nurse, was there. She was one of the Christians of the village. She filled the bottle with alcohol and I ran back to my uncle. The women cleaned the wound and took my uncle to our house where he hid from the soldiers in the grain attic. But the soldiers saw the trail of blood and soon burst in, asking my grandfather where my uncle was. My grandfather said he didn't know. They left but came back several times with the same question. At some point my uncle, who was in pain, asked for a cigarette and my grandmother gave him one. When the soldiers came back again the smell of the tobacco guided them to him. They took him away. On their way out they insulted my grandfather and called him a liar, and he answered back that anyone would protect his own son.

My uncle survived thanks to the intervention of the mukhtar of the Jewish colony Zichron Yaacov. He had good relations with my grandfather, who was the mukhtar of Tantura. At 9 in the morning, the shooting stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up on the beach. They sorted them out, the women and children on one side, the men on the other. They searched the men and ordered them to keep their hands above their heads. Female soldiers searched the women and took all their jewelry, which they put in a soldier's helmet. They didn't give them back when they expelled us towards Fraydiss. During the entire operation, military boats were offshore.

On the beach, the soldiers led groups of men away and you could her gunfire after each departure.
Towards noon we were led on foot to an orchard to the east of the village and I saw a bodies piled on a cart pulled by men of Tantura, who emptied their cargo in a big pit. Then trucks arrived and women and children were loaded onto them and driven to Fraydiss. On the road, near the railroad tracks, other bodies were scattered about.

Muhammad lbrahim Abu' Amr, born in 1935, resident of the Yarmuk camp.

We had gathered at the center of the village, in the house of Hajj Mahmud al-Yahya. When the village fell and the soldiers entered, they herded us to the beach. On the way, near the house of Badran on the street leading to the mosque, I saw the bodies of seven young people from the village. A woman, 'lzzat Ibrahim al-Hindi, started to scream, but a burst of gunfire silenced her for good. This woman was the mother of the martyr Abd al-Wahhab Hassan Abd al-Al, who had been killed during an attack with explosives by the Jews of Haifa at the end of 1947 (*).

When they loaded us onto trucks, we saw bodies piled along the road like stacked wood. A woman recognized her nephew among the dead--it was Muhammad Awad Abu Idriss. She started to scream. She didn't know yet that her three sons had met the same fate. Her sons, Ahmad Sulayman, Khalil, and Mustafa, had been killed, but we only learned this later, in exile. But the mother always refused to believe it, and insisted that they had escaped to Egypt and would come back to find her one day. She spent the rest of her life waiting for them.

Since the Israeli courts are biased, it would not be a good idea to close the case on the basis of their rulings. We can agree on this, I hope. The High Court alone is so ethnocentric that its rulings are totally unpredictable.

Click on Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and learn the truth about the I/P conflict.

by shergald on Fri May 09, 2008 at 02:37:00 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Dhonig? Are you still with us? (none / 0)

Tarturo?

Try defending Deir Yassin:

Sixty years ago, a 12-year-old boy witnessed the slaughter of his family. His name was Fahim Zaydan, and he lived in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in Mandate Palestine, which was attacked on April 9, 1948, by Irgun and Stern Gang troops, paramilitary forces allied with the right-wing of the Zionist movement. These troops swooped into the village and started machine gunning civilians. Those that survived this initial attack were then forced by the troops to gather outside.

"They took us out one after the other," Zaydan recalled. "Shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him -- carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her -- they shot her too."

Irgun commander Ben Zion-Cohen offered a more succinct account of what happened: "We eliminated every Arab that came our way." This statement glosses over the fact that some of the Arab women were raped by Irgun and Stern Gang troops before they were killed. At least 93 civilians in the village were murdered that day, not just women and children but also babies.

The massacre at Deir Yassin is one of the most famous atrocities of 1948, but it was not the only one nor the largest. In fact, if one were cynical one could argue that Deir Yassin gets publicized only because its perpetrators were Irgun and Stern Gang troops, easy scapegoats who can be blamed for the violence in order to make the mainstream Labor Zionism of David Ben-Gurion look more respectable.

Deir Yassin was in fact a microcosm of what happened in Palestine as a whole in 1948: Zionist troops, including those under Ben-Gurion's command, used terror tactics to force the indigenous population to flee. Israel was founded through an act of ethnic cleansing, of a type all too familiar in recent history.

dhonig? What do you think of this fraudulent propaganda?

Click on Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and learn the truth about the I/P conflict.

by shergald on Fri May 09, 2008 at 07:48:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Argue Tanturo. (none / 0)

But can you argue these atrocities out of existence?

Just some more of the terrorist acts carried aout by loony Zionist homicidal maniacs....

1. King David Hotel, July 22, 1946.

Sharafat, Feb. 7, 1951.

Deir Yassin, April 10, 1948.

Falameh, April 2, 1951.

Naseruddine, April 14, 1948.

Quibya, Oct. 14, 1953.

Carmel, April 20, 1948.

Nahalin, March, 28, 1954.

Al-Qabu, May 1, 1948.

Gaza, Feb. 28, 1955.

Beit Kiras, May 3, 1948.

Khan Yunis, May 31, 1955.

Beitkhoury, May 5, 1948.

Khan Yunis Again, Aug. 31, 1955

Az-Zaytoun, May 6, 1948.

Tiberia, Dec. 11, 1955.

Wadi Araba, May 13, 1950.

As-Sabha, Nov. 2, 1955.

Gaza Again, April 5, 1956.

Houssan, Sept. 25, 1956.

Rafa, Aug. 16, 1956.

Qalqilyah, Oct. 10, 1956.

Ar-Rahwa, Sept. 12, 1956.

Kahr Kassem, Oct. 29, 1956.

Gharandal, Sept. 13, 1956.

Gaza Strip, Nov. 1956.

Gaza Strip, Nov. 1956.

And the Holocaust deserves this? 5,000 Palestinians were killed after 1948 when they attempted to return to their villages ddin what was now Israel. They were just wiped out, murdered (Jeff Halper, in The Problem With Israel).

Click on Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land and learn the truth about the I/P conflict.

by shergald on Fri May 09, 2008 at 08:02:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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