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PALESTINE: REVERSING ETHNIC CLEANSING Salman Abu Sitta

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PALESTINE: REVERSING ETHNIC CLEANSING Salman Abu Sitta PALESTINE: REVERSING ETHNIC CLEANSING Salman Abu Sitta AUB Thursday 14 Jan 2010 Today you are witnessing one more day in the longest war in history waged against a people, the Palestinians. It is now 92 years since the last western colonial project, initiated by Balfour and Weizmann, was planted in Palestine. It only succeeded in sowing death and destruction since then. Never in its 5000 years history has Palestine witnessed such massive uprooting of its people, ethnically cleansing of 675 towns and villages, such massive dispossession and confiscation of property, 93% of Israel’s area is Palestinian property, so are the contents of its towns and village, public buildings, roads, railways, ports and of course, its water resources. Never before has Palestine witnessed such massive destruction of its landscape, its cultural and religious monuments and its landmarks. Never before has Palestine witnessed such erasure of its history, identity, its Arabic and Palestinian names and its heritage. Never before has Palestinee been th subject of so many UN resolutions condemning these crimes and deeds and calling for removing this colossal injustice, with absolutely nothing done about it. The victims of this injustice are 11 million Palestinians of whom 7 million are refugees and displaced people, including 4.7 million registered refugees. They are languishing in exile while Jewish European immigrants are enjoying the fruits of their conquest, looting and plunder. But this unprecedented catastrophic event has a peculiar characteristic: It is like a constantly‐running play. The players change, but the same story goes on and on. If you missed all events since WWI, you must have seen the carnage in Gaza last January. This is the latest replica of past events. Let us look back for a minute at the beginnings. The opening scene finds Herzl in 1903 approaching his lawyer to draft for him the charter for the first Jewish colonial project by the name of the “Jewish Colonization Trust” in East Africa. The lawyer was none other than David Lloyd George. The British found the project too ambitious and probably threatening to imperial interests, so they turned it down. In 1904 a professor of chemistry, Haim Weizmann, befriended his MP AUB lecture 14 Jan 2010 date print 11/01/2010 1/12 by the name of James Arthur Balfour and introduced him to Zionism. In 1917, that same Lloyd George became Britain’s Prime Minister and Balfour became its Foreign Secretary. Together with Weizmann, they redrafted the old colonial document. It became known as Balfour Declaration. It was the last, and the only surviving, colonial project today. Scene 2: Finds the Allied planes dropping leaflets on Bilad ash Sham in the summer of 1916 promising the Arabs full independence as soon as they both defeat the Turks. At the very same time, a man who lived a long time here in Beirut and a young rich English aristocrat huddled in a room, with drawn curtains, and with a map of the Middle East before them. Thus George Picot got the piece of cake called north Syria, i.e. present Syria, and Lebanon and Mark Sykes got Palestine and Iraq. Since then, we are painted as Palestinians, and you as Lebanese and a little to the east, Syrians. Any villager in any one of these regions at that time would be baffled by this new designation. This treachery and betrayal by those diplomats, wearing top hats and exchanging polite conversation over dinner table, had to be dressed up in a civilized legal garb. They found the way. In the wake of WWI, The League of Nations bestowed upon Palestine its “Sacred Trust of Civilization” by which Palestine was put under Mandate class A; that is, it is fit for independence as soon as the Mandatory power, Britain, would finish its task of helping Palestine to build its institutions. This task is not finished till today and Palestine remains under the guardianship of the United Nations and its responsibility. Why was not the task finished after 92 years? It is because those powers who promised applying the “Sacred Trust of Civilization” are the same who betrayed it. The guardian became the villain. As a result, the Palestinian people suffered the loss of their patrimony and independence. The Mandatory Power, Britain, represented by Herbert Samuel, the Zionist first High Commissioner in Palestine, established in his first term, 1920‐1925, the legal foundation of the components of the State of Israel. Moreover, in the following 28 years, the British Mandate allowed Jewish European immigrants into Palestine, thereby increasing Jewish population from 9% to 30% of total population. More ominously, Zionist Jews built an army of 120,000 soldiers by the end of the Mandate, or 20% of all Jews, which is 15 times the ratio in any country. This number of soldiers is comparable to the American forces in vastly bigger Afghanistan. In 1948, they bounced on Palestine and carried out the largest, longest, pre‐planned and continuous ethnic cleansing operation in modern history. That was al Nakba. Slide (2‐23): Al Nakba Anatomy (30 sec). The blue areas are lands acquired by the Jewish immigrants during the Mandate to the tune of 5% of Palestine. The red areas are conquered Palestinian land. AUB lecture 14 Jan 2010 date print 11/01/2010 2/12 The flashing points are massacres. On 15 May 1948, when he declared his state, Ben Gurion was in control only of 13% of Palestine. Zionist militias committed one half of the massacres in this period, while the British were looking. The Israeli conquest went on. Seven thousand square kilometers in the south were occupied by Israel after it signed the Armistice Agreement with Egypt. Within six months Israel occupied 78% of Palestine. This shows the occupied land. What about the people? Slide 24 (Fig 3.1 animated) – 4 layers. The first thing Ben Gurion did was to expel the Palestinian citizens of the state he planned to establish. This is called ethnic cleansing. Half of all refugees were expelled before the state was established, while the British were watching, not rising to their obligations. That is before any Arab soldier entered Palestine to prevent expulsion and massacres. This explodes the myth that Israel was in self‐defence. The expulsion went on. 675 towns and villages were depopulated. Every expulsion was correlated with an Israeli military operation of conquest. When there was truce, no body left, as you can see from the yellow line. If they left on Arab orders, the truce or the lull in fighting would have been a good time to pack and leave but they did not, as you can see in the flat green curve. This explodes the myth that exodus was not initiated by the Israelis. A damning proof is the occurrence of over 70 massacres. Every Israeli operation was accompanied by one or more massacres. As you can see these massacres coincided with the exodus and the military operation. In the end, 900,000 refugees lost their homes. Al Nakba can be seen in its graphic form. (slide 25 – 4 layers). Every depopulated village was surrounded from three sides, leaving the fourth for expulsion. (slide 26). Today, 11 million Palestinians are waiting for their patrimony and freedom. They are scattered around the world, but mercifully 88% of them are in and around Palestine. (slide 27). About half of them are in the three regions of Palestine. A distinguished man of peace who saw this tragedy and understood its dimensions was Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Mediator in Palestine. Jewish terrorists assassinated him on the day of his final report. They were too late. His report and his legacy became the corner stone of the famous UN resolution 194. This resolution, affirmed by the international community over 130 times, more than any resolution in UN history, has three main components: 1. It calls for the return of the refugees and their compensation. 2. It calls for their relief and assistance until they are repatriated. AUB lecture 14 Jan 2010 date print 11/01/2010 3/12 3. It creates the mechanism for the resolution’s implementation, the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, UNCCP. Resolution 194 was the central pillar of international law. It was, over the years, the fundamental demand of the refugees. I would like to read for you a paragraph, from a letter I found in Philadelphia archives, sent by a field officer in Gaza of the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers), one of the first relief organizations to come to the assistance of the Palestinian refugees. His letter to his Philadelphia head‐office was dated October 12, 1949; a mere 12 months after al Nakba: They [the refugees] feel strongly that the United Nations are responsible for their plight and therefore have the total responsibility to feed, house, clothe and repatriate them...... Above all else, they desire to go home – back to their lands and villages which in many cases are very close... Without it, they would have nothing for which to live.... It is as genuine and deep as a man’s longing for his home can be. Today 62 years later this very same message is still echoed by the sons and grandsons of the refugees. What happened to the Palestinian patrimony, to the empty landscape, to the depopulated towns and villages? Josef Weitz, the chief official of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) behind land grabbing and people’s expulsion, visited the depopulated Galilee in the autumn of 1948, immediately after expulsion, and wrote those poetic words: And as the road continues over mountains, the Galilee is revealed to me in its splendor, its hidden places and folds, its crimson smile and its green softness and its desolation.
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