ANOTHER NAKBAH IN THE MAKING , ON THE COMMEMORATION NAKBAH 1948

In 1948 , of the 15th May , 73 years ago,  the infamous episode of a human injustice was staged by the birth of an illegal state of Israel. The ferocity of the human illtreatment of Palestinians natives through the process of a  glaringly attrotious event which took place was called Nakbah (  catastrophe ).   

The 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their native land while also leaving more than 15,000 slaughtered by the israeli army backed the British , have prolonged to a protracted crisis in modern history of the 20th Century.

And yet with the myriad of world organizations supposedly established to manage the world’s prosperity and security,  had turn out to be nothing more than institutions misused by the powerful to suppress the weak.

The most classical example is Palestine. All the international organi,ations have misearably failed to resolve the injustice inflicted on the Pakestinians.

No country was born from a criminal act of a daylight robbery to brazenly take over by force, under the watch of international agencies where  native lands of natives inhabitants was illegally surrended to an alien population brought from abroad and then announced the birth of the illegal state israel. 

No consultation. No legal rights. The Palestinian land were for the Jews immigrants to take by force. The sheer uncivilised and brutal imposition of rules by the Jews backed by the British , with a zionist ideology , rampaged into Palestine  and like hungry dogs took over lands ,homes and properties of whatever they want. A free for all venture to allow any Jews to take any property they prefer by force. Any resistance , was dealth with by terminating with impunity.

In actual fact Nakba did not start or end in 1948. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a prolonged scheme.

May 15, is black memory for Palestinians around the world. Some 12.4 million, mark the Nakba, or “catastrophe”. It is no doubt  an ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of the Palestinian society began in 1948.

What ensued was dispossession and loss of a homeland from the Palestinian to the Jews. Illegal israel was born on that day.

Israel came into being , illegally . The State of Israel came into being. by forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state.

This was a planned aspirations of the Zionist movement. Between 1947 and 1949, Palestinians became  refugees . By then , Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

In commemorating the Nakba, now more than 6 million Palestinians are refugees and denied of the right to return.

Israel continues to oppress and dispossess Palestinians to this day.

Nakbah has its roots. The emergence of Zionism as a political ideology in late 19th-century Eastern Europe gave seed to the process. The ideology is based on the belief that Jews are a nation or a race that deserve their own state.

The idea of a Jewish homeland ( Jewish state ) was crafted in 1896, by a Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl. He mooted this as a solution to a centuries-old anti-Semitic sentiments and attacks in Europe.

Palestine was chosen based on the biblical concept that the Holy Land was promised to the Jews by God.

After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1517-1914), the British occupied Palestine as part of the secret Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 between Britain and France to divide up the Middle East for imperial interests.

It was in 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to help the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.  essentially vowing to give away a country that was not theirs to give.

Chaim Weizmann, a Britain-based Russian Zionist lobbied hard for more than two years Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and fForeign Minister Arthur Balfour to publicly commit Britain to building a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

From 1919 onwards, Zionist immigration to Palestine, facilitated by the British, increased dramatically. Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president, was realising his dream of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”.

Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought land from absentee landlords.

With the Nazi seizure of power in Germany between 1933 and 1936, 30,000 to 60,000 European Jews arrived on the shores of Palestine.

In 1936, Palestinian Arabs revolted untill  1939. The British crushed the revolt violently; they destroyed at least 2,000 Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps and subjected them to violent interrogation, including torture, and deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders.

At least ten percent of the Palestinian male population had been killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned by the end of the revolt.

The current situation has actually worsened. The aggression by israel which employed an apartheid system continued till today.

Thousands were killed in various military  operations in the occupied West Bank. Gaza was sieged from 2006 when the zionist regime enforced land, sea and air blockade. With the collusion with Egypt , israel has turned Gaza into the biggest open prison on the planet !

The recent assault is seen to be an escalation of israel to annihilate Palestinian by annexation , destruction and population transfer. 

What is still happening in the Syekh Jarrah neighborhood is evidence of how forced eviction of Palestinians by the israel settlers backed by the israel forces.

Nakbah is still continued. It is only in a different scale and context. 

We say another Nakbah is in the making only because the context is different compared to Nakbah 73 years ago.

The resistance is much fiecer now and the capability of the muqawwamah movement is more wide spread with the intensity of communication capability amongst the Palestinians are more sophisticated to create a mass uprising more spontaneous.

Our call is the Nakbah of 2021 will be resisted. And it will be resisted globally. The zionist can use their sophiscated weaponary but this time the resistance will be prepared to face the israeli onslaught with equal if not stronger counter assault.

Mohd Azmi Abdul Hamid
President Malaysian Consultative Council of Islamic Organizations.( MAPIM )