{"id":112089,"date":"2018-05-28T12:01:34","date_gmt":"2018-05-28T11:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=112089"},"modified":"2018-05-27T11:52:35","modified_gmt":"2018-05-27T10:52:35","slug":"how-long-are-we-going-to-pretend-palestinians-arent-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/05\/how-long-are-we-going-to-pretend-palestinians-arent-people\/","title":{"rendered":"How Long Are We Going to Pretend Palestinians Aren’t People?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember how they were to blame for their own exodus seven decades ago, because they followed the instructions of radio stations to leave their homes until the Jews of Israel were \u2018driven into the sea\u2019. Only, of course, the radio broadcasts never existed.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Israeli soldiers search Palestinians. (photo: Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n

26 May 2018 – <\/em>Monstrous. Frightful. Wicked. It\u2019s strange how the words just run out in the Middle East today. Sixty Palestinians dead<\/a>. In one day. Two-thousand-four-hundred wounded, more than half by live fire. In one day. The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create.<\/p>\n

And we are supposed to believe that the Israeli army is one of \u201cpurity of arms\u201d? And we have to ask another question. If it\u2019s 60 Palestinians dead in a day this week, what if it\u2019s 600 next week? Or 6,000 next month? Israel\u2019s bleak excuses \u2013 and America\u2019s crude response \u2013 raise\u00a0this very question. If we can now accept a massacre on this scale, how far can our immune system go in the days and weeks and months to come?<\/p>\n

Yes, we know all the excuses. Hamas \u2013 corrupt, cynical, no \u201cpurity\u201d there \u2013 was behind the Gaza demonstrations. Some of the protesters were violent, sent burning kites \u2013 kites, for heaven\u2019s sake \u2013 across the border, others threw stones; though since when has stone-throwing been a capital offence in any civilised country? If an eight-month-old baby dies after tear gas inhalation, what were her parents doing bringing their infant child to the Gaza border? And so it goes on. Why complain about dead Palestinians when we have the Sisis in Egypt and the Assads in Syria and the Saudis in Yemen to contend with? But no, the Palestinians must always be guilty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The victims are themselves the culprits. This is exactly what the Palestinians have had to endure for 70 years. Remember how they were to blame for their own exodus seven decades ago, because they followed the instructions of radio stations to leave their homes until the Jews of Israel were \u201cdriven into the sea\u201d. Only, of course, the radio broadcasts never existed. We still must thank Israel\u2019s \u201cnew historians\u201d for proving this. The broadcasts were a myth, part of Israel\u2019s foundational national history invented to ensure that the new state \u2013 far from being founded on the ruins of other\u2019s\u00a0homes \u2013 was a land without people.<\/p>\n

And it was a marvel to behold the way in which the same old reporting cowardice began to infect the media\u2019s account of what happened in Gaza. CNN called the Israeli killings a \u201ccrackdown\u201d.<\/p>\n

References to the tragedy of the Palestinians in many news media referred to their \u201cdisplacement\u201d 70 years ago,\u00a0as if they happened to be on holiday at the time of the \u201cNakba\u201d,\u00a0the catastrophe, as it\u2019s known,\u00a0and just couldn\u2019t make it home again. The word to use should have been perfectly clear: dispossession. Because that is what happened to the Palestinians all those years ago and what is still happening in the West Bank \u2013 today, as you read this \u2013 courtesy of men like Jared Kushner, Donald Trump\u2019s son-in-law, a supporter of these wretched and illegal colonies built on Arab lands and appropriated from Arabs who have owned and lived on the land for generations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Gaza, Palestine | Photo: Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

And so we come to the most ghastly of all fateful events last week: the simultaneous bloodbath in Gaza and the glorious opening of the new US embassy in Jerusalem<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great day for peace,\u201d Israel\u2019s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced. When I heard that, I wondered if my hearing was defective. Did he actually say those words? Alas, he did. At times like this, it is an immense relief to find that journals like the Israeli daily Haaretz <\/em>maintain their sense of honour. And the most remarkable piece of reportage came in The New York Times<\/em> where Michelle Goldberg caught perfectly the horror of both Gaza and the embassy opening in Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

The latter, she wrote, was \u201cgrotesque\u2026 a consummation of the cynical alliance between hawkish Jews and Zionist evangelicals who believe that the return of Jews to Israel will usher in the apocalypse and the return of Christ, after which Jews who don\u2019t convert will burn forever.\u201d Goldberg pointed out that Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor, gave the opening prayer at the embassy ceremony.<\/p>\n

Jeffress, who once claimed that religions like \u201cMormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism\u201d lead people \u201cto an eternity of separation from God in hell\u201d. The closing benediction came from John Hagee, an end-times preacher who, Goldberg recalled, once said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral homeland.<\/p>\n

Of Gaza, she added: \u201cEven if you completely dismiss the Palestinian right of return \u2013 which I find harder to do now that Israel has all but abandoned the possibility of a Palestinian state \u2013 it hardly excuses the Israeli military\u2019s disproportionate violence.\u201d I\u2019m not so sure, though, that Democrats have become more emboldened to discuss Israeli occupation\u00a0as she thinks. But I think she\u2019s right when she says that as long as Trump is president\u00a0\u201cit may be that Israel can kill Palestinians, demolish their homes and appropriate their land with impunity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rarely in modern times have we come across an entire people \u2013 the Palestinians \u2013 treated as a non-people. Amid the trash and rats of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon \u2013 oh fateful names they remain \u2013 there is a hut museum of items brought into Lebanon from Galilee by those first refugees of the late 1940s: coffee pots and front door keys to houses long destroyed. They locked up their houses, many of them, planning to return in a few days.<\/p>\n

But they are dying fast, that generation, like the dead of the Second World War. Even in the oral archives of the Palestinian expulsion (at least 800 survivors are recorded), organised in the American University of Beirut, they are finding that many whose voices were recorded in the late 1990s have since died.<\/p>\n

So will they go home? Will they \u201creturn\u201d? That, I suspect, is Israel\u2019s greatest fear, not because there are homes to \u201creturn\u201d to\u00a0but because there are millions of Palestinians who claim their right \u2013 under UN resolutions \u2013 and who might turn up in their tens of thousands at the border fence in Gaza next time.<\/p>\n

How many snipers will Israel need then? And, of course, there are the pitiful ironies. For there are families in Gaza whose grandfathers and grandmothers were driven from their homes less than a mile from Gaza itself, from two villages which existed precisely where today stands\u00a0the Israeli town of Sderot, so often rocketed by Hamas. They can still see their lands. And when you can see your land, you want to go home.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Robert Fisk is the multi-award winning Middle East correspondent of <\/em>The Independent, based in Beirut. He has lived in the Arab world for more than 40 years, covering Lebanon, five Israeli invasions, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein\u2019s invasion of Kuwait, the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the 2011 Arab revolutions. Occasionally describing himself as an \u2018Ottoman correspondent\u2019 because of the huge area he covers, Fisk joined <\/em>The Independent in 1989. He has written best-selling books on the Middle East, including <\/em>Pity the Nation and<\/em> The Great War for Civilisation. He was born in Kent in 1946 and gained his BA in English and Classics at Lancaster University. He holds a Ph.D. in politics from Trinity College, Dublin. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 readersupportednews.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 May 2018 – Monstrous. Frightful. Wicked. It\u2019s strange how the words just run out in the Middle East today. Sixty Palestinians dead. In one day. Two-thousand-four-hundred wounded, more than half by live fire. In one day. The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":112091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spotlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}