Nakba continues in Palestine even after 75 years—through ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements, administrative detentions, murder of journalists and everyday Palestinians—by Israeli occupation forces. Photo: Al Mayadeen
By Fra Hughes – Jun 1, 2022
What do these four separate events have in common?
The Nakba, as many people are already aware, refers to the mass expulsion of ethnic Palestinians from their homes towns and villages in 1948.
Over 750,000 old men, young women, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, fled for their lives, under the threat of annihilation and ethnic genocide from the forces of the newly created “Israel.”
“Israel” was born into the bloodied hands of Zionist terrorism, the Irgun, Stern gangs, and Haganah.
Terrorist groups murdered, maimed, mutilated, and raped Palestinians as part of their campaign to create the colonial regime of “Israel” in the land depleted of its indigenous population.
Europeans who were not born in Palestine carried out a wave of ethnic cleansing and a campaign of murder to replace the indigenous population with a non-indigenous invasion of European Jewish and Zionist colonial carpet baggers, who stole farms, occupied homes and robbed the national wealth and resources of Palestine for their own selfish gain.
They not only stole the land, but they stole the lives, the future, the dreams and the aspirations of a nation and its people, forcing 8 million Palestinians to live in exile, many still surviving in refugee camps, and two open-air defacto prison camps, incarcerating the remaining Palestinians living under illegal military occupation.
The Nakba is the name given to the Catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948.
That ongoing catastrophe continues today as illegal Israeli settlements are built on land stolen by the apartheid regime in the occupied territories.
The theft of homes in Al-Khalil and Sheik Jarrah, combined with the recent Israeli Court decision to expel 1,000 Palestinians from their homes in order to plant trees on top of their land, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ethnic cleansing house by house, dunum by dunum, continue apace and is indeed Israeli state policy
The remodeling of Palestine into “Israel” continues.
Add to this the cultural appropriation of Palestinian culture and food, and we have nearly the complete expropriation of most things that are Palestinian into a hybrid “Israel” society.
Even the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem) is under constant assault by Israeli occupation forces and illegal settlers, who wish to take and ultimately destroy the mosque, the third most holy site in Islam, in order to build the fabled Temple Mount on the site, of which “Israel” archaeologists have found no historical evidence.
All this violence, death, destruction, and regional conflict were delivered by the US, Britain, and the UN.
They gave away 52% of Palestine on the 14th of May, 1948.
They gave it to the armed militant Zionist gangs who were designated as terrorists at that time.
“Israel” was built on terrorism and continues to exist through its use of terrorism, illegal occupation, siege, bombings, warships, F16 aircraft, attack helicopters, nuclear submarines, extrajudicial murders, spies, and collaborators.
Palestinians have paid the ultimate price for European anti-semitism from 19th-century Czarist Russia to Hitler’s 20th-century Germany.
Palestinians are paying the price for crimes they did not commit.
The riots in Al-Quds in 1926 prove Zionist intentions to colonize Palestine long before the Second World War.
The primary resistance to this military occupation of Palestinian homes, towns, lands, and villages by Zionists was the use of armed resistance.
Although Palestine had no army, navy, or airforce, with most of the civilian population having been disarmed by the British occupation prior to partition, the people tried valiantly to defend themselves.
As part of the occupation’s oppressive control of Palestinians today, the use of administrative detention, also known as internment without trial, used by the British during the British Mandate laws, has no legal basis in international law.
It is used to disrupt peaceful opposition to the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation as a blunt tool of repression.
No charges are brought against the plaintiff.
Secret evidence may be produced for the non-jury, trial judge to peruse.
This secret evidence, if it even exists, is not made available to the defense, and universally the victim of this miscarriage of justice is carted off to jail for periods of 6 months at a time.
This can be extended at the whim of the court upon expiry.
Some Palestinians have served concurrent periods of administrative detention leading to between 10 and 15 years of incarceration.
No formal charges are presented, no trial by jury, no evidence provided in open court to be challenged by the defense, just a nod and a wink between the state enforcement branch of government and the state judiciary branch of government, and you’re locked up.
A whole society and government based on the continued exploitation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in order to allow Zionists to steal their homes and their land.
This is all carried out under the protection of the IOF.
Palestinians are subject to military law and military courts while illegal Israeli settlers are subject to civil law and civil courts.
Administrative detention, controlled movement, extrajudicial murder, house demolitions, live bullets, rubber bullets, batons, tear gas, bombs, and missiles are the order of the day in the arsenal of the repressive apartheid regime to be used as necessary against the Palestinian people.
While the UN passed resolution 194 allowing Palestinians who fled the ethnic cleansing of 1948 to return to Palestine, “Israel” consistently refuses to comply.
Any Jew not born in Palestine can immigrate there from Russia, America, France, Ukraine, Britain, or indeed from any part of the globe and be given land or homes that have been stolen from the indigenous people.
Palestinians have the right under international law to resist the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by “Any Means Necessary,” this includes the right to armed self-defense.
Jenin is one of the many refugee camps that are to be found in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and indeed all over West Asia.
Many of its inhabitants are refugees from the expulsions of 1948 and again in 1967 when the Israeli militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza.
A refugee camp filled with the nightmares of occupation and the dreams of returning to their homes and land.
A place where the spirit of freedom shines bright amidst the darkness of oppression.
The only response to the overwhelming and complete control of their society, and as a reaction to the continued Israeli military brutality and provocations, was to use their very bodies in an act of desperation to remind the world and Israeli society that they refuse to be treated like this, they chose to resist.
Recently we have witnessed Israeli provocations at Al Aqsa.
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The beatings and arrests inside the mosque combined with the firing of tear gas at peaceful worshippers, the brutality shown towards the old men, young women, and girls near Damascus Gate and the apparent shoot to kill policy being used by the IOF against unarmed civilians, has enraged Palestinian civil society and roused the resistance into action.
Many children, young men, and even mothers have been murdered by the IOF.
A death sentence is a price for resisting the illegal occupation with a stone.
Jenin is not alone in continuing to resist the occupation, every Palestinian—except those who profit from the occupation or collaborate with it—demands peace, justice and dignity for Palestine.
Shireen Abu Akleh died as she lived, exposing Israeli violations of international law, its war crimes, its brutality and its viciousness.
The hierarchy of victimhood, which is so well defined in the West, can also be found in Israeli coverage of the occupation.
Palestinians are “terrorists.”
Israelis are “peace-loving people who just want to live in safety.”
The reality is most likely the reverse of this narrative.
Why was Shireen assassinated?
Well, its quite simple really, from the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba which is commemorated every May 15, the day after “Israel” was created and the ethnic cleansing began in earnest, through administrative detention, used to repress legitimate dissent and opposition to the occupation, to the abandonment of Palestinians to the refugee camps in order to control them, it is the broadcasters, journalists, photographers and eyewitnesses that the occupation also wants to control.
They want to control not only what Palestinians are allowed to do in their own country in their homes on their land and even in their mosques but they want to control what you and I outside of Palestine are allowed to see and hear.
Targeted assassination of journalists is as much a tool in the arsenal of the apartheid regime as ethnic cleansing house demolitions, administrative detention, controlled movement, and murder.
Shireen was executed because she exposed the truth to the world of the brutality of “Israel”s continuing illegal occupation.
She reported on house demolitions, peaceful protests, military house raids, and on the excesses of the Israeli Courts.
She was a thorn in their side.
According to the Palestinian Union of Journalists, 55 journalists have been murdered, executed by the IOF in Palestine from 2000 and many many more injured.
The press is regularly attacked, cameras are broken and journalists are assaulted.
There is no freedom in Palestine from the brutality of the repressive military occupation for any indigenous person.
Indeed international solidarity activists are also under threat, while walking children to school like the ecumenical accompaniers in Al-Khalil, to Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndell, both International Solidarity members murdered by the Israeli regime.
There is a straight line that goes from 1901 through to 2022 that joins land, acquisition, ethnic cleansing, race riots, the partition of Palestine, the 1948 and 1967 Israeli wars of aggression, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh.
It’s called Zionism.
It is a cancer that has invaded the body politics and society of West Asia, and if not treated, it will destroy the host.
Fra Hughes
Fra Hughes is an Irish political activist, commentator, and author. His most recent books are My Walk with Palestine: an Activist's Tale and Voices from Donbass.
