Today is Nakba Day, the day on which Palestinians commemorate the process - which began properly in March 1948, and continued until the second ceasefire in 1949 - by which approximately 750,000 of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were compelled to leave their homeland, as Israel was brought to birth. They were compelled by armed intimidation, by rumour, by attacks on their homes and economic infrastructure, and by massacre - all carried out by various Zionist militias, chief among them the Haganah and the Irgun Zvai Leumi. There is a strong case to make that the expulsions continue to this day - having passed through punitive raids into Gaza and Jordan in the 1950s and 1960s, the conquest of the Strip and of the West Bank in 1967, war in Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and brief brutal wars in the Territories in 2002, 2009 and 2014.
The sheer ghastly inequality of the struggle is illustrated by the grotesque paradox of Monday's events in Jerusalem and on the border with Gaza - on the one hand, a sleek and cynical ceremony to mark the United States's transfer of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; on the other, the shooting down of waves of unarmed protestors, leaving 58 people dead and 2000 injured. In the first instance, the smug co-ordinated hypocrisy of bloated plutocrats in Jerusalem, Israeli and American; in the second, the desperation of thousands of people who live in a semi-polity without sovereignty, mostly under the poverty line, dependent on UNWRA food aid, under Israeli siege and blockade since 2007, and without significant defences.
Some critical reading, in these dark days:
From Verso -
The sheer ghastly inequality of the struggle is illustrated by the grotesque paradox of Monday's events in Jerusalem and on the border with Gaza - on the one hand, a sleek and cynical ceremony to mark the United States's transfer of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; on the other, the shooting down of waves of unarmed protestors, leaving 58 people dead and 2000 injured. In the first instance, the smug co-ordinated hypocrisy of bloated plutocrats in Jerusalem, Israeli and American; in the second, the desperation of thousands of people who live in a semi-polity without sovereignty, mostly under the poverty line, dependent on UNWRA food aid, under Israeli siege and blockade since 2007, and without significant defences.
Some critical reading, in these dark days:
From Verso -
