"...a number of Yemini Jews took to wearing T-shirts which read: 'I'm a Yemini Jew', to avoid being mistaken for Arabs and attacked." (p. 221)
When a member of staff at the Hebrew University was asked whether he understood the significance of making Arab workers wear yellow tags for identification, he replied that the tags were orange.
"It is never right to conflate tragedies, but it is also wrong to use one tragedy to justify another, as Israeli propagandists have done." (p. 222)
"So worried is Israel by the memory of the Nakba that in March 2011 the Israeli Knesset passed the Nakba Law, depriving any state-funded body that commemorated the Nakba of its budget. In this way, Israel is attempting to erase the memory of the most traumatic event in Palestinian history." (p. 223)
So there are Holocaust deniers and Nakba deniers.
"...the Sephardi Chief Rabbi declared that non-Jews should not be allowed to live in the land of Israel." (p. 224)
About the same time as the Israeli War of Independence (1945-50), 11,000,000 Germans were ethnically cleansed from areas of Eastern Europe that they'd lived in from time out of mind, and in the process between 600,000 and 2,000,000 were butchered -- burned alive in churches, locked in box-cars and left to die of thirst, just shot, whatever.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950)
So, how would Poland or the Czech Republic or Russia feel about a nationalist movement in Germany which held days of mourning and commemoration of this and demanded a "right of return" for Polish and Sudeten and East Prussian Germans? And sent bombers to blow up cafes full of Czech and Polish and Russian women and children?
To ask this question is to answer it.
The War of Independence happened because the Arabs, including the Palestinians, rejected the UN Partition Resolution and attacked instead, with the stated intention of killing or expelling all the Jews if they won.
Having done this, they forfeit all claim to complain about the subsequent consequences; and they forfeit all claim to solutions which depend on the Jews relying on Palestinian goodwill. It is their 'original sin'.
If you reject negotiation and put things to the wager of battle, then the results are all on your own head. War is about power, not right: in fact, it's about who gets the power to define what's right.
At a conference a few years ago, a German remarked that he could visit in peace the village where his ancestors had lived for a thousand years...
... but he could only do this -because- he had renounced any 'right of return'.
If the Palestinians want peace, they have to accept defeat and the consequences of defeat.