I wrote the piece below in response to — and offering a different perspective from — opinion pieces that have appeared in South Florida’s Jewish newspaper. I am always anxious to engage with Florida’s Jewish communities about these issues and how we can most meaningfully participate in seeking and pursuing justice. The Jewish press has not published pieces with this or similar perspectives despite the fact that there are certainly lots of Jews in Florida (as elsewhere) who share these opinions. I published this article on Medium (links at that site), on Dec. 11.
Accusations of antisemitism hurled at supporters of Palestinian human rights is an attempt to derail the message of justice for a people who have been denied their rights for far too long. There is nothing discriminatory, or antisemitic, in holding a nation-state accountable for its human rights abuses and for violations of international law. Some history and context are necessary.
Seventy-three years ago this week, on December 11, 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 made clear that Palestinians had the right to return to their homes and lands from which they had been expelled. Resolution 194 stated that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
While Israel has consistently thwarted the implementation of Resolution 194, Palestinians have continued to rightly demand their right to return home. The right of return is one of the three demands of the global call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), a call from Palestinian civil society to hold Israel accountable to basic principles of human rights and international law and to achieve freedom, equality, and justice.
The BDS call came after decades of the Palestinian people being denied self-determination and sovereignty. Before and during Israel’s creation in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land and homes, known as the Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic). The Nakba didn’t end but continues to this very day as massive land theft, violence, and institutionalized discrimination have intensified at the hands of the Israeli government, military, and settler organizations.
Initiated in 2005, the Palestinian call for BDS was inspired by the boycott movement against South African apartheid. Boycotts have a long history as a strategy for overcoming injustice. Think of the Montgomery bus boycott in the US as well as the grape boycott. Once the injustice has been overcome, the boycott ends.
The call for BDS includes three demands: ending the occupation and dismantling the wall; implementing full equality for Palestinians who live inside Israel; and promoting the right of return for Palestinian refugees.The third demand, promoting the right of return for Palestinian refugees, is at the heart of the call for justice and the demand that is, not coincidentally, most opposed by Israel’s defenders. To fully appreciate this demand requires a bit of Israeli history.
One cannot speak about Zionism and Israel’s creation without speaking about the Nakba. In fact, the Nakba, the catastrophe for Palestinians, is the direct consequence of Zionism. Zionism, which began in the late 1800’s, refers to the political movement to create a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, resulting in Israel’s creation in historic Palestine in May, 1948. While a commonly-held refrain within the Zionist movement was a land without people for a people without land, in fact, there were several hundred thriving, and culturally rich, Palestinian cities and villages prior to the Nakba, and Palestinians were the overwhelming majority of the land’s inhabitants.
Despite propaganda claiming that Palestinians left on their own accord or were instructed to do so by their leaders, the evidence points elsewhere. A Jewish-majority state was created in Palestine because the Zionist movement purposefully reduced the numbers of the Palestinians living there. Vibrant Palestinian villages were destroyed and replaced with Jewish ones. Businesses and villas were seized, and books, photographs, and personal belongings were confiscated and outright looted.
Evidence of this intention is in Plan Dalet, a plan launched by the Haganah, the Zionist para-military, in March 1948. According to Plan Dalet, which laid out a blueprint for the destruction and forcible depopulation of Palestinian population centers: “In the conquest of villages in your area, you will determine — whether to cleanse or destroy them.”
The question also arose of what to do with the refugees. Should they be allowed to return when the war was over, or not? Israel’s founders left little doubt about the answer. The Israeli government, on June 16, 1948, said about the refugees “they’re not returning.”
Palestinians have the right to return to the land from which they had been expelled and where they had been living as an indigenous people. Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations in May, 1949, only after it promised to fulfill Resolution 194. The right of inhabitants to return to the homes from which they have been expelled by an occupying power is one of the fixed principles of international law.
BDS is a call affirmatively for equal rights, freedom, and dignity; it’s about building an equitable society that is not rooted in a relationship of occupier and occupied. That is why BDS is garnering so much support across the globe, including among thousands upon thousands of Jews such as myself.
The demand for Palestinian self-determination and the right to return home, as stated in Resolution 194, are essential to justice being achieved.
“One cannot speak about Zionism and Israel’s creation without speaking about the Nakba.”
The Naksa, about as third as large as the Nakba, also needs to be remembered.
https://orientxxi.info/magazine/the-second-nakba-displacement-of-palestinians-in-and-after-the-1967-occupation,1875
June 1967, an Endless Six-Day War · Nineteen years after the Nakba (1947-1949), Israel carried out a second wave of expulsions of Palestinians from their homeland during and after the 1967 war. Without hope of return, they were forcibly displaced from the Latroun area, East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to Jordan….Although the hostilities of the [1967]war itself were quick and not that widespread, the displaced persons from the occupied Palestinian Territory were hundreds of thousands. In other words, the number of Palestinians displaced in that war was out of proportion…When the war took place in 1967, Zionist leaders saw this as an opportunity to make some demographic changes in the occupied territory as a whole and in certain areas in particular. During and immediately after the war, some quarter a million to 420,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes.
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“All the evidence is to the contrary; that the Arab authorities continuously exhorted the Palestinian Arabs not to leave the country…. Panic and bewilderment played decisive parts in the flight. But the extent to which the refugees were savagely driven out by the Israelis as part of a deliberate master-plan has been insufficiently recognized.” (John H. Davis, The Evasive Peace, London: Murray, 1968)
Walter Eytan, then Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, referred to the UNRWA registration of 726,000 [refugees] as ‘meticulous’ and believed that the ‘real number was close to 800,000.’ (Dr. Norman Finkelstein, “Debate on the 1948 Exodus” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. XXI, number 1, autumn, 1991, footnote #4, p. 86.)
(BTW, as a consequence of the war Israel launched on 5 June, 1967, a further 250,000 were dispossesed and driven out of their ancestral homeland as Zionist forces seized and has since illegally/brutally occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip (still occupied by Israel) in violation of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, i.e., “collective punishment”) as well as Syria’s Golan Heights and Lebanon’s Shebba Farms/Kfarshuba Hills.)
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For the record;
What took place in Palestine between late 1947 and early 1949 was described by eye-witness Nathan Chofshi, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, who arrived in Palestine in 1908 in the same group as Polish born David Ben-Gurion, (real name, David Gruen): ‘…we old Jewish settlers in Palestine who witnessed the flight know how and in what manner we, Jews, forced the Arabs to leave cities and villages…some of them were driven out by force of arms; others were made to leave by deceit, lying and false promises. It is enough to cite the cities of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramle, Beersheba, Acre from among numberless others.’ (Jewish Newsletter, New York, February 9, 1959)
Chofshi was deeply ashamed of what his fellow Jews did to the Palestinians: ‘We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and of trying to undo some of the evil we committed…we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.’ (ibid, p. 803)
In 2004, when asked by Ha’aretz journalist, Ari Shavit, what new information his just completed revised version of The Birth of the Palestinian Problem 1947-1949 would provide, Israeli historian Benny Morris replied: ‘It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.’ (Ha’aretz, January 9, 2004)
To quote John H. Davis, who served as Commission General of UNRWA at the time: ‘An exhaustive examination of the minutes, resolutions, and press releases of the Arab League, of the files of leading Arabic newspapers, of day-to-day monitoring of broadcasts from Arab capitals and secret Arab radio stations, failed to reveal a single reference, direct or indirect, to an order given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave…’ (cont’d)
Only the American Jews who have a sense of right and wrong, not been brainwashed into thinking that the occupier is the victim and ALL Palestinians are the aggressors/terrorists, and those whose realize the Palestinians have been treated inhumanely, are able to reject Israel’s ridiculous claim of victimhood, and see Israel for what it is – an apartheid nation, a criminal nation that keeps violating international laws, and who speaks of democracy, but it is only for them, not for their victims.
Yeah. No. They are not going to ever be able to live within the borders of Israel. Short of a full scale military conquest of Israel there is literally nothing that will force Israel to accept being overrun by millions of Arabs and ceasing to exist. And Israel has the means to deter that scenario. So, yeah, not going to happen. But y’all keep dreaming. Another year and another year of impractical demands have so far been super productive for the Palestinians. But hey, as long as it makes someone in Florida feels better, keep at it.