“Record, record. Don’t get the information wrong. I’ll speak slower, but focus and write. What happened yesterday was a neo-Nakba.” –A Palestinian elder calls on the world to witness the ethnic cleansing of Ein Samiya in May 2023 by racist Jewish settlers.
As the son of a general who participated in the Nakba in 1948 and the Naksa in 1967, Miko Peled thought he knew Israeli history. But when he finally met Palestinians and heard their stories of Zionist atrocities he was shocked to learn the truth.
Suarez provides an epic presentation of new and existing research, depicting a narrative of relentless Zionist aggression and arguing that the Nakba of 1948 was over before it started.
It is overwhelming to take in the spectacular violence, the extravagant lies and tricks, the exuberant intimidation, the gratuitous cruelty, and the absolute dedication of the Zionists over decades. But we should be overwhelmed if we are to get a sense of the bewilderment of the Palestinians, the British, the many non-Zionist Jews, and eventually much of the world, at the fevered advance and blood-drenched birth of Israel. The book pulls us along through wave after wave of deceptions, bombings, shootings, clever escapes, daring infiltrations, denials, accusations, obfuscations, demands, mad propaganda, and intimidation that break over the land. We see the Palestinians provoked into the doomed, desperate 1936-1939 revolt against the British and their Zionist clients. Next, the British are beaten down and terrorized until they give up. All this before the Nakba erupted.
Palestinians in Jaffa face a similar fate to their brethren in Sheikh Jarrah as the Israeli government is attempting to displace them in what residents allege is ethnic cleansing through real estate.
The context behind Israeli government minister Matan Kahana’s shocking statement that he would like to send all Palestinians “to Switzerland” deserves close scrutiny, because it proves it was not a mere slip of the tongue and actually reflects an Israeli consensus.
The Palestinian towns of Iqrit and Birim in the Galilee were destroyed by the Israeli army in the 1950s so as to prevent Palestinian villagers from returning under a court order. The case haunts Israeli government to this day, as Rinawie Zoabi, a Palestinian lawmaker in Meretz, demands the return of the residents as a condition of her staying in the coalition. But Foreign Minister Yair Lapid is having none of it.
What is happening in Masafer Yatta is not only the largest ethnic cleansing scheme to be carried out by Israel since 1967, but the move should be considered a first step in a much larger scheme of illegal land appropriation, ethnic cleansing and official mass annexation.
Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination and the barbaric assault on her funeral are but incidents in Israel’s unceasing 74+ year ethnic cleansing campaign of Palestine.
Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom does the right thing for J Street at Passover by admitting that the Tantura massacre of Palestinians took place in the early days of Israel’s existence. But he cannot acknowledge that Israel was then and is now an apartheid state that continues to push Palestinians out of their homes. The rabbi’s view that “Israel’s challenge is to reclaim the ‘child we prayed for'” is simply a delusion, especially in light of rightwing governments that are all committed to maintaining military occupation.
The Nation runs a righwing religious endorsement of Zionism in an apparent sop to its New York base. The article opposes BDS, citing Jewish fears stemming from Nazis and “centuries of forced exile from a historic homeland.” And leaves out the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their land. And anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that Jewish connection is “goysplaining” to Jews, Alexis Grenell writes.