{"id":10643,"date":"2023-05-15T15:19:01","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T07:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/?p=10643"},"modified":"2023-07-12T14:01:13","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T06:01:13","slug":"un-recognition-of-palestinian-nakba-counters-the-myth-that-israel-was-created-on-empty-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/un-recognition-of-palestinian-nakba-counters-the-myth-that-israel-was-created-on-empty-land\/","title":{"rendered":"UN recognition of Palestinian Nakba counters the myth that Israel was created on empty land"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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By Dina Matar<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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When Palestinians\u00a0commemorate the Nakba<\/a>\u00a0(the catastrophe) on May 15, they are not only remembering a violent historical event that took place 75 years ago which led to the uprooting of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Nor just the destruction of more than 400 villages and towns and the killing of thousands others. They are also marking the fact that the Nakba did not end in 1948, but continues in different forms to this day.<\/p>

What Palestinians call \u201congoing Nakba\u201d still generates suffering, destruction of homes and loss of Palestinian lives. They experience it in the continuing Israeli annexation of their land and attacks launched regularly against their homes in Gaza. And they see it in the regular violations of their human rights, both inside Israel and in the \u201coccupied territories\u201d and Gaza Strip.<\/p>

For Palestinians worldwide, the Nakba is remembered as a traumatic rupture that represents their humiliating defeat, the destruction of Palestinian society and severance of links with their homeland.<\/p>

The 1948\u00a0Palestine war<\/a>, which led to the creation of the Israeli state, left Palestinian society leaderless, disorganised and scattered. Today, more than 60% of the estimated 14.3 million\u00a0Palestinians are displaced<\/a>. The rest are in the occupied territories, the Gaza Strip and Israel, where they have been subject to discrimination and outbreaks of communal violence.<\/p>

The violence has only been exacerbated by the return to power at the end of 2022 of Benjamin Netanyahu in an alliance with extremist religious-nationalist Israeli factions and ultra-nationalist politicians. The most notorious of these is\u00a0Itamar Ben-Gvir<\/a>\u00a0of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Violent escalation<\/strong><\/p>

The 75th anniversary of the Nakba comes at a critical and dangerous juncture that has seen a relentless escalation in Israeli\u00a0violent interventions<\/a>\u00a0against Palestinians in the occupied territories and Gaza, which began with the\u00a0unity intifada (or uprising) in 2021<\/a>.<\/p>

In 2021, 313 Palestinians including 71 minors were reportedly killed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank (including East Jerusalem) by\u00a0Israeli security forces<\/a>. A record high of 204 Palestinians were reportedly killed in 2022, making it\u00a0the deadliest year<\/a>\u00a0for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005.<\/p>

So far in 2023, 96 Palestinians have been\u00a0killed<\/a>\u00a0during the first four months of 2023. And so it continues.<\/p>

The unity uprising called for a Palestinian popular mobilisation in the struggle against Israel\u2019s settler-colonial rule and practices akin to apartheid. These have been documented and recognised as such by several international human rights organisations, including\u00a0Amnesty International<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Human Rights Watch<\/a>.<\/p>

Along with\u00a0widespread arrests of Palestinians<\/a>\u00a0since its launch, Israel has also taken punitive measures against Palestinian civil society. It has\u00a0designated as terrorist organisations<\/a>\u00a0six leading Palestinian organisations at the forefront of efforts to hold Israel to account \u2013 including through legal challenges being pursued at the International Criminal Court.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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A hidden people<\/strong><\/p>

This year marks the first time that the\u00a0UN has announced<\/a>\u00a0that it will commemorate Nakba Day, which also marks the creation of the state of Israel. While the UN move might be seen as a diplomatic coup for Palestinians, it nevertheless serves to underline two interrelated problems.<\/p>

The first is that Palestinian history, when it is told, tends to be done as part of Israeli history. The second is that the Palestinians themselves \u2013 as ordinary human beings \u2013 remain a largely unknown quantity in the west.<\/p>

In March, the BBC aired a two-part television series\u00a0The Holy Land and Us<\/a>\u00a0in the UK.\u00a0The series<\/a>\u00a0explored Israel\u2019s founding by splitting its story into two parallel narratives, separately featuring British Palestinians and British Jews pursuing their families\u2019 connections to the events surrounding Israel\u2019s creation in 1948.<\/p>

It presented the Palestinian and Zionist narratives as two sides of the same story and the same conflict, repeating the same tropes that suggest it is an equal fight.<\/p>

The series was referred to as brave reporting because of its use of personal Palestinian testimonies that recalled, in particular, the Deir Yassin massacre by a Zionist militia of\u00a0more than 100 Palestinians<\/a>, many of them women and children, in early 1948, weeks before Israeli statehood was declared.<\/p>

Despite such historical retellings, few people in the west know about Deir Yassin, the Nakba or the events around Israel\u2019s creation, which Israeli historian\u00a0Ilan Pappe<\/a>\u00a0has referred to as ethnic cleansing. Revisiting the formation of Israel, Pappe has documented that between 1947 and 1949, more than 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint.<\/p>

The lack of western knowledge about the Nakba is partly because the longstanding narrative surrounding 1948 and the creation of Israel has rested on several fictions \u2013 including the idea that the land was empty.<\/p>

It is also partly because of Israel\u2019s ability to propagate its version of reality in the mainstream media, particularly as historians are forced to tell the story of the powerless by those who victimised them, as historian Rashid Khalidi argued in\u00a0his 2007 book<\/a>\u00a0Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness.<\/p>

In a globalised world linked via diverse media, this has meant that the imagination of Palestine and its people has as much to do with power relationships and strategic alliances as with the degree of visibility and access ascribed to the two parties in the mainstream media.<\/p>

And there is no doubt, Israel has been ascribed a degree of visibility and access that has made the Palestinians, and the ongoing violence against them, invisible and hardly mentioned in the western media.<\/p>

For Palestinians, commemoration and remembrance of the Nakba is not about marking a historical event. It\u2019s about the need to continue telling their stories. Seventy-five years since the Nakba, it is time the whole world watched and listened.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Dina Matar<\/a>, Professor, Political Communication and Arab Media,\u00a0SOAS, University of London<\/a><\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Source: The Print<\/a>. 15 May 2023<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dina Matar. When Palestinians commemorate the Nakba (the catastrophe) on May 15, they are not only remembering a violent historical event that took place 75 years ago which led to the uprooting of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Nor just the destruction of more than 400 villages and towns and the killing of thousands others.… Read More »UN recognition of Palestinian Nakba counters the myth that Israel was created on empty land<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":10646,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,29,1],"tags":[128,39,90,496,441,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10643"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10643"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10665,"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10643\/revisions\/10665"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perdana4peace.org\/v2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}