Editorial: Dancing on Arab graves
Dancing on Arab graves
Television news viewers last week saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis fill the streets to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel. As the cameras focused on boisterous, well-dressed young things boogieing the night away, voice-overs extolled the event as the culmination of a valiant and besieged people's long struggle to build an island of democracy in a sea of tyranny, forced to fight wars of self-defence as hostile Arab neighbours time and again threatened a small, isolated people with annihilation.
Three weeks earlier, another 50th anniversary passed with barely a murmur in Israel or international media dispatches. Like the true history of the bloody imposition of the state of Israel on the Palestinian people, Deir Yassin has been all but obliterated from official Israeli memory.
Deir Yassin was a small Arab village just outside Jerusalem. On April 9, 1948, a heavily armed squad of the Zionist settler militia, the Irgun, descended on the town. Its inhabitants were given 15 minutes to flee. With machine guns, grenades and knives, the Irgun assassins slaughtered 254 men, women and children.
In the aftermath of the World War II Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish population of Europe, the United States seized upon the tragedy — and manipulated world sympathy for the Jewish people's plight — to back the Zionist movement's goal of a Jewish state in Palestine. Washington's motive was the creation of a reliable pro-imperialist state to police the oil-rich region.
The founders of Israel popularised their colonisation with the slogan "A land without people for a people without land". That more than a million Palestinian Arabs lived there presented a problem for the US-backed Zionist movement.
The UN on November 29, 1947, voted to divide the British colony of Palestine into two states. The new Israeli state was granted 55% of the territory despite the fact that 70% of the population was Arab. The goal of the Zionist leaders was to make Israel an exclusively Jewish state.
Zionist militias, armed by the west, embarked on a terrorist campaign to drive Arabs from the Israeli state. In 1948, the Israeli army and the terrorist Irgun launched "Operation Dalet". They attacked Arab villages at night, burning and bombing houses, to drive the population away.
With the Deir Yassin massacre, the Zionist campaign reached a hideous new level. Deir Yassin, and many other deadly attacks like it, was a warning to Arabs that to stay in Israel meant risking their lives.
By the end of 1948, more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs had been driven out of Israel — their land and homes stolen and redistributed to settlers — and the Israeli state controlled 80% of Palestine.
Israel was founded on this brutal and deliberate dispossession. Those who remained are treated as second class citizens. Today, more than 3 million Palestinians and their descendants remain in exile, refused the right to return to their country.
Since 1948, in a series of US-backed wars, the expansionist Zionist state has seized the remainder of Palestine — the West Bank and Gaza —, Syria's Golan Heights, Egypt's Sinai and a large chunk of southern Lebanon. Tel Aviv has launched military attacks on virtually all its Arab neighbours at one time or another. That the Deir Yassin massacre was no aberration was confirmed during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the Israeli army permitted its Lebanese quislings to massacre 2000 Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Israel's expansionist policy continues. During last week's celebrations, revellers chanted "Build! Build! Build!" in support of the Netanyahu government's backing for continued construction of Israeli settlements on Arab land, ignoring the protests of the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat.
Box Text = The scenes of delirious dancers and sombre military ceremonies broadcast around the world are meant to obscure the truth that modern Israel is built upon Arab graves and stolen land.
Palestine will know peace only when all people who inhabit it share full political, economic and social equality, and all Palestinians who wish to return are given the right to do so.