By Masimba Musodza| I pen this in response to the so-called “Statement by the Zimbabwe Palestine Solidarity and Friends of Palestine Solidarity Movement,” (ZimEye, May 15), written by Robson Musarafu and Jabulani Charlie. As with virtually every piece of anti-Israel statement doing the rounds, it is fraught with distortions and outright lies . It then becomes the duty of those who are always ready to present the facts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to speak out and allow members of the general public to take a more informed position.
The statement makes the claim that “60 unarmed people were killed by the lethal force of the Israeli occupying forces while protesting the relocation of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv in Israeli teritory to Jerusalem, in what the US President Donald Trump calls the unified capital of Israel.” What actually happened was Hamas activists tried to cross the border from Gaza into Israel, declaring that they wanted to massacre the Jewish people.
In an interview on al Jazeera, flighted on May 13, a Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahhar stated that the march on the Israeli border was not an act of peaceful resistance. “When you have weapons that are being wielded by men who were able to prevent the strongest army in the region from entering the Gaza strip for 51 days and were able to capture or kill soldiers of that army, is this really ‘peaceful resistance?….So when we talk about ‘peaceful resistance,’ we are deceiving the public. …This is peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies and enjoying tremendous popular support.”
Hamas journalist, Dr. Salah al-Bardawil, admitted in an interview that 50 of the 60 unarmed Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli Defence Force were in fact Hamas activists. Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian group claims that an additional three of the 60 were members of its military wing. Among those killed in this week’s protest was the son of Hamas co-founder Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. One of the 2,770 wounded is the son of Hamas senior political leader Ismail Haniyeh.
One of the so-called peaceful Palestinian protestors……Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, quoted a Gazan doctor, who requested anonymity, as saying that the baby reported as killed had a pre-existing medical condition. Her family confirmed that the baby only happened to be in the area as a result of a mix-up and was not involved with Hamas militants. Haaretz also reports that Hamas officials refused to let into Gaza IDF medical teams sent in to offer assistance to victims of the conflict.
Hamas is the Palestinian organisation that controls the Gaza strip, the smaller of the two territories allocated to the Arabs when the land west of the Jordan river was split into Jewish and Arab areas by the British in what was called the Partition Plan of 1947. The other territory is known as the West Bank, and is controlled by the Fatah Party, the political wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Hamas came to power in Gaza since 2007, and effectively governs it as a separate entity from the West Bank, while claiming to represent all Palestinian people.
In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza as part of the Oslo Accord, with the understanding that the withdrawal would lead to peace and the Arabs would begin at last to build their own state. Israel had occupied the territory since 1967, when all the surrounding Arab nations launched a coordinated invasion and were defeated in what was to be known as the Six-Day War. Before that, between the years 1948 (the year the British Mandate over Palestine ended and the State of Israel was established) and 1967, Gaza was occupied by Egypt. An All-Palestinian Government was created in Gaza, led by Lebanese Ahmed Hilmi Abd al-Baqi, but it was a symbolic organisation that competed with Jordan for internationally recognised sovereignty over the two Palestinian territories. The West Bank was at this time occupied by Jordan. It is to be noted that no attempt was made at creating a Palestinian State.
Rather, the struggle was against the existence of a Jewish State. Before 1948, Gaza was part of the British Mandate for Palestine, i.e., a region of the the defeated Ottoman Empire also known as “Southern Syria.” In an interview on Egypt’s Al Hekma TV in 2012, Hamas Minister for the Interior and National Security, Fathi Hammad said every Palestinian, “ …in Gaza and throughout Palestine can prove his Arab roots- whether from Saudi Arabia, from Yemen, or anywhere…. Personally, half my family is from Egypt.We are all like that…. Brothers, half the Palestinians are Egyptians, the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families who are called Al-Masri (“the Egyptian”)…they may be from Cairo, Alexandria…”
In the finest tradition of the anti-Israel camp, the statement by Messers Musarafu and Charlie takes liberties with documented history, so facts such as the ones I have mentioned above are conveniently ignored. “ The innocent Palestinian people were also commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. The Nakba saw 750,000 Palestinians, under the watchful eye of British authority , expelled from their homeland by mid-May 1948. The British Army played an active role alongside the Zionist in mastermiding the tragedy that befell the Palestinians which Britain was the author, architect and butcher in Palestine 70 years ago.”
Arabs came to the region, which had been largely uninhabited because of the Jews returning to their ancestral homeland, bringing with them economic opportunities. As far back as 1937, told the Peel Commission, “There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it”. Nobody was listening, for the UN ruled that any Arab who was in the land at least two years before 1948 was a Palestinian and indigenous to the land. However, the Arabs have remained aware of this fact. Syria’s Hafez Assad,father of the incumbent, told Yasser Arafat in 1982, “You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian People, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria.
Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.”
The Arabs did not rule Palestine. It was ruled by the Ottomans, the Turkish. Most of what is now the West Bank was owned by just three absentee landlords. In fact, the only time Arabs controlled Palestine was when Egypt held Gaza and Jordan controlled the West Bank. While Jordan controlled the West Bank, the Palestinian Liberation organisation was created.
The Anniversary of the Nakba was coined by Yasser Arafat in the 1980s. The term “Nakba” (Arabic, “catastrophe”) first appears in 1920, and refers to the splitting up of Syria, a region of the defeated Ottoman Empire, into what are now the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories. It was called a catastrophe because it challenged Pan-Arabism, which seeks to establish a supra-state spanning the Middle East and North Africa. The only conflict among Pan-Arabists is whether this state should be secular in character, as advocated by the likes of Egypt’s Nasser or guided by Islam, which is the vision of ISIS, and therefore able to accommodate non-Arabs who are Muslims. What they do agree on is that a Jewish state in their midst is undesirable.
This is the real agenda of the so-called Palestinian struggle, not this smoke and mirrors depiction of an indigenous population oppressed by European colonialists! As PLO leader Zuhair Mohsen told journalist James Dorsey in 1977, “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”
The Hamas Covenant (1988) states:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
In fact, if you want to look at a clear example of the triumph of Pan-Arabism, look no further than Sudan, where the Janjaweed, an offshoot of Muammar Gaddafi’s Arab Legion, have cleared north Africa of millions of non-Muslim Black people. Like the Palestinians, Gaddafi and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir are admired by some African politicians and journalists alike because of their anti-western rhetoric. The Kurds and Yazidis are two other non-Arab peoples who did not get a country of their own when the defeated Ottoman Empire was carved up by the victorious powers of the First World War. Their plight is rarely highlighted.
The so-called expulsion of Arabs from Palestine is another distortion of history. The first Arabs to leave Palestine did so voluntarily, fearing war would break out once the British Mandate ended, moving to neighbouring states with the intention to return once things had cooled down. The movement of people increased such that Arab leaders were calling on the governments of neighbouring countries to deny them visas. On January 30, 1948, the Jaffa newspaper, Ash Sha’ab, reported: “The first of our fifth-column consists of those who abandon their houses and businesses and go to live elsewhere….At the first signs of trouble they take to their heels to escape sharing the burden of struggle.” Then came those fearing retaliation from Jews for killings in places like Hebron. The largest exodus occurred when the State of Israel was declared, and was part of a move bythe surrounding Arab nations clear land to move their armies in and annihilate the nascent Zionist homeland. Syrian Prime Minister Khalid al-`Azm, wrote, “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homeland, while it is we who constrained them to leave it. Between the invitation extended to the refugees and the request to the United Nations to decide upon their return, there elapsed only a few months.” The Palestinian representitive to the United Nations, Jamal Hussain, wrote in 1948, “The withdrawals were carried out pursuant to an order emanating from Amman. The withdrawal from Nazareth was ordered by Amman; the withdrawal from Safad was ordered by Amman; the withdrawal orders from Lydda and Rale are well known to you. During none of these withdrawals did fighting take place. The regular armies did not enable the inhabitants of the country to defend themselves, but merely facilitated their escape from Palestine. All the orders emanated from one place.”
The Lebanese American paper, Al Hoda (June 8, 1951 records that, “The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade. He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean….Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.”
In an interview on the Jordan-Israeli border with a journalist from the Gaza TV station, Al-Aqsa TV, a 92 year old woman, Sara Muhammad ‘Awwad Jaber, was asked “So, you remember May 15, the day of the Nakba?” She replied, “Why wouldn’t I remember? …Allah willing, you will bury (Israel) and massacre the Jews with your own hands. Allah willing, you will massacre them like we massacred them in Hebron…..I lived through the British era, and through the massacre of the Jews at Hebron. We the people of Hebron massacred the Jews. My father massacred them and brought back some stuff..thank you very much!” At this point, the reporter cut her off.
The Israeli government reacted to this exodus by creating a Custodian of Abandoned Property “to prevent unlawful occupation of empty houses and business premises, to administer ownerless property, and also to secure tilling of deserted fields, and save the crops. In 1949, Israel offered to allow families that had been separated during the war to return, to release refugee accounts frozen in Israeli banks (eventually released in 1953), to pay compensation for abandoned lands and to repatriate 100,000 refugees.The Arabs rejected all the Israeli compromises. They were unwilling to take any action that might be construed as recognition of Israel….
Jews being expelled from Jerusalem, where they had lived for centuries, in 1948. In that same period, Jews were expelled from not only the West Bank and Gaza, but from Iraq, Morocco, Egypt and all the countries of the Middle East. A large majority of Israel’s population is from these countries, another fact which overturns the myth that the Jewish homeland is a White colonial settler state. During the Ottoman Empire, census records of Jerusalem showed a Jewish majority. However, in 1948, Abdullah el Tell, a Jordanian commander and later the military governor of the Old City, was able to brag that, “For the first time in 1,000 years, not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”
Musarafu and Charlie state further, “Today, another butcher – Donald Trump – joins the murderous Netanyahau in their quest to annihilate the people of Palestine. The murderous Zionist Israeli government celebrates the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, whilst Palestinians are being murdered in Gaza. Peacefully protesting for their right to live as human beings.”
As we have seen, even from Hamas sources, they were not peacefully protesting for their right to live as human beings, but were trained guerillas bent on killing civilians and annihilating the State of Israel. Blaming President Donald Trump for the relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem ignores the fact that the decision for the move was made by Congress as far back as 1995, with the passing of the Jerusalem Embassy Act.
Successive American presidents held back against implementing the decision because they genuiniely believed that this would help the peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis. However, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Jr and Barack Obama have all stated publicly that they held Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. Trump is simply showing America’s impatience with the Palestinians. America is not the only country to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Trump is the only one mentioned in the statement by Musarafu and Charlie because his name, in some circles, evokes the kind of emotions they are seeking.
“How much more suffering are Palestinians going to endure before the world wakes up with a solution?” Well, that is a question that the Palestinians and their Arab allies should ask themselves. They had a chance to create their own state when Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan seized the West Bank in 1948, yet they did not do so. Even the United Nations Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of the occupation of these two territories in 1967 by Israel makes no mention of a Palestinian State.
Since Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, she has persistently offered them back in return for peace. Israel withdrew from Gaza. Instead of peace and the building of what optimists called “the Singapore of the Middle East”, Gaza is simply a base from which Hamas and other terrorist groups launch attacks on civilians in Israel. In the war of 1967, Israel also captured from Egypt the Sinai region and from Syria the Golan Heights. A peace agreement with Egypt has lasted to this day, and Egypt has full sovereignty over Sinai. Syria refused to recognise the State of Israel and has vowed to destroy it. Giving back the Golan Heights would give it a military advantage over Israel.
So, that is all the Palestinians and Arabs have to do to end this conflict; recognise the State of Israel and focus on building a viable Palestinian State. As Zimbabweans, we need to send a clear message to the Arab world that we will not become useful idiots for a cause that is seeing millions of Africans slaughtered in the northern part of our continent.