The events that Israel is citing allegedly occurred at a time when Zionist Jewish militias were actively uprooting nearly one million Palestinian Arabs and systematically destroying their homes, villages and towns throughout Palestine.
The Israeli announcement, which reportedly followed “18 months of secret research” conducted by the Israeli government’s Ministry of Social Equality, should not be filed under the ever-expanding folder of shameless Israeli misrepresentations of history.
It is part of a calculated effort by the Israeli government, and namely by Minister Gila Gamliel, to create a counter-narrative to the rightful demand for the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Jewish militias between 1947-1948.
But there is a reason behind the Israeli urgency to reveal such questionable research: the relentless US-Israeli attempt in the last two years to dismiss the rights of Palestinian refugee rights, to question their numbers and to marginalize their grievances. It is all part and parcel of the ongoing plot disguised as the ‘Deal of the Century’, with the clear aim of removing from the table all major issues that are central to the Palestinian struggle for Freedom.
“The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms (against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore, to hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property, what is rightfully theirs,” said Gamliel.
The language – “.. to correct the historic injustice” – is no different from language used by Palestinians who have for 70 years and counting been demanding the restoration of their rights per United Nations Resolution 194.
The deliberate conflating between the Palestinian narrative and the Zionist narrative is aimed at creating parallels, with the hope that a future political agreement would resolve to having both grievances cancel each other out.
Contrary to what Israeli historians want us to believe, there was no mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries and Iran, but rather a massive campaign orchestrated by Zionist leaders at the time to replace the Palestine Arab population with Jewish immigrants from all over the world. The ways through which such a mission was achieved often involved violent Zionist plots – especially in Iraq.
In fact, the call on Jews to gather in Israel from all corners of the world remains the rally cry for Israeli leaders and their Christian Evangelical supporters – the former wants to ensure a Jewish majority in the state, while the latter is seeking to fulfill a biblical condition for their long-awaited Armageddon.
To hold Arabs and Iran responsible for this bizarre and irresponsible behavior is a transgression on the true history in which neither Gamliel nor her ministry are interested.
On the other hand, and unlike what Israeli military historians often claim, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947- 48 (and the subsequent purges of the native population that followed in 1967) was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing and genocide. It has been part of a long-drawn and carefully calculated campaign that, from the very start, served as the main strategy at the heart of the Zionist movement’s ‘vision’ for the Palestinian people.
“We must expel the Arabs and take their place,” wrote Israel’s founder, military leader and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion in a letter to his son, Amos in October 5, 1937. That was over a decade before Plan D – which saw the destruction of the Palestinian homeland at the hands of Ben Gurion’s militias – went into effect.
Palestine “contains vast colonization potential,” he also wrote, “which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified to exploit.”
This clear declaration of a colonial project in Palestine, communicated with the same kind of unmistakable racist insinuations and language that accompanied all western colonial experiences throughout the centuries was not unique to Ben Gurion. He was merely paraphrasing what was, by then, understood to be the crux of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine at the time.
As Palestinian professor Nur Masalha concluded in his book, the ‘Expulsion of the Palestinians’, the idea of the ‘transfer’ – the Zionist term for “ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinian people – was, and remains, fundamental in the realization of Zionist ambitions in Palestine.
Palestinian Arab “villages inside the Jewish state that resist ‘should be destroyed .. and their inhabitants expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state,” Masalha wrote quoting the ‘History of the Haganah’ by Yehuda Slutsky. .
What this meant in practice, as delineated by Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi was the joint targeting by various Jewish militias to systematically attack all population centers in Palestine, without exception.
“By the end of April (1948), the combined Haganah-Irgun offensive had completely encircled (the Palestinian city of) Jaffa, forcing most of the remaining civilians to flee by sea to Gaza or Egypt; many drowned in the process, ” Khalidi wrote in ‘Before Their Diaspora’.
This tragedy has eventually grown to affect all Palestinians, everywhere within the borders of their historic homeland. Tens of thousands of refugees joined up with hundreds of thousands more at various dusty trails throughout the country, growing in numbers as they walked further, to finally pitch their tents in areas that, then were meant to be ‘temporary’ refugee encampments. Alas, these became the Palestinian refugee camps of today, starting some 70 years ago.
None of this was accidental. The determination of the early Zionists to establish a ‘national home’ for Jews at the expense of the country’s Palestinian Arab nation was communicated, openly, clearly and repeatedly throughout the formation of early Zionist thoughts, and the translation of those well-articulated ideas into physical reality.
70 years have passed since the Nakba’ – the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1948 – and neither Israel took responsibility for its action, nor Palestinian refugees received any measure of justice, however small or symbolic.
For Israel to be seeking compensation from Arab countries and Iran is a moral travesty, especially as Palestinians refugees continue to languish in refugee camps across Palestine and the Middle East.
Yes, indeed “the time has come to correct the historic injustice,” not of Israel’s alleged ‘pogroms’ carried out by Arabs and Iranians, but the real and most tragic destruction of Palestine and its people.
PALESTINA
Like his parents, he did not really know his Palestinian neighbors. His view of them was typical of the Western view of his time—that their political and social potential did not go beyond what could be found in the stereotypical “Arab state.” That stereotype had only negative connotations for Oz, and this was the reason he denied the possibility of a one-state solution wherein Palestinians and Israeli Jews lived together in relative harmony. He claimed that “there could never be a binational state but only an Arab state with a Jewish minority” and he, Amos Oz, did not want to live in an “Arab state.” That meant he could never believe in, or struggle for, a truly democratic multi-ethnic and multi-religious Israel. His was a dualistic world—the two-state solution was Oz’s solution.
It is important to understand that his support for two states made Oz a “moderate” among Zionists and consigned him to the political margins of Israeli politics. Mainstream Israeli politics could not abide his assertion that a real peace required that the Palestinians have their own separate “Arab state” in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside Zionist Israel. Likewise, the support for a two-state solution automatically set him against the maximalist formula—a Zionist state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River—propounded by a hardline conservative element of the Zionist movement. The position of this element has become the political standard for an increasing number of Israeli Jewish citizens.
Oz’s opposition to the maximalist Zionist position categorized him ipso facto a serious opponent of the Israeli occupation. The occupation, insatiably expansive as it has proven to be, was the death knell of the two-state dream, and Oz despised the Israeli politicians who refused to make the necessary compromises for such a peace. He thought of them as “cowards” and they thought of him as a “traitor.”
Amos Oz’s ambition was to define, or more accurately, redefine, the Israeli character; reverse the present state of Zionist Israel and humanize it—to make it more benign through an underpinning of what he called “humanistic Jewish culture.” This unrealistic outlook made the Haaretz editorial writer Gideon Levy refer to Amos Oz as “the last moral Zionist.”
The vehicle for this transformation was his idealized two-state solution. His dedication to it essentially blinded him to the real nature of his nation’s character—one of longstanding imperialism combined with racism. In contrast, someone like Binyamin Netanyahu grasped this aspect of Israeli consciousness almost instinctively.
In his literary work Oz sometimes suggested there is a conflict embedded in the nationalist consciousness about what Zionism really stands for. Well, once again, there is no doubt a conflict in the minds of Israelis such as Oz. But it is a conflict that has set them apart from their fellow Zionists. For the majority the need for discriminatory laws and racist practices is clear enough. That is what an exclusive ethnic/religious state requires. In practice it has produced an Israel now approaching apartheid status. American readers of this essay can think of it this way: today’s Israel has a lot in common with the U.S. state of Alabama, circa 1930. That is why contemporary white supremacists in the United States such as Robert Spencer claim an affinity with Israel and Zionist ideological goals.
Did Amos Oz understand that this was Zionism’s inevitable outcome? If he did, he tried hard to rationalize that awareness away.
In truth there the two-state solution Oz supported would result in the same sort of racist Israel we see today, just in a smaller territory. What then would Oz have done? Well, if a Jewish majority could have been guaranteed in, say an Israel confined to land west of the Green Line, he would no doubt have felt secure enough to advocate for human and civil rights for all its citizens. In the end, however, that advocacy would have most likely led him onto the margins of that smaller hypothetical Israel, just as his demand for two separate states has done in the contemporary larger one.
Oz’s hope for Israel, and not his alone, always rested on the assumption that a humane Zionist state was possible. The reality is that it is not possible. Any state designed first and foremost for one ethnically and/or religiously defined group, and also having in its midst a sizable minority, must inevitably become discriminatory in its laws and practices. In the case of Israel this fact is reinforced by a Zionist ideology that demands such an exclusive state if Jews are to be “safe.” This too is an illusion, for there are fewer places in today’s world less safe for Jews than Israel.
Like his fiction , Oz's political commentary ranged from the stunningly insightful to the not-so. The single most concise, lethal summation of the Israeli political worldview can be found via one of his character's ruminations in the novel Don't Call It Night:"...a vicious circle of self-righteousness and hysteria: Kicking out at everything that stood in its way and at the same time pleading for mercy and demanding to be loved. A tacky cocktail of destiny, arrogance and self-pity..."
Some of his politial prose, though, could get a little purple.
He very articulately rendered the two competing national movements - Israeli and Palestinian - as a battle between right vs right. Which is unacceptable.
He also just as articulately compared the Israeli-Palestinian conclict to a divorce: Both sides face up to irreconcilable différences, split property, and go their separate ways.
These observations are trenchant only if predicated on the Zionist assumption theat these are two evenly matched antagonists. In reality, one side has one of the world's most sophisticated militaries and is backed by the heft of the United States. The other side lives in isolated, impoverished Bantustans and flings rocks against a heavily armoured army
Oz nonfiction In the Land of Israel was published in the early 1980'. It is his masterful work, in which he dips into the myriad strata of Israeli society: the religious, the colonisation, the yishuv/settlers, the Sephardim, the Palestinians; legitimizing the stealing of the Palestinian nation in a "convincing" way, to the eyes of Zionists.
Like his fiction , Oz's political commentary ranged from the stunningly insightful to the not-so. The single most concise, lethal summation of the Israeli political worldview can be found via one of his character's ruminations in the novel Don't Call It Night:"...a vicious circle of self-righteousness and hysteria: Kicking out at everything that stood in its way and at the same time pleading for mercy and demanding to be loved. A tacky cocktail of destiny, arrogance and self-pity..."
Some of his politial prose, though, could get a little purple.
He very articulately rendered the two competing national movements - Israeli and Palestinian - as a battle between right vs right. Which is unacceptable.
He also just as articulately compared the Israeli-Palestinian conclict to a divorce: Both sides face up to irreconcilable différences, split property, and go their separate ways.
These observations are trenchant only if predicated on the Zionist assumption theat these are two evenly matched antagonists. In reality, one side has one of the world's most sophisticated militaries and is backed by the heft of the United States. The other side lives in isolated, impoverished Bantustans and flings rocks against a heavily armoured army
Oz nonfiction In the Land of Israel was published in the early 1980'. It is his masterful work, in which he dips into the myriad strata of Israeli society: the religious, the colonisation, the yishuv/settlers, the Sephardim, the Palestinians; legitimizing the stealing of the Palestinian nation in a "convincing" way, to the eyes of Zionists.
As a writer Amos Oz will long be remembered as a master craftsman of the Hebrew language—a producer of a few good reads.
As a advocate of a two-state solution, he will be remembered as a "moderate" Zionist who wanted his people to be the great majority of the country his parentes took from the Palestinians.
Oz was probably a good man bred to a bad system he could not bring himself to abandon from his childhood to the end. But he was no hero.
As a advocate of a two-state solution, he will be remembered as a "moderate" Zionist who wanted his people to be the great majority of the country his parentes took from the Palestinians.
Oz was probably a good man bred to a bad system he could not bring himself to abandon from his childhood to the end. But he was no hero.
BRASIL
De acordo com a Fenaj, a diferença entre o número de vítimas e de ocorrências explica-se pelo fato de mais de um profissional ter sido atingido na mesma ocasião. “A violência contra profissionais de imprensa é um fator extremamente grave e muitíssimo preocupante. O crescimento em 2018 em relação a 2017 é um sinal de alerta”, afirmou a presidente da Fenaj, Maria José Braga.Segundo a Fenaj, as agressões físicas foram a forma de violência mais comum e aumentaram 13,79% no período. O relatório aponta 33 casos, que vitimaram 58 profissionais, contra 29 registros em 2017.
Com 105 vítimas, o sexo masculino foi o mais atingido (46,26%). Entre as jornalistas, houve 60 vítimas (26,43%). Os casos não identificados, quando a violência é generalizada e atinge vários profissionais e de ambos os sexos, foram 62 (27,31%).
De acordo com a Fenaj, um fato chamou a atenção: o grande crescimento no número de casos de agressões verbais, ameaças, intimidações e impedimentos ao exercício profissional. Na comparação com o ano anterior, o aumento de agressões verbais e os impedimentos ao exercício profissional mais que dobraram. Foram registradas 27 ocorrências de agressões verbais, 28 de ameaças eintimidações e 19 de impedimentos ao exercício profissional. Já em 2017, eram, respectivamente, 13, 15 e 8 casos.
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