Podcast of the Day #013
Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe
I’m just going to leave these words from Dr. Gabor Maté right here:
“This is one of the issues that's closest to my heart, and it has been for a long time. So you know my history—I don't have to repeat it—but I'm personally a Holocaust survivor. As an infant, I barely survived.
My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz . And most of my extended family was killed. That's my personal background.
I grew up ashamed of my Jewishness. In Hungary after the war, I was still bullied for being Jewish. And I remember one of my friends coming to my rescue once saying, “Leave him alone. Is not his fault that he's Jewish. It's a fault, but it's not his fault.” This was the defense. So I grew up with that….
..In my teenage years in Canada, I became a Zionist. This dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army, I found it liberating. It was exhilarating to believe in that dream. And I absorbed all the perspective, all that point of view, and I really believed in it.
And then I found out that it wasn't exactly like that. That in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population. You couldn't—there was a Zionist slogan called, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” But there was no land without a people. There was people living there who'd been living there for hundreds of years or even longer.
As a matter of fact, if you want to hear something really interesting. And David Ben-Gurion, who was the first Prime Minister of Israel, actually subscribed to this. He said this, “Who are the Palestinians? Because the Jews in Roman times, never, all of them never left Palestine. Many of them stayed there, and some of them, hundreds of years later converted to Islam. So guess who the Palestinians are? In some ways, they might be descendants of ancient Jews.” They are cousins, to say the least, no matter how you look at it.
And you know--and there's no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population, which is what they did in 1947, beginning in 1947, and first of all with British Empire protection, you know. But they did this.
And then in 1948, Israeli historians—Jewish Israeli historians—have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of the Palestinians was persistent; it was pervasive; it was cruel; it was murderous, and with deliberate attempt. So that's what's called the Nakba in Arabic, the disaster or the catastrophe.
Now in Canada there's a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust. I don't believe in such laws, by the way, but in Israel you're not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it was at the very basis of the foundation of the state.
So once I became aware of all this, I was, okay, well, yeah we created this beautiful dream, but we imposed a nightmare on somebody else.
And then I visited the occupied territories, Russell, during the first Intifada , I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw. The brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it. The burning down of Palestinian or cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations. And this went on. And it's much worse now than it was then.
So this is the background. And it couldn't have been in any other way. Because, again, you couldn't have created that exclusive Jewish state without oppressing or expelling the local population. It's the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's still going on.
And who are these people in Gaza? Now, you have to go to Gaza. You have to go there to really appreciate it. It's a small area where there are these multiple hundreds of thousands of people. Who are those people? The direct children or grandchildren are the people that are expulsed from Israel or what is now Israel.
Now, here's the outrage. And I'd like your Zionist friend in the States to tell me this. I as a Jew, I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship under the right law of the right of return, but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, Hana Kawas, who was born in Jerusalem, can't even visit….So what sense does—so who is Gaza? This desperate blockaded…let me stop again. Am I talking too long about this? I'm sorry. This is so important to me, and I know so much about it that I don't even know where to stop.
So then you have these miserable people packed into this horrible—people call it the world's largest outdoor prison, which is what it is. Incredible poverty, 50% unemployment.
Now Hamas is an Islamic organization that was originally encouraged by Israel and supported by Israel as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization, which Israel didn't want to deal with. And given those conditions, of course people will go for extremist leadership. That's what people do when they're miserable and hopeless and deprived of any possibility whatsoever. You don't have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights. That’s a complete falsity. But there were free elections in Gaza, monitored by international community. They were declared to be the freest elections ever held in the in the Arab world. And Hamas happened to win.
And when Hamas won that election, Israel and United States immediately organized the military coup against them, which Hamas defeated, for which the punishment was this blockade that deprives Hamas, not Hamas, but Gaza, of food, of medical supplies, of sufficient water. I could go on and on and on and on.
And then you have this conflict. And then every time there's a conflict Israel mows the lawn. That's the expression they use. You know what they call it? They call it mowing the lawn. By which they mean the mass murder of Palestinian civilians.
Now, is it true that that the Gazans shoot rockets into Israel killing innocent civilians? Yes it is. Do I support that? No, I don't. But when it comes to the death of innocent civilians, Israel killed 20,000 Lebanese civilians in 1982, using illegal weapons like cluster bombs in a war that had no justification whatsoever. I could go on and on and on and on. Except I'll say that the disproportion of power and responsibility and oppression is so markedly on one side that you take the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians….
…If we can—if after 2,000 years we can look for liberation and freedom, why can't the Palestinians?
…If you look at the Western press, when Hong Kong demonstrators throw stones at the police in Hong Kong, that's considered to be heroism in the American press. When in Myanmar, the demonstrators throw slingshots at the army, at the oppressive army, they’re considered to be heroes in the Western press. When Palestinian kids throw stones at the Israeli soldiers, they're called terrorists. And Israel gets away with a lot more, with much less criticism in the Western press than any other country.
I'll say one more thing. I was recently contacted by a Palestinian woman from Jericho. She runs a program for Palestinian children who spend time in Israeli jails. 14, 15, 16-year-olds are jailed for months or years. Sometimes they can't see their families for months. And she runs a program for them. You know what she does? She meditates with them. She does Sufi dervish dancing with them, swirling dancing, to bring them out of their stress. She says, “We don't have post-traumatic stress disorder here, because the trauma is never post. The trauma is daily,” she said.
I just wish your Zionist friend would visit the occupied territories in Gaza like I have and let him speak the way he speaks now. He’s got any ounce of humanity left, he would cry like I did for two weeks when I was there….
..Now, we're not living in Nazi Germany. Anybody can go on YouTube and listen to Ilan Poppe, an Israeli historian, totally eloquent on Israeli history, who's living in England now because life became in Israel too difficult for him.
Anybody can listen to Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish Professor, world expert on Gaza, who was denied ten tenure at his university because of his public speaking against Israeli policy.
You can listen to any number of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers who talk about the brutality that they now regret having committed. You can listen to Israeli pilots who talk about why they refuse to fly over Gaza because of the atrocities they're made to commit.
You can get all the information you want. So if anybody these days doesn't know, it's not because the information is not available. It's not what you know. It's what you could know if you wanted to find out.
Now, I can understand the warmth that Jews have for Israel. I used to be in that same camp. I can understand after the horrors of the Nazi genocide how we desperately want some protection. I can understand all that. But none of that excuses what we're doing. And none of that excuses not knowing truth and this deliberate attempt to silence anybody who speaks—Jewish or non-Jewish…
..There are no two sides. I mean, it's always a complex question, but in terms of power and control, and it's pretty straightforward. There was a land with the people living there, and other people wanted it. They took it over, and they continue to take it over, and they continue to discriminate against, oppress, and dispossess that other people. That's what happened and that's what's happening…”