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Nakba continues today

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Monessa Shapiro’s article (STAR: 20th May 2015) needs a response.

The Palestinian refugee crisis was not an unintended result of war. It was a thoughtful, measured and  systematic act of aggression necessary for the creation of the Zionist entity.

Historic Palestine was overwhelmingly  Arab prior to 1948. Zionist leaders used the weasel word  transfer  when discussing the future of the Palestinians. Today the phrase used is ethnic cleansing.

Almost immediately after the UN Partition Plan for historic Palestine, Zionist terror groups, Irgun, Stern and others, terrorized and expelled Palestinians from their homes and villages, including the village of Lubya, which was totally destroyed in 1948. This occurred long before the armies of the neighbouring Arab countries got involved. By the way, the strongest Arab army at the time was Jordan, who was on the side of the Zionist entity.

The Nakba did not end in 1948. It continues unabated, today, in the form of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land for settlements for Jewish immigrants. Its destruction of Palestinian homes and agricultural land, revocation of residency rights deportations, periodic brutal military assaults that result in mass civilian casualties such as the one that took place in Gaza in the summer of 2014, and the denial of the internationally-recognized legal right of return of millions of stateless Palestinian refugees.

Yes, the Palestinian refugees still languish in refugee camps in the neighbouring Arab countries. Why should these Arab countries absorb the Palestinians when they, the Palestinians have a country in which they lived for centuries? Why should the Palestinians be paying for the atrocities committed by Europeans on Europeans on European soil?

  A key actor in the dispossession of Palestinians was the Jewish National Fund (JNF), founded in 1901. It was tasked with acquiring land for the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. The quasi-governmental Jewish National Fund continues to play an important role in the distribution of state lands and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians in Israel today. Its mission statement declares“The Jewish National Fund is the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners – Jewish people everywhere.”

Written by: Ibrahim Vawda

Senior Researcher, Media Review Network