By Dr Salim Nazzal 15 May, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Dedicated to Palestinians who still holding the dream to return back home.

As they have done ever since, in the dark year of 1948 Zionists were dancing joyously in Tel Aviv. While they danced, Palestinians were dying on the roads and in the mountains, towns, villages and ports of Palestine. Palestinians were 'not wanted' according to the will of the Russian and Polish Jews who were the new masters of the nation.

Thus they were forced to leave their homeland for the obvious reason that the Jewish incomers wanted it to be state solely for Jews.

Palestinians were forced to leave, with Jewish terrorists shooting anyone who even glanced backwards as they departed, as an elderly man told me years later; he recalled that a Jewish officer sneered that those being driven from their homes should 'move to Lebanon,' telling them that anyone who looked back would be shot dead!

Some went to Lebanon, others to Jordan or Syria, while many simply took to the open sea in small overcrowded boats in a desperate attempt to flee murder, and subsequently drowned. In short, a whole society and nation and one of the world's oldest cultures were destroyed that day.

The question now is, had Palestinians any quarrel or war with Jews? The answer to that is No.

So why then had they to suffer all this, as we have asked ever since. We were told that Jews were persecuted in Europe and in order to escape this, they had to commit all this horrific brutality against people who had done them no harm. But why did those Jews not stay in their home nations to struggle for equality there? Which is more easy, to fight for equality in your homeland or to travel thousands of miles away to a country in a different region of the world and launch a perpetual war with the native people of that nation? Whatever one's answer to that question, Jews obviously chose the second option.

Zionists refer to this date in history, May 15th, as their 'Independence Day.' To which the only answer can be, Independence from whom?

To gain independence, one must first have suffered occupation; in this case the facts are the very opposite. Britain occupied Palestine and consequently the Palestinians were the occupied people. Britain brought Jewish terrorists to Palestine, providing every form of aid for them, including arms, while arresting Palestinians for even owning a knife! How is it then that those brought to the nation as occupiers by a colonial power can celebrate independence? Independence from whom?

Every Palestinian knows the answer to this question, as does every Zionist: one Zionist with whom I argued some years ago answered the complete answer in blunt language, saying, "We took Palestine by force!'' This was not news to me, the son of a Galilean family expelled by Zionist Jews.

But Zionist Jews did not stop at occupying the country; they changed everything about it, creating new and oppressive laws for those Palestinians who survived the massacres and the expulsions.

According to Israeli law, Palestinians have no right even to commemorate the Nakhba (Catastrophe). Is there anything more brutal and offensive than that? Imagine that Britain and France introduced legislation that prohibited Jewish citizens there from commemorating the Holocaust. But of course, nobody can imagine such a thing because we know from their history that Britain and France are incapable of reaching such a state of brutality.

Anyway, Zionist occupied Palestine that is true, but to keep Palestine a racist state for Jews is a goal I doubt Zionist will ever achieve.

Dr. Salim Nazzal, a Palestinian-Norwegian historian on the Middle East, He has written extensively on social and political issues in the region.