Palestine's 1948 agony, its Nakba, is commemorated in Galway

galway | rights, freedoms and repression | news report

Tuesday May 15, 2007 18:26

by TD - Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign

"In a matter of seven months, five hundred and thirty one villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied" (Ilan Pappe)

In May 1948, Zionist immigrants who comprised 35% of the population and owned less than 7% of the land, in defiance of the Palestinian people, persuaded the UN to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, what followed was a catastrophe, Palestine's.

Some 750,000 were driven out or else fled in fear, their homes and villages razed to prevent their returning - according to historian Ilan Pappe; "In a matter of seven months, five hundred and thirty one villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied. The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape and the imprisonment of men in labor camps for periods of over a year." In an address to the General Staff in May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, founding PM of Israel set out what had to be done: "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."

In December 1948, Resolution 194 was passed by the UN confirming the refugees legal right to return to their homes and land, two years later Israel's response was to legalise the criminal expropriation of Palestinian property by passing the Absentee Property Law providing for the confiscation of the property and land left behind by fleeing Palestinians, the so-called "absentees" (Arabs who never left Israel, and received citizenship after the war, but stayed for a few days in a nearby village had their property also confiscated), according to the Middle East correspondent of the UK Independent, Robert Fisk, an Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property told him that, including the Gaza Strip and The West Bank it could amount to up to 70% of the territory.

So it went, so it goes. no mercy for Palestine then or now, only a slow vicious torture on the Israeli wheel?.