Al-Nakba: Lambs to the slaughter, By Ameen Izzdeen

On May 15, Israel celebrated the 62nd year of its existence. Looking back, it claims that it outshines all the other states in the Middle-Eastern region as a true democracy. It also boasts that it is the only country in the region that upholds the fundamental rights of its citizens. However, it cannot boast about its record of human rights in the occupied Palestinian land. The Palestinian people live under Israeli occupation with their fundamental rights — their right to life, property and freedom of movement — being either denied or restricted.

Israel's success story as an industrial nation today and its advancements in medicine, agriculture, science and technology have made many in the West to view the Jewish country as politically and ideologically one of them.

While the countries around the world sent congratulatory messages to Israel, little did they remember about al-Nakba — a dark truth which Israel is trying to hide.

Every year, as Israel celebrates its independence day, the Palestinians remember al-Nakba or the great catastrophe in which some 780,000 Palestinians lost their homes, their villages and their dignity. The catastrophe began months before Israel made the declaration of independence on May 15, 1948.

Deir Yassin was a village that lay outside the area which the United Nations identified as the state of Israel in its partition plan. On April 9, 1948, a Zionist terrorist outfit Irgun headed by Menachem Begin, who later became Israeli prime minister, and another terror group, the Stern Gang, surrounded the village just before dawn. The village that housed some 750 Palestinians stood on high ground on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which was not part of Israel under the UN partition plan. The two gangs raided the village house by house and killed 250 Palestinians, half of them women and children. Those who survived the attack were driven to East Jerusalem. In the United States, the Deir Yassin massacre evoked little sympathy. Perhaps, it was because the white man who colonized America killed the Native Americans in a similar ruthless manner.

With the massacre of the Palestinians at Deir Yassin, the Zionist terrorist threat spread to other Arab villages and cities, prompting the exodus of 780,000 Palestinians and the depopulation of more than 400 Arab villages and cities. That was one of the early stories of how the oppressed became oppressors or the victims of Nazi horror turned their venom at a people with whom they lived in harmony for centuries. Not all Israelis or all Jews turned into villains after World War II. It was only those who subscribed to the political Zionism preached by European Jewish leaders Theodor Herzl and Chaim Wiezman who became the predators of Palestinians. There is little difference between the ideologies of Nazism and Zionism — both are ultranationalist and racist and seek to thrive on the misery of their victims. Between 1912 and 1948, some 50,000 Palestinians were killed in political violence perpetrated by the Zionists and the British who ran Palestine as a League of Nations mandate. The Palestinian plight was further aggravated when UN moves to rectify the mistakes in the original partition plan and redraw the map came to a halt when the Zionist terror group Stern Gang assassinated the UN envoy, Count Folke Bernadotte, in Jerusalem. The Palestinian territory further shrank when the Arabs lost the 1967 war. In spite of these losses, the Palestinian spirit remained high because they had the support of the Communist bloc and the support of the Non-Aligned nations which saw the Palestinian struggle as a fight against colonialism.

It was a time when little Sri Lanka also stood tall in the international arena. And it stood for what it felt was right and just, weathering pressure from the Western bloc led by the United States. Sri Lanka was just a dot on the world map, but its voice was heard loud and clear in the battle against anti-imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, apartheid and Zionism.

The lure of economic benefits that was on offer if Sri Lanka was to succumb to Western demands did not shake the country's commitment to the freedom struggle of the Palestinians. When the coalition government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike severed diplomatic links with Israel in the 1970s in condemnation of Israel's occupation of Arab land after the 1967 war, the main opposition, the United National Party, told parliament that the government was missing an opportunity to get economic support from the West. Minister Pieter Keuneman replied, "Though we may have some material advantages, we have to support the people fighting for just causes. That is a matter of principle, which the government stands for…"

The NAM's Colombo Conference in 1976 was another case in point that showed the group's support for the Palestinian cause. With Sri Lanka in the chair, the then powerful Third World bloc produced a strong declaration condemning not only imperialism and colonialism but also apartheid and Zionism. The declaration recognized the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle and expressed NAM's solidarity with the Palestinian people.

But today, as Israel celebrates the 62nd year of its creation and the Palestinian people marked the 62nd anniversary of the great catastrophe or al-Nakba, the Non-Aligned Movement has virtually abandoned its anti-imperialistic and anti-colonialist causes. NAM countries have sold the ideals and principles they once promoted in return for a few million dollars from the very neocolonialist nations they once lambasted. They justify the tradeoff in terms of their national interests.

The Palestinian people, left to fend for themselves, receive only verbal support from NAM. Even the Arab League's support stops at with statements. The Palestinians are like an isolated lamb that was forced to talk peace with the wolf. The story also has a peace broker in a globe-gobbling lion — the United States. The lamb knows that the lion is committed to serve his friend, the wolf, but it has no option but to talk peace. Whenever the lamb tries to use its body or whatever is at its disposal in defence of its rights or to send a message that the pasture belongs to it, the wolf and the lion condemn the lamb as a terrorist. The lamb is in a desperate situation. It is fast losing the pasture where the wolves set up their colonies with economic and military aid from the lion.

The Palestinians say a decade of peace talks with Israel has only made the prospects of winning back their homeland a difficult, if not an impossible, task. During the peace talks Israel has built more settlements than what it had built before the process began with the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993. It was during the peace talks that Israel built the so-called security wall that robbed more Palestinian land. It was during the peace talks that Israel took some 12,000 Palestinians prisoner.

It was also during the peace talks that Israel raided the Gaza Strip and killed some 1,500 Palestinians and the siege that the Israel had laid during the raid in 2006 continues todate, making Gaza the world's largest open air prison.

With their armed struggle giving them nothing but a terrorist label and with peace moves also giving them no hope, the Palestinian people now seek to muster the support of peace loving people around the world. But even here, Israel has taken steps to thwart the Palestinian efforts.

This week, world renowned American thinker Noam Chomsky, himself a Jew, wanted to visit the Bir Zeit University near the West Bank city of Ramallah and talk to Israeli students about the Palestinians' right to statehood. He had a visa, but Israeli officials refused him entry.