al-Nakba: the Palestinian "Catastrophe"

Ironic, how quickly innocent victims can become ruthless victimizers

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The Holocaust is typically cited to assert the need for a Jewish state as a contingent safe haven. However, in an interview with Bill Moyers, former AIPAC editor M.J. Rosenberg explained that Jews are safe in the US due to the Establishment and Equal Protection clauses of the Constitution. In contrast with America’s legal equality for all religious groups, over 50 Israeli laws discriminate against non-Jews, principally their 20-25% Palestinian Muslim and Christian minorities.
 
Anti-Semitism has by no means been universal. In pre-WWI Germany, its sizable Jewish population had long prospered and been well-integrated into German society.  German anti-Semitism erupting after WWI was to a large degree attributable to anger over World Zionist Organization intervention that contributed substantially - perhaps decisively - to their defeat leading to the crushing reparations imposed on Germany by Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles - Great Power and Ruling Class manipulations of which ordinary German Jews who suffered the consequences were wholly innocent and largely unaware. In addition, Raul Hilberg, the most authoritative historian of the Holocaust, believes the relentless drumbeat of anti-Semitic Christian attitudes over many centuries had primed the German population to tolerate progressively tightening discrimination against Jews in the 1930s, culminating in the bizarre 4-year genocide of the 1940s. 

And Jews were hardly alone as victims of genocide since the beginning of the 20th century, our "modern" age that has included: 

• Mass murder of 5-7 million Ukrainians by Stalin in the early 1930s, expanding the gulag system developed by “Stalin’s Jews” under Genrikh Yagoda to include over a quarter-million arrests in 1934-36, a massive system of slave labor camps, and the “Great Purge” of 1934-40.

• Over a decade of mass murder of Chinese by Japan including the brutal and sadistic 1937-38 Rape of Nanking, the latter killing an estimated 300,000 people over just six weeks in the worst single atrocity of the Second Sino-Japanese and World War II period.

• Mass murder by the Nazi regime of Romas, Polish Catholics, homosexuals and the disabled in addition to Jews, built upon and rationalized by an academically fashionable, racist theory of eugenics not limited to Germany and intellectually fashionable in the US as well.

• Mass murders in China by both Mao (an estimated 45 million peasants, academics, professionals and intellectuals) and the Kuomintang (over 300,000 in anti-Communist purges). 

• Ottoman massacres and deportations of an estimated million or more Armenians and other non-Turkish minorites during and after World War I. 

• Later in the 20th century we saw mass murders in South America (80,000) and Central America (over 100,000) orchestrated by the US in Operation Condor and Iran/Contra in the name of anti-Communism. 

• To begin the 21st century, Arab and Muslim states have been in the crosshairs of the US and its nefarious allies, destroying the nation states of Iraq (killing over a million Iraqis), Libya and much of Afghanistan and Syria in the name of anti-terrorism, with Palestine a continuing 20th and 21st centuries victim of Israel with US enabling.
  
This is especially ironic and unjust since Ashkenazi Jews subjected to persecution in Christian Europe during earlier centuries fled to Arab and Persian lands where they enjoyed relative freedom, equality and success. Baghdad once had the largest and longest-standing Jewish community in the world, and Mizrahi Jews - convert communities in Arab cultures when Judaism was a proselytizing religion - were not subjected to pogroms or the Holocaust. When Christians conquered Spain in the late 15th century and the Muslims vacated, the Sephardic Jews vacated with them to North Africa.  During the Nazi occupation of North Africa, the King of Morocco tried to protect its Jewish population from the Vichy government; when told to identify their Jews, he reportedly responded, "We have no Jews, only Morroccan citizens."  Iran continues to have a substantial Jewish population with no interest in moving to Israel.

In Palestine before onset of the Zionist project, the population was approximately 80% Muslim, 15% Christian and 5% Jewish, all living together harmoniously for centuries. Muslim anger today is not historical but is specifically and appropriately directed at Israel for its seizure, expulsions, humiliating subjugation, and brutal occupation of Palestine, denying the original Palestinian majority the right of self-determination specified for all emerging nations in the UN Charter.

Ethnic groups are largely distinguishable by mutually unintelligible languages, of which there are some 6,500 in the world.  Most countries include numerous ethnic and religious groups, and natural selection favors diversity.  As Palestinian professor of biology Mazin Qumsiyeh mused at a meeting we attended, “why does Israel prefer a tree farm to a forest?”

Whatever any ethnic or religious group prefers, none have the right under international law to seize the land and property of another people and expel that people by force. 

Demand Freedom, Justice and Equality in the Holy Land