77 years ago today, Zionist militias ethnically cleansed 800,000 Palestinians from their homes. The event, known as the Nakba (catastrophe in arabic) is commemorated every year by Palestinians and their supporters. As Israel’s current destruction of Gaza has showed, the Nakba did not just happen on one day, but is a continuing experience, both for the Palestinians whose families were expelled, and those who continue to live in a state of apartheid.
The Nakba was preceded by a number of massacres, such as in Deir Yassin village on April 9th, when 93 Palestinians (including 30 babies) were murdered by Jewish forces, and many were raped. One week after the Nakba, on May 22nd, Jewish soldiers occupied the village of Tantura and shot between 110 and 230 Palestinians. Ilan Pappe reports: “The Jews gathered all the women and children, in a place where they dumped all bodies, for them to see their dead husbands, fathers and brothers and terrorize them.” Many other acts of terror were used to force the Palestinians out.
One of the ironies of the Nakba is that most Jews fleeing the Holocaust did not want to go to Israel, which their leaders told them was an uninhabited desert. They wanted to go to countries like the USA and Britain, but these countries were implenring racist laws to restrict migration. The first of these laws was the British Aliens Act of 1905, introduced by AJ Balfour, the same man whose Balfour Declaration led to the formation of apartheid Israel.
By 1949, about 500 Palestinian villages and towns, and tribes had been destroyed and nearly 1 million Palestinians were forced to leave. The Israeli Absentees Property Law of 1950 expropriated their homes. There are now around 7 million Palestinian refugees, many of them in the 58 refugee camps in surrounding countries. Show your solidarity with them at the events which have been organised, including a demonstration today (4pm at Südstern).
