[Marxism] my speech for Brisbane's commemoration of al Nakba

[Gary MacLennan <gary.maclennan1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Remembering al-Nakba



Al Salam Alaikum; Wa rahmat Allah; Wa barak atoh.  Friends, Ladies and
Gentlemen, comrades we are here today to commemorate one of the worst crimes
of the 20th century – the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by what was to
become the Israeli army from their homeland in 1947, 48 and 49. That event
has come to be known to Palestinians and their friends throughout the
Islamic world as al-Nakba – the catastrophe or disaster.  However we in the
Western world still cling to another version of those events.

Many Westerners and their governments and certainly the Australian
government believe the following:

The UN set up the state of Israel by partitioning Palestine.  The Arabs
rejected this plan and 6 Arab armies invaded Israel. The Arab Governments
wanted to slaughter all the Jews. The Arab governments ordered the
Palestinians to leave their homes while the Israeli government begged them
to stay.  Heroic little Israel defeated the Arab Goliath.  The Israelis
desperately tried to make peace with the Arabs but the Arabs only wanted
war. Still the Israelis set about making a wonderful modern progressive
state in the land which the Palestinians had neglected.

Friends,  that is the official story behind the setting up of the State of
Israel.  It is what Israeli school children are taught to believe. It was
made into a Hollywood movie called *Exodus* in 1960 and it was as I have
said it is what most people in the West believe as the truth.  Friends I am
here to tell you that it is all lies; every single last word of it.

What then is the truth? Well the Arabs have long known the truth, but since
1978 the West has begun to listen a little to a group of Jewish historians.
These historians have proved that the Palestinians were not ordered to leave
by Arab governments. In fact they were ordered to stay. We also now know
that there was a master plan for the ethnic cleansing of all
Palestinians.  That
plan took final shape on the 10th March 1948 in what is now the Sheraton
Hotel in Tel Aviv.  It was drawn up by the first Prime Minister of Israel
David Ben Gurion. The plan is known as Plan D or the Dalet Plan.  It called
for the total expulsion of the people of Palestine from Palestine.

Just like for the Nazis the Holocaust was the Final Solution for the
so-called “Jewish problem”, for the Zionists the Dalet Plan was the final
solution for the Arab Problem. And like the Nazis Ben Gurion was careful  to
leave as few traces as possible of the decision to expel the Palestinians.  In
so doing he was acting like the Nazis who tried to cover up the truth of
their death camps.

But the Islamic world has long known the truth of al Nakba and we in the
Western world are beginning to learn it too.  That is why today’s
commemoration is very important.  All of us who know what happened in 1947,
48 and 49 have a duty to see that all people of good will come to learn that
truth as well.

In so doing we have to struggle against the lies of the Zionists and their
allies in the media and the governments throughout the Western world. I
would like to say a few words now about the struggle to get the truth out.  The
anti-Vietnam war activist Ron Kovics said some time ago that he would never
again let any government tell him to fear and who to hate.  As a young man
he had been taught to fear and hate the Vietnamese.  But now he has turned
his back for ever on such hatred and fear.

I would like to say that we should also never let any government tell us
what to remember or what to forget.  The Zionist media has been telling the
Palestinians that they should forget about al Nakba.  The Palestinians will
never forget.  What is more to tell them they should forget is absolute
racism.  None of would ever tell the Jewish people that they should forget
about the Holocaust. That would be unthinkable. But why should Zionists be
allowed to tell the Palestinians that they must forget about the ethnic
cleansing of 1947-49?

I want to repeat now.  Our memories belong to us.  They are not the property
of the imperialists, the Zionists or the Media barons. And we should use our
memories to remember the victims. I want to read to you now some words by
the great Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin.  It comes from his theses on
history: I would like you to remember these words whenever you hear or read
the Zionist boasting of the vibrant modern progressive democracy they have
built in Israel.  Benjamin wrote:

*A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he
is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes
are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to
stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a
violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.*

Benjamin also wrote that the dead have a right to be redeemed by our
remembering them.  We owe the act of remembering  to those Palestinians who
were murdered and to those who were driven out and to those who died broken
hearted in the refugee camps.  When David Ben Gurion ordered the mass murder
and expulsion of Palestinians, he hoped the world would never find out the
truth of his crimes.  He also hoped that one day the Arabs would forget.

60 years later – Ben Gurion is long dead.  But the memory of Al Nakba lives
on. And more and more the world is looking at Israel and seeing it for the
monstrosity that it truly is. Ben Gurion and his successors have built an
apartheid state.  That same state is reeling under its own violence and
corruption. It is now run by people like Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor
Liebermann who have talked openly of the need for another round of ethnic
cleansing. They want to drive out all the Arabs and create the greater
Israel.  It is because there is a real danger of another Nakba that today’s
act of remembrance is so important.  It is also why the struggle for peace
is so important.  But peace can only come from the liberation of Palestine.
And the day of that liberation is coming. All around the world civilised
people are turning against the brutality of the Israelis.  More and more
they are coming to understand what the Israelis have done to the
Palestinians.

One of the finest statements on the fate of the Palestinians was made by the
great philosopher Bertrand Russell days before his death in 1970.  He said

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was "given" by
a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The
result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made
permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How
much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?
It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland
from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of
the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being
expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people
of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A
permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential
ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East. We are frequently
told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the
Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. [...] What Israel is doing today
cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those
of the present is gross hypocrisy (31st January 1970)

Of course to criticise Israel, and even to remember al Nakba is to be
accused of being an anti-Semite.  But we should take comfort here from the
brave Jews who have stood out against the Zionist hoodlums. If we want to
describe accurately what happened in 1948 it is only necessary to quote the
words of Aharon Zisling, the Minister of Agriculture in the Ben Gurion
Government.  He told the Israeli cabinet on 17 November 1948:



"I couldn’t sleep all night. I felt that things that were going on were
hurting my soul, the soul of my family and all of us here (...) Now Jews too
have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken."

To the people of Palestine on this day, when we are gathered to commemorate
al Nakba, we say, “We are with you in your struggle and we are with you all
the way to victory. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
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