Wednesday Edition | Five things the United States knew about the Nakba as it unfolded

Source: Middle East Institute
https://www.mei.edu/publications/five-things-united-states-knew-about-nakba-it-unfolded

By Josh Ruebner
Published May 13, 2022

During the waning days of the Trump administration, 22 Republican Representatives, led by Doug Lamborn of Colorado, sent a letter to the president urging him to erase Palestine refugees and their rights as a matter of U.S. policy.

“The issue of the so-called Palestinian ‘right of return’ of 5.3 million refugees to Israel as part of any ‘peace deal’ is an unrealistic demand, and we do not believe it accurately reflects the number of actual Palestinian refugees,” these members of Congress argued.¹

This attempt by members of Congress to minimize the dimension of the Palestine refugee issue and negate refugee rights was not only intended to tip the scales of U.S. policy further in Israel’s favor; it also dovetails with a deliberate Israeli strategy to advance what historian Nur Masalha dubbed “the memoricide of the Nakba,” or “catastrophe” in English — Israel’s large-scale dispossession of two-thirds of Palestine's Arab population in the course of its establishment in 1948, a process of dispossession which many Palestinians rightfully argue continues to this day.

“Zionist methods have not only dispossessed the Palestinians of their own land,” Masalha wrote, but “they have also attempted to deprive Palestinians of their voice and their knowledge of their own history.”²

Read more: Five things the United States knew about the Nakba as it unfolded

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Palestine, Corbyn and the Labour left

Source: Jews for Justice for Palestinians
https://jfjfp.com/palestine-corbyn-and-the-labour-left/

Phil Bevin writes in SKWAWKBOX
Published May 17, 2022

The outrage has been widespread, to the point that even Labour Party MPs associated with Labour Friends of Israel have felt compelled – if sometimes belatedly – to condemn her killing. Tragically, this high-profile death is one of a great many killings of Palestinian civilians regularly perpetrated by the IDF. The individual crime is an expression of a wider culture of cruelty and oppression that characterises life in the apartheid state and its occupied territories.

‘Systemic brutalisation’

Mainstream politicians and media will likely present this as an individual outrage rather than the product of systemic brutalisation it really is, and Israel’s militarism will continue to be exported to other domains of the Anglo-Saxon Empire for some time yet.

The illegal military occupation of Palestine by Israel has not only blighted the lives of Palestinians for decades; the development of a security state around the occupation has built up a culture of militarism within Israel itself, which – as we have seen with regards to IDF interrogation techniques – is then exported abroad to allied states who are looking to find novel ways of imposing “law and order” on their peoples.

In the UK, for instance, the manufacture of weapons to be sold for use in the slaughter of Palestinians increases the reliance of our own economy on arms production. In certain parts of the country, the war industry is relied upon to provide employment. This, in turn, influences the priorities of politicians representing those constituencies, as well as trade unions, and incentivises the further consolidation of UK manufacturing around weapons for export. Israel is not a lone actor but an integral part of an Empire that spans the “West” and it therefore has the full support of the USA/UK global military-industrial complex, into which it is integrated and according to whose colonial practices the apartheid state is itself modelled...

Read more: Palestine, Corbyn and the Labour left

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Israel Used to Be Beautiful. Then Came Zionism

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-used-to-be-beautiful-then-came-zionism-1.10796712

By Ofri Ilany
Published May 12, 2022

Israel celebrated its 74th birthday earlier this month as one of the ugliest countries in the world. That becomes readily apparent as one’s plane descends to Ben-Gurion International Airport. Spread out below is a charmless carpet of parking lots, rock quarries, interchanges, housing projects and supermarkets. It doesn’t get better at ground level: More parking lots, quarries, interchanges, housing projects and supermarkets.

In winter and spring the weeds manage to conceal the ugliness in certain places, but as summer looms, the truth will out: This country has become irreparably uglified. No one can honestly say that it’s beautiful. Well, maybe fans of horror-movie, post-apocalyptic landscapes can.

Poor planning and neglect can be found in other countries, too. But they compensate for it with spectacular wild landscapes and architectural gems. Not so in Israel. Once there was a delightfully beautiful country here, but no longer: Zionism has wrought irredeemable destruction on it. In the long term, this is the principal legacy of the Zionist project. Political regimes will come and go here in the future, as they have done in the past. But eons will be needed to undo the ecological and aesthetic harm we have inflicted on the earth. A limestone hill truncated by bulldozers is now gone forever. A lizard that has become extinct will never exist again. If it would take a few million years for the world’s flora and fauna to rehabilitate themselves from the damage wrought by humanity to the planet, undoing the damage caused by Zionism will take twice as long.

In the past it was possible to say that Israel was not wealthy enough to take aesthetic considerations into account. But that’s no longer the case. Israel is a rich country that looks like a backward one. The real estate-childbearing amalgam – a fusion of a money-machine and a hatchery for the Jewish people – runs roughshod over every flower, stream or bird. Which is ironic, because Zionism was always so obsessive about the Land of Israel and its vistas. But it took revenge precisely on those biblical landscapes that for generations were identified with the Promised Land – drying out the Jordan River, vaporizing the Dead Sea and crisscrossing the Jezreel Valley with highways...

Read more: Israel Used to Be Beautiful. Then Came Zionism