Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City, toward the end of the Ottoman Empire’s control over Palestine.
Palestine was once a place where people lived alongside their Jewish, Christian and Muslim neighbours peacefully. Palestinians welcomed refugees, those needing refuge, and was proud of its people, its traditions and its humanity. Holy buildings, schools, hospitals, markets; they all existed alongside each other and served the communities there.
In 1917 the British government announced its support for the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in Palestine. Palestine was then the Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. This was called the Balfour declaration and was financed by high profile Zionists at the time including British company, Marks & Spencer.
The Balfour Declaration: [letter from] Arthur Balfour, Walter Rothschild, Leo Amery, Lord Alfred Milner. 1917
Between 1896 -1948, Jews came to the area now known as British-controlled Palestine, already home to majority Muslims, with minorities Christians and Jews. Over time, as a result of the atrocities faced by many people in World War Two, when over six million Jews were murdered, Zionism grew in popularity as a political organisation and taught the notion that in order to be safe, Jewish people needed a purely Jewish state, and quoted from the Jewish holy book, the Torah (aka the Christian Old Testament of the Bible, much of which is also in the Islamic holy book, the Qu’ran) referring to Jerusalem and the area around it as the Holy Land.
This form of Jewish nationalism, in the name of Zionism shaped Palestine into the two ‘states’ of Israel and Palestine.
In 1947, the United Nations intervened and voted to split the land into two states.
Israel have subjected Palestine to increasing levels of apartheid ever since.
Zionism is the ethno cultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th century Europe to establish and maintain a Jewish homeland through the colonisation of Palestine. In Judaism, this region corresponds with the land of Israel and essential to Jewish history Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.
The word earlier ALIYAH means assent and refers to the immigration of Jews to this geographical land of Israel or the Palestine region which today chiefly represented by the state of Israel.This was described as the act of going up to the Holy Land of Jerusalem. Moving to the land of Israel became one of the most basic tenets of Zionism.
Through ‘the law of return’ that was passed by the Israeli parliament in 1950, all diaspora Jews as well as their children and grandchildren have the right to relocate to Israel and require Israeli citizenship and maintain their Jewish identity. Since the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, more than 3,000,000 Jews have made ALIYAH. As of 2014, Israel and the Israeli occupied territories contain approximately 42.9% of the world's Jewish population.
Zionists used the term ‘transfer’ to describe the removal, or in fact the ethnic cleansing, of the Palestinian population.
The ‘Transfer’ was not only seen as desirable but as the ideal solution by some Zionist leaders. This was not always the case across the growing state of Israel. Yet the genocide of Jews had frightened many in to thinking their safety relied upon the genocide of yet another ethnic group. Zionism thrived on fear and suspicion and destroyed a community that until 1948 had lived side by side in relative harmony.
The Zionist, the Zealot and the Emergence of Israel
Geoffrey Lewis 2009 (Bloomsbury)
The Balfour Declaration: letter from Arthur Balfour, Walter Rothschild, Leo Amery, Lord Alfred Milner.
My Father tried to hide the NAKBA. But it found me
