Yesterday, Israeli soldiers opened fire again on Palestinian demonstrators. In doing so, 52 people were killed and 1,900 injured. The protests took place on the eve of the Nakba, the commemoration of the expulsion of Palestinians from their villages and towns and the establishment of the state of Israel. It is striking that the American government chose this day to open the new American embassy in Jerusalem. Very often the colonial origin of Israel is forgotten, but today it is more important than ever.
It all starts with the British. by supporting the immigration of European Jews who adhered to the political doctrine of Zionism, they started chaos in their former mandate.
Zionism thought to find a solution to anti-Semitism in Europe by colonizing Palestine and establishing a purely Jewish state there. One of their first actions was the establishment of the "Jüdische Colonialbank" (1899) to finance their project. It was an initiative of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. The Zionists wanted to make Palestine a country as Jewish as France was French. That is why the original Palestinian population had to be evict across the border. Unnoticed. This new state, according to Herzl, “should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism."
Theodor Herzl
However, they did not take into account the resistance of the original population, the Palestinians. When the British take over the administration of the country after the division of the Ottoman Empire, one of the losers of the First World War, and support the immigration of Zionist settlers, the first Palestinian resistance movement is founded, the Union of Islamic Christian Societies ( Jerusalem, 1918). They sent a message to the Paris Peace Conference in which they rejected the idea "of a Jewish national home."
This anti-colonial resistance will have highs in 1929 and later during a major strike and revolt in 1936-1939. The British no longer knew who to support and they passed the problem to the United Nations. How to solve that? Divide the Arab country of Palestine into a territory for the natives and one for the European Jewish settlers?
On November 26, 1947, the General Assembly voted. Perhaps it is useful to quote our Belgian ambassador at the time. He uttered nothing but doubts about the plan:
The Palestinian question strongly appeals to us, Belgians. We have trouble understanding the intentions of the Zionists. Our Jewish compatriots have their national home with us in Belgium. None of us have treated them in such a way that they would like to go and find another home in Palestine. They joined us during the war and many Belgians risked their lives for their fellow countrymen, so that our national unity was strengthened ... We are completely not sure that the distribution plan is righteous, we doubt it is feasible, and we fear that it will have terrible consequences ...
The Palestinians found this plan unjust and rejected it because their interests were seen as less important and should be taken into account. The Jewish settlers in 1947 barely had 7 percent of the land and constitute a third of the population: 608,000 out of a total of 1,835,000. Nevertheless, according to the UN plan, they are assigned 56% of the territory. They also planned an international zone, the corpus separatum Jerusalem, in which 100,000 Jews would live next to a small majority of 105,000 Arabs. It had to serve as a common capital.
The Zionist settlers want even more and on April 1, 1948 they start a war of conquest. A month later they supported the idea of a Israeli State. The consequences our ambassador had talked about became much greater than he had thought: 418 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Cities such as Haifa, Jaffa, Akka, Ramla, Lydda, Safad and Tiberias were ethnically purified. For example, 80 percent of the current inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been expelled from the state of Israel. The palestinians commemorate this day; the ‘nakba’ or ‘catastrophe’.
After the Israelis had taken away their land and their homes when the colonial state of Israel was established, the Zionist movement also wanted to erase Palestinian history. With the Bible and the hoe in their hands, the were digging up whole areas in search of purely Jewish relics, or what was purported to be relics. All other layers of history were buried. In addition, the colonial army in 1948 massively looted libraries, the memory of the Palestinians. In total, more than 70,000 books were burned.
To underline the Jewish character of the state and to hide the western origins of many immigrants, they were asked to use a more Hebrew name as much as possible. Simon Persky became Simon Peres, Isaak Rabinowitz is the old name of Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Scheinerman became Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Mileikowsky became Benjamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Benozovich became Tzipi Livni and the famous writer Amos Oz was originally called Klausner.
But the colonization did not end. From 1967 the remains of Palestine were colonized. Israel now has real power over the West Bank: through its military administration and its colonies. 130 colonies connected by 800 km of road infrastructure - which Palestinians cannot use - form a separate area, with separate Israeli legislation. The colonial occupier controls 70 percent of the land, allowing it to quietly expand colonies. The water policy is entirely in the hands of Israel so that the colonists per capita get 5 times more water than the Palestinians and that at one tenth of the price. Israel further controls 80 percent of the finance in the West Bank and the Palestinian armed forces are controlled by Israeli military governors.
But also within Israel the colonization of Palestine continues: in Galilee, where more than 80 percent of the inhabitants are still Palestinian, land is still being stolen for the benefit of Jewish colonies (mitzpe) that dominate and monitor the Arab cities and villages on the hilltops.
Time to decolonise Israel after 70 years.