This post is part of a long series about Palestine as a country, culture, and humans across multiple communities in hopes that I spread the word about Palestine and what is happening there.

The fact that I am an Arab obviously comes with perceived bias which is a perception that I accept considering that most of the people on this platform are not Arabs. As much as I believe it is something I am able to refute using my own history, I prefer to keep the focus of this series on Palestine itself and let the series speak for itself.

However, considering the aforementioned fact of my identity, I have challenged myself and limited myself to use mostly sources that are outside of the Arab world when it comes to facts. Therefore, all the events mentioned here come from non-Arab sources which you will be able to verify yourself by reading the sources below. In fact, I implore you to check out those sources regardless of the series.

On May 14th, 1948, Israel was established as a country. As part of the Zionist narrative, it announced itself as a small David standing in front of a big Goliath. During that time, it should be noted the majority of the world's strongest countries recognized it very quickly. US President, Harry Truman, recognized Israel after no more than 11 minutes. It was, however, the next day, May 15th, 1948 when Arabs announced war on Israel.

New York published the headline:

JEWS IN GRAVE DANGER IN ALL MOSLEM LANDS

If you reflect on the headline, you can easily how it plays off the recent holocaust that had just occurred in Europe. Israel is a state established with its propaganda ready to go. One day after it was announced one of the biggest newspapers published the aforementioned headline. What the title shows is Jews are another minority facing a huge Muslim tide, reality is different.

This is when you look at the entire SEVEN Arab armies and realize that they only had around 25,000 soldiers. That's right! Arabs completely miscalculated this war, their armies weren't as regulated as you might think. They are armies coming from countries that were still under occupation or mandate, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia didn't have presidents or rulers at the time.

On the other side, the Israeli army started the war with 35,000 soldiers, soldiers who were trained and prepared for this moment. Not only that, by the time the war ended, Israel had 100,000 soldiers.

Again, just in case you missed the last episode and only started reading this part; Arab armies weren't regular armies who lost to a bunch of gangs. In fact, just by reading this series, you'd know that they weren't just gangs. These groups have been training with the British, participated in World War II, have been in operations, have funding, have been fighting for years, and were handed fully weaponized military arsenal and camps by Western countries.

In addition, Arabs completely fucked up the reading of the situation and didn't consider any of the factors I mentioned in this series so far. That's why Arabs were so shocked by the defeat. How was a group of armies from 7 different countries defeated by a bunch of gangs? Because as we said, those weren't just gangs. These are armed forces who committed massacres during the war, like the bombing of Lyd and Ramla, and the Tantura massacre that I spoke of at the beginning of this series.

According to Ilan Pappe, massacres were no longer committed when there was a reason, or even part of a strategy, they happened for the sake of happening, or as Ilan Pappe better described it:

Zionists no longer see that they are killing humans.

This is not surprising as this has been a feature throughout this series, Zionists saw themselves entitled to those lands, and the British prime minister saw the inhabitants as "dogs in managers".

Post-Defeat

In August 1948, after the defeat of the Arab armies, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to surrounding countries, Count Bernadotte, the UN ambassador, visited Palestine and the refugee camps in Jordan. He was terrified by what he saw and was quoted:

No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the homes from which he has been dislodged. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the Right to Return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.

Bear in mind, this is the very same man who negotiated the release of 35,000 people out of the Nazi concentration camps. Unfortunately, he died quickly after the statement above. The Stern gang saw him as a puppet of the British and Arabs, however, it was the Lehi gang who assassinated him through Yehoshua Zettler who got the green light from three men in charge of the Lehi gang, including Yitzhak Shamir.

Yitzhak Shamir would go on later to become Israel's Prime Minister later. I honestly started to feel that it is just a requirement of the position.

By December 1948, the Jews occupied 85% of Jerusalem outside the Old City in front of the eyes of the UN and the entire world. Israeli Historian, Hillel Cohen, said that thousands of refugees from Sepphoris and surrounding villages took shelter in the Christian city of Nazareth. Why do that? Well, because they knew that Ben Gurion wouldn't attempt to destroy it or ethnically cleanse it as the rest out of fear of its importance to the Christian world. Those thousands of refugees were the nucleus of the 1948 Arabs, to those unaware of the term, that's the name of the Palestinians inside the newly established Israel.

Zionists attempted to bring back Christian villagers from villages like Al-Bassa, but to return but without the Muslims. Why? To establish the narrative of Christian villages safely existing in Israel to affirm their war as a war of defence with Arab Muslims. However, it didn't go their way as the Palestinian Christians of villages like Al-Bassa, refused to return without their Muslim brothers and sisters.

The Right of Return

In 1949, the UN issued Resolution 194 guaranteeing the Right of Return for every refugee expelled. How many refugees are we speaking about here? How many refugees were expelled in the Nakba? 750,000 refugees! We're talking about 1948 here. 75 years later, the refugees' number went up to 5 million refugees.

The Argentinian researcher, Pedro Brieger, during his visit to refugee camps in Palestine, found that all the children were introducing themselves with the names of the villages their ancestors came from. Those children knew nothing of the villages except their names. They never got to visit it, they never got to see it. Yet, they still call themselves after those villages.

They still had keys to the homes they were kicked out of. Generations would still pass on those keys, one to another. That Right of Return to Palestinians was guaranteed by the UN in 1949, but as you probably know now, was never implemented. However, just a year later in 1950, Israel declared a legendary Right of Return stating that any Jew has the right to return to Israel, a country that sees itself as an extension of the Jewish state that existed prior to the Roman Invasion in 70 B.C, almost 2000 years ago.

It's ironic, why would someone who never lived in the land, their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and a few generations beyond never lived in that land, have the right to return? Return to what? You were never here, it would take you climbing up around 200 names in the family tree until you reach someone who lived in the land. Meanwhile, someone who had lived in the land, not more than a year ago, had no right to return. The only condition for Israel's return law was to have a Jewish mother.

Just imagine a Jewish Russian, his ancestors, 20 generations back, lived in Russia, Died in Russia, and were buried in Russia, that person would have the right to return and go to Israel, get citizenship, and all the rights the moment he steps out of the plane. Literally on the other side, in the West Bank, there's the Jordan River, which has Palestine on the left and Jordan on the right. A Palestinian refugee in Jordan could literally be looking at his old home but can't cross the river to get to it.

The law of the return of the Jews is the culmination of a Herzl idea, based on freeing the Jews from all their diaspora and creating a pure-race society, a society just for them. They get to create their boundaries and cancel the others, whether by avoidance, expulsion, or genocide.

How Much Land is Enough Land?

By the time of the Peace Treaty in July 1949, Israel wouldn't only claim 55% of the land as per the 181 resolution, but actually 78%, the UN easily recognized those borders, most likely they were afraid of getting assassinated by an Israeli aspiring to be a Prime Minister. The UN dubbed that the "Green Line".

Theodor Katz, the Israeli historian who was mentioned a lot in the first and second part of this series, said that the morality of the IDF lives on an eternal fallacy that they didn't find a land without people, but instead found 1.3 million Palestinians there. Those people very well existed, but to the eyes of the Zionist gangs and then the Israeli army, they weren't humans.

Maybe that's how Israelis will inherit this myth, a group of psychological defence mechanisms, denial, and justification to help them sleep at night and forget that only a few meters below the land all the evidence needed for killing, genocides, and ethnic cleansing. The reason I started this series with Al-Tantura is because what happened there is also what happened in the entirety of Palestine.

The only myth that's left now is Israel being "The Only Democracy in the Middle East" and that would be the final part of this historical series.

Previous Parts

Sources

The Arabs: A History - Eugene Rogan
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe
Ten Myths About Israel - Ilan Pappe
Palestine: ...it is something colonial (Decolonizing the mind)
One hundred questions and answers about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Pedro Brieger
Tantura Documentary
Executions and Mass Graves in Tantura - Forensic Architecture
Israel’s 55-year occupation of Palestinian Territory is apartheid – UN human rights expert
"Nakba Law" - Amendment No. 40 to the Budgets Foundations Law
Eye Witnesses Statments
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 1 | Featured Documentary
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 2 | Featured Documentary
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 3 | Featured Documentary
Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 4 | Featured Documentary
Anatomy of the Israeli mind
Collusion Across The Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement, And The Partition Of Palestine - Avi Shlaim

The Tragic Story of Palestine - Part 12: The "David vs Goliath" Myth (2/2)

Post-Defeat

The Right of Return

How Much Land is Enough Land?

Previous Parts

Sources