Imagine for a moment that you were forced from your home, and forced at gun point to walk 10 miles, the air a sweltering 90 degrees as the sun beats down in you.
As you slowly make your way, you see bodies strewn intermittently on your path, either dead or barely clinging to life. Imagine that as you walk, some of those bodies you see are familiar to you. Perhaps a distant peer, maybe a friend, maybe even family.
You consider stopping, but you hear warning shots ringing out about your head. Eventually you finally reach your destination, but you know in your heart that returning home is a distant dream.
Perhaps what springs to your mind are images of the Holocaust, or maybe the trail of tears. No doubt similar stories have been told from Jewish and Native American brothers and sisters, but what I’m speaking to now is the plight of Palestinians forced from their homes in an event known to Arab people around the world as the Nakba, a word banned from Israeli textbooks.
Between Dec. 31, 1947 and July 20, 1949 some 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, and a conservative estimate of 10,000 were killed to make way for the modern state of Israel.
The initial partition plan voted on by the U.N. on Nov. 29, 1947 gave the incumbent Jewish state 56.47 percent of what was then referred to as Palestine, and gave the Arab State only 42.88 percent, despite the Arab population doubling the Jewish population at the time.
By the end of 1949, 78 percent of the territory was held by Israel.
Fast forward to 1967 to the six-day war, when Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt, claiming a defensive preemptive strike (a claim refuted by U.S. intelligence). Israel seized even more territory, obtaining the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt.
Although Israel eventually withdrew from the seized territories, they maintained, as they still do today, an oppressive presence in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In the periods between 1987-2023, which contained events such as the first and second intifada, two armed uprisings against Israel, which are still used as justification for the treatment of Palestinians today, and to which there is no doubt that Israeli citizens did die in terrorist attacks, the death toll is incomparable.
A total of 10,273 Palestinians were killed in that period, compared to only 1,337 Israelis.
And that leads us from Oct. 7, 2023 to today. I need not rehash what happened on Oct. 7, doubtless a tragic event, but one that we’ve all seem the disproportionate response from Israel.
Not to mention the state of apartheid (a word Israel preposterously claims is anti-Semitic) those in the West Bank live under. While Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military court, Israeli settlers, those who illegally claim Palestinian territory inside the West Bank, who have enacted a protracted campaign of harassment of Palestinians, supported By the Israeli government, are subject to the constitutional protections of Israeli criminal court. Not to mention the permits those in the West Bank must obtain from Israel in order to build on their own land.
It’s easy to say now, after witnessing the destruction and misery that Israel has brought upon the Gaza strip, that they are on the wrong side of the current conflict. But a look back at Israel’s brief history will tell us that Israel has always been on the wrong side of history, but it took the war in Gaza for us all to start finally seeing it.