Point of no return Aaqib Md Shatil They have no future, no present, and no past. They do not have any home to return to In 1895, Theodor Herzl, a correspondent for a French newspaper, closely observed the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer of the French Army, for his alleged collaboration with the German Embassy in Paris. Herzl witnessed the wrath of the French people who were chanting “death to the Jews” all the time during the trial. He realised that there should be a separate state only for the Jewish population. He is known as the father of political Zionism. Herzl’s idea came to light when the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, Arthur James Balfour, was convinced with the idea and took steps to establish a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. On September 11, 1922, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine. During the days of Mandatory Palestine, with the help of the British government, the Jewish population from different corners of the world took shelter in the land of Palestine. In 1947, the United Nation formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55% of Palestine’s land to the Zionists. Within a year Zionists captured more than 76% of the land. On May14, 1948, the state of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognised Israel. Since then, Israel has continued its hegemonic attitude towards the Palestinians as well as the Arabs. In the summer of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Settlers were offered state subsidies and development aid to move into occupied territories. Almost every day, more Palestinian families are forced off their land and driven into refugee camps. Palestinians who continue to live in Israel do not have the same rights as Israelis and live as second-class citizens in their former homeland. Every story has three sides to it – yours, mine, and the facts. It has always been a Herculean task to find out the facts from the other two stories. But in the case of Palestine, only the Israeli version of the story had been found to read since the Arab-Israel war of 1948. The international media, being completely controlled by the Israeli sympathisers, have never dared to utter the truth of Israeli atrocities in Palestine. The Palestinians had never taken it so easily, and sometimes reciprocated violently. The Munich massacre is considered one of the most formidable responses to the Israeli atrocities. Later on, some armed groups like Black September, Hamas, etc, tried to fight the battle for the Palestinians. But the rebuttals to all these actions were crueler than that of the Palestinians. After the Munich massacre, Prime Minister Golda Meir launched “Operation Wrath of God” to uproot Black September and hunted down almost all the masterminds of the massacre, including Ali Hassan Salameh, who was the founder of Black September and had led an assassination attempt on Golda Meir. Golda Meir used to say that the Palestinians do not exist. During the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948, around 700,000 Palestinians had to leave their homeland and reside in the neighbouring Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. After the annex of West Bank and Gaza strip in 1967, the number of Palestinian refugees increased. Since World War II, Palestinians have been the largest refugee population in the world. Around 5 million Palestinians are living in the refugee camps of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. They have been living there for decades. Every day, this population is getting larger than ever. These refugees are provided with no basic rights. Almost no education, limited healthcare, and extensive malnutrition are leading this Arab population to endless troubles. The luxuries of the modern world are more than a dream to them. While Israeli Jews are investing in their companies and building better futures for their children, Palestinians are passing days with almost no future and leading their descendants to catastrophic consequences. And the others who still dare to live in Palestine are settled into a routine of frequent airstrikes, being killed by the Israeli soldiers in the bordering area of their state. Millions of Palestinians have died since 1947 due to the conflict with Israel. After every event that caused any harm to the Israelis, Israel launched air assaults upon the Palestinians. They were slaughtered en masse, their houses were demolished, and more than a hundred habitations were dismantled. According to recent developments, almost a hundred Palestinians were killed while many more were injured. Amid pressure from the international community, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ruled out any possibility of ceasefire and firmly declared to continue his campaign. The Israeli defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, proclaimed that they will continue this drive until they realise that the terrorist groups of Palestine have learnt a good lesson. This time Israel is using the iron dome missile system. This system can determine whether the rocket soaring through the sky is likely to land in an open field or crash into a building in a city. In case of the latter, a counter-missile will be deployed to intercept it and will destroy the rocket in the sky. Israel has installed seven such missile batteries around the land. After the installation of such missile batteries, the question that arises is whether there is any necessity to continue airstrikes to save the lives of Israelis from the rockets of Hamas. More than a hundred years back, Theodor Herzl, the father of the state of Israel, felt the agony of stateless people. Herzl did his best to give his people a land where they can reside forever, a land that will be a home to them. But now Israelis are responsible for making Palestinians the world’s largest refugee population. Today, Palestinians have to flee every single day to save themselves from the Israeli assaults, just like Jews in Germany during the World War II. They have no future, no present, and no past. They do not have any home to return to, and the paupers’ graves where their predecessors were buried were either annexed by the Israeli settlers or bombed. Evil falls suddenly, no one can say when. Israel has driven the Palestinians to the point of no return, where they either have to fight or become a part of the statistics. Slaughtering the entire Palestinian population will not only hamper the peace process of the Middle East, it will also create potential threats for all of mankind. courtesy. : Dhaka Tribune
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 09:20:43 +0000
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