Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan

 

On November 28-30 Israelis will glimpse a picture that has been distorted or withheld in the past. The Tel Aviv Cinematheque will  stage the First International Nakba Film Festival with three days of documentary and fiction films by Israeli and Palestinian directors spotlighting Israel’s biggest taboo - the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in their country.



The festival will be inaugurated by a documentary, On the Side of the Road, by Israeli journalist Lia Tarachansky, who grew up in the Soviet Union, migrated to Israel, lived on an illegal settlement and eventually discovered that some Palestinians had been killed and the majority uprooted when Israel was created. With determination and moral courage, she undertook to research and present the truth to her countrymen and the world.



The Israelis maintain that the United Nations voted to partition Palestine and that the Jews accepted the plan but Arab armies attacked them and told the Palestinians to get out of their way so that they could kill the Jews.

Western media and politicians accepted this version as the gospel truth. Palestinians’ efforts to narrate the truth fell on deaf ears.



The gradual opening of Zionist archives, however, is now revealing the facts - 40,000 armed Jewish militiamen assaulted the Palestinians, who lacked a militia, arms and training, and began an orgy of killing, looting and expulsions. Arab armies intervened only eight months later but were beaten back by the better armed and trained Israelis.



In Canada Tarachansky and other Israelis, including Miko Peled, son of Gen. Matti Peled, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass have highlighted the wholesale victimization of Palestinians. In the US also Israelis and American Jews spoke out when they learned what had happened and is still taking place.



Israeli lobbies dubbed these critics of human rights violations anti-Semitic or “self-hating Jews” and attack them continuously. But their conscience impelled them to keep speaking against injustice, deception and oppression. So the Independent Jewish Voices of Canada are calling for ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (which is besieged), scuttling the Israeli laws that deny Israeli Arabs the rights that Israeli Jews enjoy and recognizing the right of the expelled Palestinians to return to their homes or be compensated for the theft of their property.



Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark, a co-host of Beyond the Pale, a US Jewish radio program, said that the publication of Ari Shavit’s Lydda, 1948: A City, a Massacre and the Middle East Today in The New Yorker, October 21, 2013, is a “welcome chink in the wall of silence around the Nakba, the forced dispossession and expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.” 



Israeli right-wing scholar Benny Morris shed light on Zionist expulsions and atrocities in his work, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.



Several American Jews wrote to Hollywood celebrities, who were celebrating the 60th anniversary of Israel’s creation, that they should not ignore the “systematic and ongoing ethnic and religious discrimination against the Palestinian people.”



They wrote, in part: “Sixty years ago, Zionist groups destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages and made more than 800,000 Palestinian people refugees in order to create a Jewish state in a land where the majority was not Jewish. This has come to be known by Palestinians as the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe,’ and this Nakba continues today. Inside the 1948 borders of Israel, Palestinian citizens are denied equal rights to Jews under the law.



Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are denied access to land, water, healthcare, and other basic resources. Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees throughout the world, all of whom are denied their internationally recognized right to return to their homes and land simply because they are not Jewish…



“As Jewish North Americans, we are outraged at the policies the state of Israel has implemented in our names and with our government’s financial support for more than sixty years. At the same time, we are inspired by the ongoing creative resistance of the Palestinian people, and most recently the unified civil society call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law. We ask you to heed this call. ….”



Some support Israel blindly, others oppose the occupation of the West Bank but they also reject equal rights for Jews and non-Jews in Israel and the right of return of expelled Palestinians. Now more Jews are stating that only by ending the siege of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, providing equal rights to all citizens in Israel and respecting the expelled Palestinians’ right to return will Israel become a democratic state and will the Middle East have a just peace.



Most media and politicians in the West seem to lack the courage to speak the truth or to stand up for justice for everybody. It is encouraging that some Jewish people are taking the lead in the struggle for human rights. This principle should be applied in the Middle East and throughout the world to make it a safer, and better place, for everybody.

 

— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.