A land without a people for a people without a land

By Ali Karbalaei 
It's also one of the biggest injustices the Zionists have portrayed against the Palestinian people as it wipes out their cultural heritage and identity. In this way Israel has tried to do in an effort to depict a tale that Palestine had no existence and the settlers have some kind of God-given right to squat on another people's indigenous land.

As freedom-seeking people across the world mark the 75th Nakba Day, when at least 800,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homeland by Zionists in 1948, experts point out the slogan was used as far back as 1831 and not something coined by the Zionists themselves.

Today, the Palestinians number 14 million, the majority of them living in refugee camps outside their occupied land. They still hold on to the keys of their homes and ancestral homes, which are currently occupied by Israeli settlers. They also strongly maintain the hope that they will return to their native land in the not-so-distant future.

They are the most oppressed people on the planet, and this catastrophe, which is what the word Nakba means, will not end until they return to their homeland.

Zionists had tried to argue as early as the beginning of the 20th century that Palestine was a farmland with no inhabitants but even prominent Zionist leaders such as Israel Zangwill backtracked and acknowledged several years later during speeches in New York and London “the density of the Arab population in Palestine".

Zangwill himself then changed his own position after studying the facts. He advocated for a Jewish population to settle in Uganda instead of Palestine and parted ways with the Zionist movement.

In 1917 he wrote “‘Give the country without a people,’ magnanimously pleaded Lord Shaftesbury (a British politician), ‘to the people without a country.’ Alas, it was a misleading mistake. The country holds 600,000 Arabs.”

Historians and researchers say the land was inhabited by at least 800,000 Palestinian Arabs before the Zionist movement began its deadly ethnic cleansing campaign. Throughout the decades, Palestinian officials have repeatedly slammed the fake narrative that Palestine was a land without a people until foreign settlers arrived, and it miraculously blossomed.

The real author of this whole tragedy is none other than Great Britain who also in 1917, during its colonialist era, promised the Zionist movement which ironically staged terrorist attacks on the British themselves, and only represented a sliver of the global Jewish population, the land which belonged to the Palestinians under the Balfour Declaration.

The British knew perfectly well that the land was inhabited by people, their identity and race.

Despite this, in an illegal public pledge by Britain's then foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour, Palestine was offered to the Zionist organization as a home, in a country whose indigenous people would later be mercilessly and brutally ethnically cleansed.

This followed sustained efforts by the Zionist organization and came despite the Zionist terror attacks against British interests.

Just a few yards away from Balfour's former office at the British parliament in London, where he signed the declaration, is a map with a country named Palestine written on it in the West Asia region. There is nothing that says Israel.

How can you name a country Palestine if it was a land without a people? Surely, the name of a desert would be on the map in the British parliament today next to Balfour's former office and not the name of a country.

This alone totally destroys the Zionist myth about “a land without a people for a people without a land”. It also destroys the Zionist myth that "Israel" and the Holocaust are somehow connected as the Balfour Declaration was made in 1917, way before the Second World War.

There will be no peace in West Asia until there is justice for the Palestinians.

That means the return of all Palestinians back to their land including “the right of return” as enshrined under international law, meaning the descendants of the Palestinians that were kicked out of their country in 1948 as well.

Justice means a one state solution with a referendum granted to the 14 million Palestinians to decide for themselves on who governs the occupied land.

This explains why former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley declared in August 2018 that the right of return for Palestinian refugees should be removed from any eventual peace settlement with the Zionist entity.

If there was a referendum today, the Palestinians would overwhelmingly win it, as they largely outnumber the Israeli settlers squatting in the occupied Palestinian territories.

This further explains why, for decades now, Washington has been floating the idea of a two-state solution.

This is at the heart of the matter, and if there is no peace in West Asia, there can be no peace in the world.

While the one-state solution may sound like a pipedream to some, it is closer to happening than at any time in the history of so-called Israel's 75-year existence.

There is an incredibly rising tide of recognition and awareness among people across the world that this conflict will not end without the land of Palestinians returning to its rightful owners.

The number of pro-Palestine movements and organizations that have sprung up over the past decade, which are non-Palestinian, yet are actively pursuing the rights of the Palestinians speaks volumes.

The record number of pro-Palestine activists among the younger generation in university campuses and colleges is a strong indication that they realize the security of their future and global stability hinges on justice for the Palestinians.

This rising tide even extends to more and more non-Zionist Jews who don't accept nor recognize the Israeli occupation over Palestinian land. The number of Jews who are joining anti-Israel street protests is rising by the year.

Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. There are many Christian Zionists. Something that was highlighted when former U.S. President Donald Trump relocated the American embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem) in May 2018.

"We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem," Trump said. "That's for the evangelicals (Christians)."

"You know, it's amazing with that – the evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people," Trump added. "That's right, it's incredible."

Trump moved the embassy to win evangelical votes back home. For evangelical Christians, the illegality of even having a foreign embassy on occupied land is further evidence of their Zionist affiliation.

This is while the number of settlers who see no future security for them in the face of the resistance are leaving the occupied Palestinian territories in their droves.

The current internal crises unfolding under Netanyahu are driving even more settlers to immigrate back to where they came from.

Justice for Palestinians means reparations and war tribunals for all the Israelis who committed countless war crimes and massacres against Palestinian civilians, in particular children.

Developments over the past two decades show that the rapidly rising power of the resistance against Israel can help bring this apartheid child killing machine to an end.

The Secretary-General General of Lebanon's Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, believes that he "will be among the Palestinian generation who pray in the al-Aqsa Mosque" in occupied al-Quds.

That means Palestinians will return to their land that has been occupied for 75 years.

SOURCE:TEHRAN TIMES