Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have now demonstrated a heroic willingness to stay in their historical homeland despite the death and destruction Israel caused to their daily lives, which had already been tough under Israeli siege.
In the early days of their aggression on the besieged strip, Israeli leaders appeared to be rubbing their hands in glee believing that the time had finally come for Israel to apply the “final solution” to the Palestinian headache: a mass displacement of the Palestinian population from the Gaza Strip and then the West Bank into Egypt and Jordan respectively.
Israeli officials started a wave of bluster, all encouraging the Gazans to head south all the way to the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. They used every tool at their disposal from air leaflets to SMSs to make the Gazans know their intent. While some Gazans moved south, the majority of them remained firmly anchored in their houses. Even those who departed in the first days, decided to return home, partially because there was no safe place throughout the Palestinian enclave. Interestingly, no one gathered at the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border to flee to Egypt.
The Palestinians’ attachment to their land is spectacular given the massive nature of Israel’s barbarism. Israel has deliberately targeted each and every civilian infrastructure from hospitals and schools to water storages and churches, putting the lives of the civilians not just in danger of carpet bombing, but also starvation.
Doctors in Gaza have been forced to perform surgeries without anesthesia due to the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel. “Doctors and nurses in Gaza’s teetering hospitals, which are nearing collapse without electricity and basic supplies, say they must now decide which patients get ventilators, who gets resuscitated, or who gets any medical treatment at all. They make snap decisions amid the screams of small children undergoing amputations or brain surgeries without anesthesia or clean water to wash their wounds,” the New York Times reported on Monday.
Despite the harsh conditions, however, the Gazans are adamantly opposed to any displacement plots, which constantly invoke bitter memories of the Nakba.
To understand the Palestinian attachment to their land, one has to take a look at the painful history of Palestine. Ever since its establishment in 1948, Israel has been grappling with a Palestinian demographic “problem.” Of note, Jews have historically been a minority in Palestine, who used to live in peace alongside the Arabs throughout history. This coexistence was shattered by Zionist figures who mostly migrated from Europe to Palestine in the early twentieth century. David Ben Gurion, the founding father of the Israeli regime, was a Polish Jew like many other Zionist leaders who had nothing to do with Palestine and the East in general.
When these Zionist fanatics declared the establishment of Israel in 1948, they had one big problem to deal with: how to rule a land with a majority of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. Their solution was simple: massive massacres and displacements of the original people. From day one, the Zionists embarked on a deadly campaign of terror and displacement. As a result, more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave Palestine while many others were slaughtered by Zionist terrorist groups such as the Haganah, which later were incorporated into the so-called Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The irony is that many Gazans hail from now-defunct Palestinian cities inside the Israeli apartheid regime such as Ashkelon, Ashdod, Negev, etc. In a sense, Gaza is a big refugee camp brimming with Palestinians from all across the lands occupied by Israel. And these Palestinians have already experienced displacement several times over the course of the history of the Palestinian tragedy.
So, when Israel asks Gazans to leave Gaza, it actually reminds them of their stolen lands and homes in Ashkelon, Haifa, Jaffa, Ashdod and so many other cities taken over by Zionists.
Ironically, Israel implied that displacement would be temporary and that the Gazans would return home after the end of the war. But with Israeli settlements metastasizing to wherever Israeli soldiers set foot, Palestinians know full well what Israel is up to.
In their quest for displacement, the Israelis also lobbied Europe and the U.S. to put pressure on Egypt, which has roundly rejected Zionist plans to transfer the Gazans into the Sinai. At the end of the day, the Egyptians have never forgotten how the Zionists’ greed led them to build settlements on the Egyptian Sinai itself before 1973. What is astonishing here is the complete disregard of the Zionists for how they are seen in the region. They are morally bankrupt in the eyes of the whole region. Yet, they think that some would be naïve enough to fall for their machinations.
All in all, the Palestinians are here to stay- in their historical land. Perhaps, it would be better for the patchwork society of Israel to do justice to Palestine and leave what they stole from their previous hosts.
By Sadegh Fereydounabadi
First published by Tehran Times
