From ‘vibrant’ society to rubble, Palestinian narrative is heart-breaking

Israel is trying to destroy Hamas. But it has failed to locate the Hamas militants and the captives they seized in their murderous rampage into Israel on Oct. 7.

Instead, the full impact of Israel’s relentless military campaign has fallen on a defenceless population — more than two million Palestinians, trapped within the walled compound of Gaza, with no possible refuge. For six months, Israel has bombed them, their homes, their schools and hospitals, killing 32,000 and reducing their society to rubble. It has cut off access to food and medicine.

This extreme power imbalance has long been the case in the territory known as Palestine, where the stories of two peoples are deeply intertwined, but we’ve only really paid attention to one of those stories.

We in the West are very familiar with the heartbreaking story of Jewish refugees fleeing hideous persecution in Europe, including pogroms and the Nazi Holocaust and their resettlement in a Jewish homeland in Palestine — a story powerfully imprinted on the Western imagination in the iconic 1960 Hollywood film “Exodus,” starring Paul Newman.

We’ve been less aware — to the point of ignoring — the story of the hundreds of thousands of Arab-speaking people who lived on the land that was to become the Jewish homeland.

The very existence of that original Arab community has frequently been denied amid suggestions that Israel was established on barren land — a suggestion repeated recently by B.C. cabinet minister Selina Robinson when she said Israel was founded on a “crappy piece of land.”

In fact, there was a “vibrant Arab society” there, according to Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, author of “The Hundred Years War on Palestine.”

As Gaza is besieged, we should finally pay some attention to the Palestinian narrative, which is also heartbreaking. Consider it a long-overdue land acknowledgment.

In even a thumbnail sketch, it’s a story of immense suffering, going back to the First World War when the collapse of the Ottoman Empire left the territory under British military control. The British quickly proclaimed the Balfour Declaration, which stated their support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as advocated by European Jewish activists known as Zionists.

The Balfour Declaration also made clear that there would be no homeland for the Arab-speaking people who had lived in Palestine for centuries and who made up 94 per cent of the population (while Jews made up 6 per cent), notes Khalidi.

For decades, the British encouraged European Jews to immigrate to Palestine and to organize politically and culturally. The British denied such organizational rights to the Palestinians, who were discriminated against and brutally repressed when they rebelled.

After the Second World War, the Palestinians found themselves further disempowered when their fate was largely determined by the U.S. — an even more fervent supporter of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — and the new global superpower.

When the United Nations voted to partition Palestine in 1947, the Zionist forces prevailed over the Palestinian population, destroying hundreds of Palestinian villages, killing thousands of Palestinians and expelling more than 700,000 from their land in what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe.

Today, millions of Palestinians still live in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, while in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinians are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers, some of whom have acted as vigilantes.

The Palestinian story — which started with a “vibrant” society — continues today with the heartbreaking events in Gaza, where children are starving to death.