Once again the Palestinians are being dispossessed, and once again, most of the rest of the world doesn’t care. From Jonathan Cook at consortiumnews.com:
Israel is openly carrying out ethnic cleansing inside Gaza and yet, just as during the first “Nakba,” Israel’s lies and deceptions dominate the West’s media and political narrative, writes Jonathan Cook.
History is repeating itself — and every politician and establishment journalist is pretending they cannot see what is staring them in the face. There is a collective and wilful refusal to join the dots in Gaza, even when they point in one direction only.
There has been a consistent pattern to Israel’s behaviour since its creation 75 years ago — just as there has been a consistent pattern to the “see no evil, hear no evil” response of western powers.
In 1948, in events the Palestinians call their “Nakba,” or Catastrophe, 80 percent of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their lands in what became the self-declared Jewish state of Israel.
As Palestinians maintained at the time — and Israeli historians later confirmed from archival documents — Israel’s leaders lied when they said Palestinians had fled of their own volition, on the orders of neighbouring Arab states.
As the historians also discovered, Israeli leaders lied when they claimed that they had pleaded, first, with the 900,000 Palestinians inside the new state’s borders to stay and, later, with the 750,000 forced into exile to return home.
Rather, the archives showed that the new Israeli state’s soldiers had carried out terrible massacres to drive out the Palestinian population. The overall ethnic cleansing operation had a name, Plan Dalet.
