This May 15th the Palestinian people all over the world commemorate the 60th anniversary of their Nakba (Catastrophe). As Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, the Palestinian people mourn and remember the massive expulsion and forcible displacement from their homes, villages and towns inflicted upon them by Zionist militias in a systematic drive to create an exclusively Jewish state on Palestine. 

In the fourth and final phase of a Zionist program of ethnic cleansing, known as ‘Plan D’, nearly 457 Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed and about 750,000 people (three-quarters of the population) were evicted or fled for their lives. The immediate consequence was the disintegration of the Palestinian social, political, economic and cultural fabric on whose ruins a new entity was planted, alien from its environs culturally, historically, politically and linguistically.

Now comprising the world’s largest and oldest refugee population, the Palestinian refugees, numbering more than 7 million (one third of them are still languishing in 59 refugee camps across the Middle East) remember with pain and bitterness 60 years of dispossession, suffering and the loss of their homeland. Nearly 4 million of them, according to UN records, are living under Israeli military occupation in the occupied territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. 

In 1986 my parents took me and my siblings on a Nakba journey tracing their first exodus from there. As we arrived at the ruined village, my father tearfully recounted the happy story of a place that was once full of life and love. The spectacle of the village and its bare remains, the piles of rubble and the scorched earth, has left an indelible mark in my memory. But that spectacle also encapsulates the Palestinian story of dispossession and longing for the lost homeland, a story that is etched in the collective consciousness of every Palestinian. 
 
For the past 60 years, Israel continues to deny the Palestinian refugees the right of return to their ancestral homes, in violation of international humanitarian law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and dozens of United Nations resolutions issued since 1948. The United Nations Mediator for Palestine Count Folke Bernadotte, who was later assassinated by Jewish terrorists, stated at the time: “It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right of return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries” (UN doc A/648 September 16, 1948)

Over the past 60 years, the war of 1948 remains the root cause of the Israel/Palestine conflict. The Palestinians refuse to relinquish their natural, historical and legal right of return to their ancestral homeland, while Israel refuses to acknowledge its moral and political responsibility for this tragedy. At the same time, Israel has allowed ‘Jewish people’ born anywhere in the world the presumed right to return to Israel under the ‘Israeli Law of Return’, granting them citizenship upon arrival.   

Israel’s advocates around the world have vociferously held that the return of millions of Palestinian refugees means a ‘policide’ for the ‘Jewish’ state. Should that remain the case, then what we have is not the ‘only democracy’ in the Middle East, but rather a prima facie ‘ethnocracy’; a state where ethnic and religious exceptionalism prevails over universal principles of justice and equity. Can you imagine, just for a moment, if Australia was said to be a country for Christians only, or for Irish or English descendants only?

Sixty years of ongoing displacement in shanty refugee camps and in the Diaspora and 41 years of Israeli occupation have pulverized the Palestinians, turned the occupied territories into fragmented cantons encircled by walls, fences and dominated by ever expanding colonial settlements. Israel continues its suffocating siege on Gaza and imposes a structure of domination on the West Bank that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, in addition to a growing number of prominent figures, has called a regime of ‘Apartheid’ akin to, if not worse than, that of former white South Africa.

The enormity of the 1948 tragedy and the gross injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people are yet to be officially recognized by the major world powers.

The past two decades of negotiations, diplomacy and partial solutions have failed precisely because they fell short of reaching a fair and just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem; a problem that will continue to fuel the Israel/Palestine conflict. For there to be a lasting peace, the uncomfortable truths of what has been done to the Palestinians must be acknowledged.

The world would be a much safer and better place without discrimination and colonisation. Shall we give justice a chance?

Mosheer Amer is a Palestinian doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne.

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