Sixty years ago this month, the State of Israel was declared in historic Palestine. Less than a year after this declaration, when a ceasefire was declared, Zionist forces were in control of 78% of Palestine. Yet the creation of this State came at unspeakable cost to the Palestinian people, who had been living there continuously for centuries. 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland, fleeing from the Stern Gang and the Haganah militias and the newly created Israel Defence Forces.
Many were chased directly from their villages; others fled, hearing of the massacres inflicted upon other Palestinians, such as those of Deir Yassin, where over 100 people, including at least 50 women and children, were brutally and systematically murdered. In order to ensure that those who were fleeing the terror would never be able to return to their homes, 418 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Neither their inhabitants, nor their descendants, have ever been allowed to return home, in direct contravention of UN Resolution 194, which demands that ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so.’
To describe this ethnic cleansing and the brutal destruction of their homeland Palestinians use the word Nakba – catastrophe.
For the first two weeks of May, the Israeli Cultural Society (ICS) is inviting Oxford to join them in celebration of Israel’s 60th birthday. We are appalled. The state of Israel was built on the burning ruins of Palestinian homes, and is ensuring the Nakba continues to this day. Any celebration of its ‘birth’ is an open and defiant justification of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Is this what we are being asked to celebrate?
Since its establishment, Israel has continually enacted discriminatory policies towards the Palestinian population both inside and outside its borders. It has prevented internally displaced persons from returning home, and the legal system and government of the Israeli state discriminates against Palestinians on vital issues such as the purchasing of land, building permission, economic assistance for development towns – the list goes on. Is this what we are being asked to celebrate?
The Palestinians of the West Bank have lived under occupation for more than 40 years, an occupation which poisons and stifles every aspect of their lives. Since this occupation began, Israel has attempted to colonise the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, by building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land, and creating a segregated road system – with certain roads reserved for Jewish settlers, and other, inferior roads for Palestinians. Freedom of movement is severely restricted by the checkpoints, road blocks and barriers which choke the West Bank. The segregation wall, which is just the latest attempt to annex Palestinian land, surrounds cities such as Qalqilyah – population over 40,000 – leaving its inhabitants just one entrance. When they are allowed in or out, that is. The wall separates villagers from their farmland, students from their schools, patients from their hospitals, and tears families and communities apart. And let us not forget the policy of house demolitions, which since 1967 has claimed over 12,000 Palestinian homes, leaving over 70,000 people without shelter and traumatised. Is this what we are being asked to celebrate?
On the 5th of May, camels will be arriving on Broad Street as part of the festivities. Such a superficial gesture ignores and trivialises the tragedy suffered by the Middle East; meanwhile the falafel and shisha pipes, sold to us as Israeli culture, represent Israeli appropriation of Palestinian heritage, which is slowly and stealthilyeroding the Palestinian nation’s link to its homeland and denying it the dignity a society needs to survive.
One event in particular is cruelly ironic – a talk entitled ‘Israeli Medical Achievements – Saving Lives Worldwide’. Why is it, we wonder, that Israel saves lives worldwide, but regularly refuses to allow food aid, fuel and medicine into the Gaza strip? What is Israel, which controls Gaza’s borders, airspace and coastline, doing to save Gazan lives? Just last week, the United Nations reported that it has been forced to halt desperately needed food aid distribution, upon which more than 1.1m Gazans are dependent, because Israeli-imposed sanctions have created massive fuel shortages.
It is with bemusement and outrage that we find ourselves being asked to celebrate 60 years of Israel’s existence. If the ICS wish to celebrate ethnic cleansing, racism, and the daily persecution of an entire nation, we will most certainly not be joining them. Oxford Students’ Palestine Society believe this is a reason for protest, not celebration, and we invite you to stand with us.
