Newspaper
Pagina/12
Buenos
Aires, May 16 of 2001
The Palestinian Nakba (view)
By Suhail Hani Daher Akel *
In 1947 when the United Nations launched its resolution 181 with the partition of Palestine into two states: an Arab one and a Jewish one, the international conscience assumed a comfortable moral reparation with the Jewish suffering in Europe. However, the consequences and the suffering of the people involved were not taken into account. From 1948 - with the creation of the State of Israel-
it began a new suffering and a tragic catastrophe on other people, in this case the Palestinian people.
53 years from the Palestinian Catastrophe (Nakba), worry, grief and suffering are fully shared by two people: the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. Unlike Palestine that has suffered from the international indifference since 1948 and the Israeli occupation since 1967, Israel became an independent State.
Before this reality, with the Peace Conference in Madrid (1991) ten years ago and with the direct accords between la PLO and Israel (1993) later on, some light appeared as a thread of hope for the two people who were anxious about putting an end to violence and beginning a new stage. So the warm handshakes of the leaders, the flowers of the Palestinian children towards the Israeli soldiers and the white T-shirts of the Israeli children with the phase “Salam-Shalon” marked the leit motiv of those who started to understand the “Peace of the Braves”.
Everybody thought that the situation was not easy and Israel did not assumed the accords such as it had signed them. But we did not expect that frustration and the abuses of the crisis filled the restored and beautified streets with stones of a new Intifada to stop the arrogance of the tanks of the Israeli military re-occupation.
Again war drums deafened the region. Deaths, frustrations, suffering and massive grief again. Again the intolerance of the Israeli Government, which in spite of the unease of the Israeli members of a progressive party, unloaded all its war potential against the Palestinian civil population. The population found itself in the middle of toxic gases, banned bullets, impoverished uranium, tanks, helicopters furnished with artillery and bulldozers.
The United Nations resolutions were again converted into ink on paper. While the powers compromised with the Palestinian-Israeli Agreement did not manage to get over the speech diplomacy to pass to the diplomacy of action, which allows to put an end to the agony suffered by the Palestinian people and to Sharon’s anger to carry out his old dream of the Palestinian ethnic cleansing.
The renewed Palestinian loneliness and disappointment eclipse with the usual semantics of the Israeli leadership when trying to confuse the role of the occupant and the occupied and when focalizing its aggressive state terrorism as a punishment against the “Palestinian violence”. Actually when the Intifada - which is the legitimate expression against colonialism and it is not violence but resistance of the people decided to live in freedom, in peace and with dignity over their small territory – is just a 23 per cent of the historic and millenary Palestine.
* Palestine Ambassador in Argentina