Gaza’s Alleged Historical Irony

Marium Mangi

Karachi: The victims of genocide in Germany have turned perpetrators of genocide in Gaza.

On the terrible night of November 1938, a cyclone of hatred swept through the streets of Austria and Germany, leaving behind shattered lives and shattered glass. The world remembers this night as the ‘Night of Broken Glass.’

Jewish homes that were once symbols of familial warmth were reduced to smouldering ruins, silencing the echoes of laughter forever. Synagogues, once the places of protection and piece were desecrated beyond recognition, nothing was safe from the Nazis.

That day, the stench of hatred and death was everywhere as Jewish men, women, and children were hunted down, arrested, stripped, beaten, humiliated, and murdered. The very essence of being a Jew was a crime.

The Nazi-perpetuated Holocaust accounted for six million Jews. Concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka were scenes of unimaginable horror. Jews faced mass extermination by way of being shot, sent to gas chambers, being subjected to starvation, forced labour, and medical experiments. Their suffering was beyond belief and imagination.

Those who survived had nowhere to go. No other country was ready to take up the responsibility, but Palestine was. In 1943, Jewish refugees entered Palestine carrying a banner saying, “Germans destroyed our families and homes; don’t you destroy our hopes”.

Palestinians welcomed 4000 Jews as guests, not knowing that they were sewing seeds for their own genocide.

The groundwork to make Palestine a Jewish homeland began earlier with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. In this declaration, the British Government indicated support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate to administer Palestine. During this time, tensions increased between Arabs and Jews. By the time of World War II, the massacre of Jews by the Germans intensified global sympathy to create a safe land for Jews in Palestine.

In 1947, a Jewish campaign was launched across the world, calling Palestine a land without people overlooking the fact that forth generations of Palestinians had lived there. This was a conspiracy enacted by the British-American alliance for the creation of Israel by confiscating the rights of Palestinians to their land. Jewish foreigners arrived from America, Europe, Russia, and other parts of the world to lay claim to a land that was not theirs.

The United Nations’ partition plan to divide the country into two halves with Jerusalem as an international city came as something of a bombshell to Palestinians. They were not ready to have their land divided. Jews accepted this plan, but Arab leaders rejected it.

Despite objections from Palestinians and Arab leaders, on May 14, 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel was declared by David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency. Israeli The new slogan of the Jews was that “we will live to see the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River with nothing but Jews. Palestine will be ours!

Inevitably, this could not be acceptable to the people of Palestine, who were seeing their land being usurped by Jews. The Soviet Union, the United States, France, Great Britain, and China appointed a UN mediator to recommend a solution to the conflict. The Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was serving his commission.

He stated, “It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flowed into Palestine and, indeed, at least offered the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who had been rooted in the land for centuries.”

It was the first time that someone independent spoke objectively about the rights of Palestinians. It provided a ray of hope, but “the Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish terrorists,” and the Palestinians hopes were dashed.

In the year 1964, the birth of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) added a new dimension to the Palestinian struggle for their land. It spearheaded the irrepressible heartbeat of the people yearning for a voice, recognition, self-determination, and restoration of their stolen homeland and dreams. It was a declaration of intent to reclaim the Palestinian right to a homeland.

In June of 1967, the Six-Day War tore through the fabric of the Middle East when Zionist Israel attacked Egypt, and Arabs responded. However, Israel emerged victorious, defeating the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

The war resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the annexation of the Golan Heights, and the seizing of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula by Israel.

The devastation caused by this war was beyond belief. The journalists covering the war related horrifying accounts of human misery. “Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, men, grandparents, and babies—all lying together in terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death.

Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses”.

It was here that a female volunteer trying to save the lives of two girls barely five years old was stopped by an Israeli soldier, but she did not care and said, “You are no different from Nazis who stood in my way when I cared for Jews in the Second World War.”

In the corridors of the United Nations, in 1967, Resolution 242 was born, calling for the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from the territories occupied in the Six-Day War.

In 1973, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Resolution 338 emerged, calling for an immediate ceasefire and the initiation of negotiations for a peaceful solution. Then in 1974 came Resolution 3236, affirming the inalienable rights of Palestinians, including the right to self-determination, national independence, and sovereignty. A plethora of other resolutions followed:

Resolution 3379 in 2003; Resolution 1515 in 2003; Resolution 1860 in 2009; Resolution 2334 in 2016; and Resolution for Human Rights (ongoing) all condemn the Israeli settlement in the occupied territories and the human rights violations by the Israelis.

Despite the piles of resolutions, the UN failed to resolve the issue of Palestine because of its overabundance of American interests, ineffective enforcement mechanisms, strategic interests of major ‘international powers’, and the changing world power dynamics.

Even today, Israeli air strikes and tanks continue to obliterate Gaza without respite.

Therefore, isn’t it ironic that from the 1940s until today, Jews have brutally killed, raped, tortured, stripped, and humiliated Palestinians exactly the way they were treated by the Germans?

Have they forgotten that they were mistreated by Europe and not the Arabs?

The world must recognise that Israel does not have any right to “defend” itself if it is occupying someone else’s homeland. However, the Palestinians do have the right to defend themselves against an aggressor.

War is not the answer to Israel’s fears and discomfort. Palestinians will continue their struggle in whatever form or shape. Israel will not be able to kill their spirit and love of their land. Israel will never enjoy peace unless it concedes to the rights of Palestinians. The two-state solution in accordance with the pre-1967 borders seems to be the only solution to gaining peace in the Holy Land.

Marium Mangi is an international relations student at Karachi University. She writes on gender equality, environment, gender-based discrimination and women’s education & health.

The article is the writer’s opinion, it may or may not adhere to the organization’s editorial policy.

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