It's al Nakba, Just Like It's the Holocaust

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The Israelis are mad that the UN Secretary General used the word al nakba.

Strange is the logic of the Israeli government.

The Palestinians were uprooted and transformed into refugees, their homes and land taken forcefully.

Palestinian heritage, many parts of it, is being stolen and called Jewish Israeli heritage. Even the Middle Eastern dish of Hummus they want to call it "Israeli dip."

1948 is the year of the Nakba/national catastrophe for the Palestinians.

This fact does not negate the need for a political solution to the conflict. This does not mean that peace is not achievable. This does not mean that the Palestinians are not ready for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The Israelis and their friends and supporters can celebrate all they want- and call the creation of Israel any and all they want- a miracle, the best thing to ever happen to humanity, etc.

But for the Palestinian people it was and is a catastrophe. For the refugees living in camps and for the occupied colonized Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza it is nothing other than an ongoing nakba that happened in 1948.

By going after the word Nakba the Israelis are attempting to rewrite history for the Palestinians- trying to steal the memory and the name of the event.

That they can never succeed at. It is itched in the collective conscience of the people and no declaration will change that. The Palestinians live the Nakba every day.

Does the name al Nakba put Israel in a negative light? Yes it does. But it is the truth and the reality of what happened to the Palestinian people. Israeli historians have written about it. Those who read these Israeli historians will agree that the term Nakba is fitting.

Historian Ilan Pappe in his book Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine calls what happened in Palestine "ethnic cleansing." This cleansing, he argues,happened long before Slobodan Milosovic and his murderous Serbian thugs, driven by religious and ethnic hate, made ethnic cleansing a household term and endured a sustained bombing campain by the US for it.

The Israelis asking the Palestinians to call the loss of 1948 other than a Nakba is a travesty on par with the Germans asking the Jews to change the name of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews from Shoah/Holocaust to "the Unfortunate Incident."

Neither will happen.

Rightly so.

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