If you live in Brisbane, please join us at the al Nakba commemoration in Brisbane square (Reddacliff Place) at 1 PM this Saturday the 13th of May 2023.
The creation of the state of Israel was an absolute disaster. If Britain, joined by Australian troops, had not attacked the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli and in Palestine during the first World War, Israel may never have existed. The Ottomans ruled Palestine but did not occupy it in the same brutal way Israelis have done since the Second World War.
“The Battle of Nablus took place, together with the Battle of Sharon during the set piece Battle of Megiddo between 19 and 25 September 1918 in the last months of the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the First World War. Fighting took place in the Judean Hills where the British Empire’s XX Corps attacked the Ottoman Empire’s Yildirim Army Group’s Seventh Army defending their line in front of Nablus.” – Wikipedia.
We post these articles (Scholar heckled for raising Al Nakba and Palestinians overwhelmingly support armed struggle to end occupation) from Mondoweiss below.
We are mindful that only the Palestinians can decide how to conduct their struggle for independence against Israeli domination and US imperialism. – Ian Curr, Ed. 8 May 2023.
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Jewish scholars dare to bring up the Nakba, at Center for Jewish History — to boos
When scholar Omer Bartov described the “brutal” expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba, he was heckled and booed. Audience members at the Center for Jewish History shouted “Shame!” and one walked out.
The Center for Jewish History in New York yesterday held an all-day conference about American Jews and Zionism to mark Israel’s 75th anniversary, and it exposed the great tension inside the Jewish community over Zionism.
Three speakers insisted on talking about the Nakba. And there was pushback– in one case boos and shouts of “Shame.”
Omer Bartov, a professor at Brown, gave a talk on the “Legacy of 1948” that described the Holocaust and the Nakba as “irreconcilable” events. While Zionism was a logical response to the Jewish genocide in Europe, he said, “in the wake of the Nakba, nothing could sound more just than the demand of the Palestinians to be allowed back into their own land, from which they were brutally expelled.”
A scholar of Eastern Europe, Bartov said that the impossibility of partitioning the land points the way toward a democratic future: “to dismantle the barriers, to recognize that this land can be a home only when it is finally all of its peoples’ homeland.”
Bartov was heckled and booed. Audience members reportedly shouted “Shame!” and one walked out. There were also groans when a panelist referenced J Street!
Mira Sucharov, a Canadian scholar, addressed the hecklers respectfully at the start of her talk to try to disarm them. She then detailed the shelling of Jaffa in April 1948, in which 68,000 of the 70,000 residents of the Ajami quarter were “emptied out into the sea.” She then observed that when her relatives fret about Jews being pushed into the sea, this is “literally” what took place to Palestinians in 1948, before the creation of the state. (A point I have made myself.)
Read more at …
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Three-fourths of Palestinians in occupied territories believe it is impossible to create a Palestinian state. As a result, 54 percent “support a return to armed confrontation and intifada.”