“From Under the Rubble”

Despite her mother’s tearful persuasion to sleep beside her sisters in the tent, Dalal insisted on sleeping in her bed in the demolished house. She snuggled under the covers and dropped off to sleep as the sound of her mother’s voice told her a bedtime story of a hero fighting evil. The mother called her husband who carried their daughter to the tent.

Dalal was not the only heartbroken child that night. In February 1993, the Israelis destroyed a whole block in El-Amal neighborhood in Khan Younis. They claimed to be looking for a terrorist. The army issued warnings to the residents then bombarded their homes with explosives and rockets leaving behind the rubble of twenty demolished houses.

Our hearts filled with anger as we walked through the remnants of the disaster. I stopped as I listened to a woman saying, “This is the third time. They destroyed our houses in ’48, then they destroyed our house in the refugee camp, and this is the third time. We have spent our lives dreaming of a place to call home; and when we built one, they destroyed it.” I looked around me and saw that tears filled my companions’ eyes; some lowered their heads stung by the pain visible in the woman’s face.

Peace activists from many parts of the world were with me. That day, they realized that Israel’s policy of uprooting, destruction, and military occupation stripped from it all morality. One said, “If what I see before me represents Judaism, then I’m ashamed to be a Jew. I had never thought that the Jewish people who suffered tyranny and death in Europe would victimize the Palestinians to the same effect.”

My friend also talked of how great the Intifada had been in exposing Israel to the world as a nation founded on violence and uprooting, a nation adamant in expelling Palestinians despite their proclamations of peace and co-existence. The peace that Israel wants is for all Palestinians to leave all of Palestine in peace.

Since its establishment, Israel has been lying to the Jewish people and the world. This is what Smiha Flappan of Mapam stated in his book, “Truth and Myth in the Establishment of Israel”. He explained Ben Gurion’s point of view for accepting the UN Partition Plan: “we accept the Partition Plan as a first step towards taking all the land; for now, let the Arabs reject the Partition”.

Following Flappan, Israeli historian Benny Morris used Israeli army documents to prove how Zionist militias wiped out hundreds of Palestinian villages. In addition, renowned author Israel Shahak exposed the racism in Judaism and in the state of Israel, which the Zionist propaganda tried to hide during the past fifty years.

And so, Israel celebrates its fiftieth birthday with the illusion that, as was the promise of Zionism, they have laid the solid foundation for a state that will protect Jews from racism. In reality, Jews from all over Europe came to make Palestine yet another ghetto inflamed in violence, death, and destruction.

With the ecstasy of forming the Jewish State, the pioneers of this venture disregarded the rights of the inhabitants of the land and their history. With the Intifada, the truth became candid to the world as to the real victim in the Arab-Israeli conflict; and as the Arabic saying goes, “Lies are short-lived”.

And now Netanyahu, a new pioneer, turns his back to the whole world calling for peace. His manner calls up images of apartheid South Africa before it finally collapsed.

In this deep crisis, I am hopeful and optimistic. My feelings are not sentimental, but a meditation over the developments of the past 50 years. From under the rubble, the Palestinian people will rise and build their home full of love and peace just like Dalal built a new house where her tent used to be.