History of Palestine: the Land of Peace
The Israeli occupation has been going on for over seven decades now, killing over 75,000 Palestinians in wars since the 1948 Nakba.
However, to understand the current situation one needs to take a deep dive into the history of Palestine.
The word Palestine is derived from the Greek Philistia, after the land was occupied by the Greeks in the 12th century BCE.
The Greeks occupied a small partition in Palestine between the modern day Yaffa and Gaza.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, like many parts of the Middle East, Palestine was occupied by the Ottoman Empire.
Shortly after the First World War and with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain assumed responsibility of Palestine in 1920.
During the next two decades, more than 100,000 Jews made it to Palestine in a mass Jewish immigration.
The immigration was a tactic to implement Theodor Herzl’s vision of creating a Jewish state in Palestine.
During the Second World War, the Nazis exterminated a huge number of Jews in concentration camps.
This led more Jews to immigrate to Palestine, to start their own concentration camps and extermination of the Palestinian people.
In 1948, The Jewish immigrants in Palestine received weapons from western nations such as the UK, Czechoslovakia, and the US.
In May of 1948 the Nakba, or the Palestinian Catastrophe, took place.
The Nakba
In the Nakba, which is commemorated on the 15th of May, more than 750,000 Palestinian citizens were driven out of their homes and became refugees, to make room for the Jewish settlers.
The settlers also destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages.
The Nakba came after the United Nations decided in 1947 that Palestinians should settle for 45 percent of the land, while Jews can get 55 percent of the land to set up their independent state of Israel.
Such a massacre led to the 1948 war, in which Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia stood up for the Palestinians’ rights to not be annihilated from their homes.
The West refused to provide the Arab nations with weapons to help fight the Israeli aggression on the Palestinians.
Arabs did not have enough munitions, therefore, ended up losing the war, and the state of Israel was then fully established.
Israel took the time to establish a powerful state with armed forces that will later help in annihilating the rest of Palestinian land.
The 1967 Occupation
In 1967, the occupation forces launched an attack on the remaining 45 percent of the Palestinian lands, along with the Syria’s Golan, and Egypt’s Sinai.
Israel breaks another International Law that the world is blind enough to see and attacks three different countries in one day.
In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched an attack on Israel and tried to liberate the stolen lands.
However, only Sinai was liberated and Palestinian lands along with Syria’s Golan Heights remain under occupation.
The Palestinian Nakba has been ongoing since 1948 up until this day, with innocent Palestinian civilians forced to leaves their homes every day.
The Israeli horrendous acts and war crimes have been targeting innocent civilians in Palestine during the holy month of Ramadan as well as public Muslim and Christian holidays.
The ongoing aggression on the Gaza strip might wipe out the entire Palestinian population, so that Israel can ensure it holds 100 percent of the Palestinian lands.
As the world watches the ongoing massacre of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, one can always remember the Nazi concentration camps, slave trade, the annihilation of the Native Americans, and how the world let that happen.
