| In Palestine and among the working and oppressed peoples around the globe, May 15 is marked as Nakba Day. It is the Day of Catastrophe, the day on which an entity known as the State of Israel was declared and imposed on Palestinian territory by Zionist gangsters which used the Security Council of the United Nations to achieve its aim.[1] On Nakba Day, Palestinians throughout occupied Palestine and the refugee camps of the region, and Palestinians throughout the world reassert their right to return to the lands and homes of which they have been stripped by Israel. Supported by the Obama Administration in the U.S. and the British government, Israel continues to refuse to acknowledge any right of return for Palestinians. Far from receding into the past, the events of the Nakba and the Palestinians' determination to overturn the genocidal verdict of the imperialist powers concerning their continued existence as a people continue to stir world opinion. During the 60th commemoration of the Nakba in 2008 and since, for example, Palestinians have taken to massing as close as possible to the truce lines between Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Typically the monopoly media in the U.S. and Britain, report these confrontations as "riots," giving sympathetic details about Israeli army casualties. But the world's peoples are by no stretch of the imagination ready to dismiss the entirely just struggle and sacred national aspirations of the Palestinian people. In Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Palestinians this year are marking Nakba Day amid an unprecedented mobilization of support for hunger strikes which started in March and were transformed into a mass hunger strike in mid-April by more than 2,000 of their brothers, sisters, fathers, uncles and aunts who have been held without charge for years at a stretch under "administrative detention" in Israeli prisons. Israel was the creation of a handful of Great Powers following the Second World War. One of them, the United States, was rising at the time and two of them, Great Britain and France, were nearing collapse. On Palestine and a number of other matters, these Great Powers used the permanent seats they occupied on the Security Council of a newly-minted United Nations to rewrite some parts and disappear other parts of customary international and humanitarian law and on this basis establish the post-war arrangements and give their own meaning to the right of nations to self-determination. The artificial, externally-imposed and consciously anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab character of the so-called "State of Israel" ushered into existence by this bloc actually continued and further developed a "Creation story," originally cooked up during the First World War by the British imperialists in cahoots with French colonialists, for something called the "Jewish national home." This notion of a "Jewish national home" was a cover story for the British and French colonialists' bid to exploit the collapse of Russian influence on the diplomacy of the Ottoman imperial court. The notion itself was first put forward in a letter dated November 3, 1917 from British Colonial Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron Edmund Rothschild subsequently dubbed the Balfour Declaration -- which the Palestinian national movement labels "the First Nakba." At that time, the Rothschilds' pan-European banking system was bankrolling the armaments manufacturers on both sides of the Great War on terms premised on the "balance of power" that existed at the outbreak of the war. At this time too, however, on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was in a state of collapse and no longer in a position to help hold in check the forces of rebellion roiling whatever remained of the eastern Ottoman empire. In its Arab regions, the Ottoman empire was an entity whose four centuries of cruelty had "dried men's eyes with rage," as the Palestinian historian Sami Hadawi would later write. It was with the view of filling this vacuum and denying that rebellion its victorious culmination that Balfour wrote his imperialist paymaster that His Majesty's Government would "look with favour" on the creation of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. The Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian peoples who rose up in rebellion at the time were victimized by a ruthless secret diplomacy managed from London and Paris, rigged up with various Arab sellout "leaders." For example, nothing was ever said explicitly about whether Balfour's reference to a "Jewish national home" meant support for a Zionist state. That omission enabled any compromised Arab parties to these dirty deals to complain later that they "didn't know." Similarly, Balfour gave no hint of the agreement forged a year earlier by British and French diplomats Mark Sykes and Jules Picot respectively on behalf of their governments, to carve up the territory of the "Greater Syria" portion of the Ottoman empire at the end of the Great War. France would grab Syria and Lebanon while Britain would capture Palestine including Jerusalem. Despite the secrecy of the deals, it eventually became known that the foreign ministry in France was in correspondence with a number of prominent Arab leaders about the outlines of this scheme. The eventual robbers' deal struck among the Great Powers presented in the form of the Balfour Declaration was given the patina of "international law" in 1919-1920 by being incorporated into the League of Nations Covenant -- the founding document of that body. The Rothschild banking system proceeded to finance one of the first mass human smuggling schemes of modern times, providing 1,001 props and back doors to facilitate the movement to Palestine over the next 15-18 years of tens of thousands of Jews mostly from the war-ravaged zones of the former Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in eastern and southeastern Europe. The profits from such human smuggling were assured by the fact that such emigration undertaken without official British authorization was banned under the "Mandate" London was granted over Palestine by the League of Nations. Meanwhile, as Balfour himself later admitted, the strategic common interests of the Rothschilds and the British Empire greatly outweighed any humanitarian concerns about the injustice being done to the Palestinian Arabs as a result of propping-up this Zionist emigration scheme. These interests centred on retaining British imperial control over the Suez Canal -- whose construction and operation the Rothschilds had financed -- by preparing conditions for giving rise to a European "Palestine" statelet positioned at the closest available proximity to the Canal. In the discussions at Versailles to formally end the First World War, the United States opposed the Anglo-French bid to extend their colonial system into the eastern reaches of the former Ottoman Empire. However, they did not publicly oppose the "Jewish national home" idea. They wanted only to block its being accepted and used to ramify the stealthy assertion of Anglo-French colonial stewardship over Greater Syria. To this end, the U.S. unofficially supported the organization and despatch of the so-called "King-Crane Commission" to travel the region and take evidence from Palestinian and other Arabs of the region, rejecting any further colonial interference in their struggles to assert their right to national self-determination. Note 1. The catastrophe ("Al Nakba") made refugees of over 800,000 Palestinians, who were uprooted from their land and homes by marauding Zionist terror gangs and the British-trained soldiers and British officers of the "Haganah" army. International law recognizes the entitlement of these original refugees -- and the continued entitlement as well of their more than six million descendants alive today -- to a right of return to their lands and homes. International law further acknowledges a right of return for the 350,000 Palestinians displaced by the Israeli army in the June 1967 war. A large number of this latter group of refugees inhabit the Gaza Strip today, a region so besieged by the Israeli Occupation as to be known worldwide as "the world's largest open-air prison camp." On May 15, 1948 the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel which erupted into the brutal Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe was also catastrophic for United Nations (UN) ringing the death knell for its stature and authority. Like medieval kings, the US and Israel employed the UN to be its fool running around with a cap o' bells and sceptre (rendered useless by US veto) beginning with the 1947 Resolution 181, passed on 29 November by members (under coercion) recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states which was understandably rejected by Palestine but accepted by Israel as a step toward its Zionist expansionist goal for the full realisation of a Jewish Eretz Israel. The Nakba marks the onset of Israel's systematic ethnic cleansing strategy with the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and the forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian civilians fleeing Haganah, Irgun and Lehi units that carried out the savage and systematic military offensives codenamed Plan Dalet. Forced to leave their cherished lands, the Palestinian exodus dispersed to 58 squalid refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank as well as in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. All 4.9 million Palestinian refugees come under the authority of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). Its provision of health, education and humanitarian aid is vastly inadequate to the needs of the camps' three generations of desperate people. UNRWA is funded mainly by the USA, the EU Commission, UK and Germany. This cabal of collaborators which has ignored Palestinian human and political rights since 1948, are in fact, the camps' prison guards perpetuating the normalisation of the Israeli occupation thus relieving Israel of its obligation to honour the Palestinian right of return set down in Resolution 194 (December 1948) of which Article 11 reads; "(The General Assembly) Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible." Israel dismissed Resolution 194, then flagrantly legislated in 1950 The Law of Return that gives all Jews the right to emigrate to and settle in Israel (aliyah) and obtain citizenship. Billions of dollars are spent promoting aliyah, the zenith of Zionism, and spent establishing 200 illegal colonies for over 500,000 illegal, mainly thuggish, colonists on occupied Palestinian land protected by the nuclear might of the Israeli military. Within days after Palestine's failed bid to have its right to membership of the UN passed in September 2011, Israel insolently announced a further 1100 units to be built in the Gilo colony, and weeks later announced the future expansion of 50,000 illegal Israeli houses in Palestinian East Jerusalem. In April 2012, another three colony outposts, Bruchin, Rechelim and Sansana were approved flying in the face of Palestine's prime condition for resuming the 'peace process' -- that Israel stops colony expansion. The end of November 2011, saw Israel's houseboy, the Leader of the Free World and Honest Peace Broker, spit out his dummy summarily withdrawing the US and funding from UNESCO because it approved Palestinian membership in its organisation thereby jeopardising thousands of UNESCO's humanitarian projects. Since 1948, there have been over 105 General Assembly UN resolutions and over 224 Security Council resolutions passed against Israel in relation to Palestine, Lebanon and Syria condemning or deploring Israel for deportations of Palestinians, for refusal to cooperate with the UN, for assassinations, for killing Palestinian students, for denying human rights of Palestinians, for raids on Gaza, for Israel's use of resources from occupied territories, for failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions, for repeated military interventions in Lebanon and Syria, reiterating Israel's claim to Jerusalem is null and void, calling on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories, to comply with UN decisions, reaffirming the "inalienable rights of the Palestinian people," including the right to national sovereignty and the right of return...to name a few. Most have been ignored and/or vetoed by the USA..... Eight years ago, the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on the matter of the Israeli Annexation/Apartheid Wall that 'Israel is under an obligation to terminate its breaches of international law; it is under an obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the wall being built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, to dismantle forthwith the structure therein situated, and to repeal or render ineffective forthwith all legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto, in accordance with paragraph 151 of this Opinion." To this day, brave Palestinians demonstrate and struggle against the relentless encroachment of the Annexation Wall on their lands. In 2009, Resolution 1860 calling for the full cessation of war between Israel and Hamas was passed on the 9th January -- TWO WEEKS after the war began with 200 Palestinians slaughtered on the first day. Ignoring the resolution Israel leisurely prolonged its Operation Cast Lead against unarmed and trapped Gazan families with another 9 days of hellish attacks. It ended the war a discreet two days before Obama's inauguration. In March 2012, Michael Mandel, law professor at Canada's York University stridently criticised the UN's International Criminal Court (ICC) decision to refuse jurisdiction over Gaza war crimes: "It's disgraceful but not surprising that the ICC has dismissed Palestine's complaint against Israel. It sat on the complaint for over three years, always proudly announcing that it was investigating it to give the appearance of impartiality. Meanwhile the ICC jumped to attention in less than three weeks when the US government, which is not a signatory to the treaty, wanted to go to war against Libya, justifying Western aggression with bogus charges against the Libyan regime...Ocampo [ICC prosecutor] and company have been busy putting Africa on trial for crimes aided, abetted and exploited by the rich countries, while the US government killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans, and Israel has been committing Nuremberg's 'supreme international crime' of aggression against the Palestinians for 45 years." Also on May 10, the Electronic Intifada reported that UNRWA's Commissioner General Filippo Grandi's appeal "to the Israeli government to find an acceptable solution, noting that the [more than 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners] hunger strikers' demands are generally related to the basic rights of prisoners, as stipulated in the Geneva Conventions" was hastily removed from UNRWA's website. Israel's impunity to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, its 64-year defiance of UN resolutions amplify the UN's lethal incompetence. 187 member nations (not including Israel's quislings and human rights hypocrites; USA, UK, Australia, Germany, France), are too gutless or subservient or self-serving to protect and enforce the international laws for which they are legally obligated; International human rights law lays down obligations which States are bound to respect. By becoming parties to international treaties, States assume obligations and duties under international law to respect, to protect and to fulfil human rights. The obligation to respect means that States must refrain from interfering with or curtailing the enjoyment of human rights. The obligation to protect requires States to protect individuals and groups against human rights abuses. The obligation to fulfil means that States must take positive action to facilitate the enjoyment of basic human rights. The 64 years of the uninterrupted Palestinian Nakba with its sweeping scale of tragic suffering challenges the UN's moral and political credibility and its very existence as Israel's buffoon. (Nathan J. Freeman, The Marxist-Leninist Daily, May 15, 2012; Vacy Vlazna, Palestine Chronicle, May 13, 2012) |