Where is it written that Palestinians have to be killed? Good question.

The speaker was a Palestinian woman, a refugee from Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria; she is now a double refugee living, if that’s the right word, in northern Jordan. Where, she asked, is it written that Palestinians have to be killed? It is a good question. Hard-core Zionists might cite Old Testament authority for the Jews to kill goyim, but most reasonable people will have to admit that the lady has a point. It isn’t written anywhere. Nor is there a sensible argument against her logic that if Palestinian refugees are a problem then let them go back to their land and they would no longer be refugees so there would be no more problem.

This anonymous lady (anonymity isn’t such a bad thing when you are a Palestinian refugee in a violent neighbourhood) spoke to my colleagues and I when we visited Irbid in Jordan last week. Her points are timely, given that the cause of all of her problems, and those of the millions of other Palestinian refugees, will be celebrated by Israel and its supporters around the world (including state-funded Jewish schools in Britain, no doubt with Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove’s approval).

Israel’s “independence” came about through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; through the terrorism of Jewish militias; through lies; and through the complicity of Britain and the United States. What Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) will be commemorated in just 4 weeks’ time, with May 2014 signalling the 66th anniversary of the State of Israel and the Palestinian refugee problem.

Apologists for Israel tend to overlook the undeniable fact that the creation of the state is the prime cause of the unrest in the Middle East; they claim that Israel has a “right” to “defend” itself from Palestinian “terrorism” when, in fact, it is the Palestinians who have the legal right to defend themselves from Israel’s military occupation of their land. The Nakba reminds us all that the occupation of Palestine started officially in 1948 and not 1967. Those who support the so-called two state solution insist on going back to the 1967 borders, ignoring conveniently that those lines on the map were the Armistice (“Green”) Lines set out after the Nakba; any acceptance of them as the border of “Israel” and “Palestine” basically condones what took place in 1948 and the ethnic cleansing of the land that was Palestine.

Have those very sincere campaigners for Palestinian rights who back this notion and Israel’s “right to exist” ever considered what their stance actually signifies? Do they really accept that the Nakba had to take place; that those Jewish militias, including the Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists, had a “right” to kill Palestinian men, women and children in order to steal their land; and that the arbitrary choice of 1967 as the starting point for “peace negotiations” has genuine legitimacy when numerous UN resolutions suggest otherwise?

Last week, Labour leader Ed Miliband visited occupied Palestine and explained how Israel gave sanctuary to his relatives who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. He condemned “settlement expansion” but not Israeli settlements per se, giving tacit approval to Israel’s occupation and colonisation of ever more Palestinian land. While Israelis and their well-funded lobbies around the world decry efforts to “de-legitimise” their state, Miliband’s and visitors like him lend legitimacy to what are illegitimate policies and practices implemented by the increasingly-rogue Zionist state. The Holocaust was, of course, unique in its application of industrial techniques to the murder of an entire race of human beings, but that doesn’t justify the exceptionalism that Israelis and their supporters claim for themselves.

Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations on condition that it allowed the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. This point cannot be stated too often, for if Israel wants to be treated as a normal member of the international community it has to abide by the laws and conventions which the rest of the world is expected to follow; and be prepared for appropriate sanctions if its government chooses not to. It cannot be allowed to demand “exceptional” treatment as of right while denying any rights at all to millions of Palestinians.

Do not believe for one moment that the founding fathers of Israel did not consider the impact that their state would have on the Palestinians; the evidence shows that they knew very well that they were establishing a state on someone else’s land, but they went ahead with “Plan D[alet]” regardless. If they had allowed the early refugees to return straight away who knows where we might be today. There wouldn’t be a massive “problem” of Palestinian refugees, that’s for sure, and that Palestinian lady from Yarmouk Refugee Camp wouldn’t be asking her very reasonable questions. The state of Israel, however, would be a very different place; possibly less aggressively-Zionist and probably more open to co-existence by necessity rather than political doctrine. And who is to say that that would not be a much better Israel for everyone trying to get on with their lives in the Middle East?

The crisis in the Holy Land today is, therefore, very much of Israel’s making; Ben Gurion and his cronies went ahead with Plan D knowing where it would lead. It is not the Palestinian resistance to occupation which is the problem, but the occupation itself, and that started in 1948, not 1967. The sooner that we all acknowledge and accept that very basic fact, the sooner that a genuine peace based on justice for Palestinian refugees might become a reality.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.