World leaders will never admit that “7 October” actually started well before 7 October last year; that the entire history of the Zionist state brought to fruition through enabling colonisation in Palestine is to blame for the current Israeli genocide in Gaza and the unleashing of its killing machine in Lebanon and the wider Middle East. For decades, the UN has instructed the world in submission, and altered the significance of important dates in history to reduced symbolism and fake remembrance, while Israel benefited from the impunity granted by the international sense of oblivion imposed on its victims.
And now, with Gaza decimated and its population rendered refugees, disappeared in mass graves, rotting under rubble or dismembered by Israel’s relentless genocide — and Lebanon suffering a similar fate — the events of 1947 and 1948 are still ignored. Palestinians are trying to survive a genocide; the least the world can do is remember where and when Israel’s own journey from massacre to massacre and ongoing carnage started.
There is no excuse for feigning ignorance.
Even with Israel keeping most of its archives classified, there is enough information to attest to the fact that the 1948 Nakba was the first genocidal step committed by Israel, encouraged by the 1947 UN Partition Plan which was based on racism and colonial conquest.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN that the Israel will continue bombing Gaza and Lebanon, while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called publicly for diplomatic negotiations, the usual game changer for Israel and status quo for the colonised. The US, however, also admitted to helping Israel to shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles. “We are proud of the actions that we’ve taken alongside Israel to protect and defend Israel,” US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday. Only colonisers and former colonisers would use such a term while knowing that the entity they protected is responsible for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that the possibilities exist of a perpetually destabilised region in which it becomes easier to annihilate the Palestinian people for the sake of the Zionist concept of Greater Israel.
Despite such visible annihilation, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi last week told Israel that its security would be assured by Arab countries if the military occupation ends and a Palestinian state is allowed to exist. Unless Israel is stopped, it will exist within its colonial framework whether or not it is guaranteed security. Of course, Safadi is also eliminating the fact that Israel’s security narrative is the only concept that creates threats for the rest of the region. What threats truly exist for Israel from Arab countries, when the eagerness to appease the occupation state takes precedence over all else?
The UN must be called out for authoring the biggest travesty of human rights ever recorded — the signing off of Palestine to the Zionists without consent.
In 1948 the international organisation ignored the ethnically cleansed Palestinians and offered a pathetic resolution as compensation – the right of return of refugees – which is as blemished as the organisation itself given that such “return” of refugees is conditional on Palestinian obligations. Now, 76 years later, the UN – both as a political actor and a willing, side-lined spectator – can look at its monstrous creation and call emergency sessions, but will not lift a finger to stop Israel. This is the result of disregarding the importance of historical memory. Meanwhile, Palestinians and other civilians across the region will keep paying the price for the UN’s protection of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine.
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