The original wound

The original wound is still raw – septic. Yet the work of wounding continues, daily, without let, without hindrance.

The original wound

The original wound was inflicted in 1948 – the Naqba (Catastrophe) marking the expulsion of the settled, indigenous inhabitants of Palestine from their homes and land.  The methods: Intimidation and brute force at the service of the ethnic cleansing project that was, and still is, the modus operandi of the Israeli State. 

The State of Israel, a colonial and colonising State – a peculiar, almost ahistorical aberration seemingly out of time with the wider world where, for example, European countries were beginning to glimpse and face up to the inevitability of having to relinquish their colonial possessions. Israel – history in reverse.  Out of time.

Starting here, with the unhealed wound of 1948, alerts us to what has too often been obscured, that Occupation and Colonisation did not start in 1967, after the Six Day War. It started in 1948.

Between 1948 and 1967, Israel worked, as it still works, to erase Palestinian history. A patina of contrived forgetfulness lays upon the land. Walk where you will, look where you will, and you’ll not be far from a forest or institution, the presence of which masks, and is designed to mask, the Palestinian village or cemetery destroyed by Israel. Be that the Jewish National Fund’s South African Forest – billed an ecological-conservation-motivated project – which overlays the destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya; or by Tel Aviv’s coastline, at the site of what is now the Etzel Museum, which was once part of the Palestinian village of al-Manshiyyah. Then there is Al-Shaykh Muwannis, which abuts the campus of Tel Aviv University. Down the road a large building that was once part of the Palestinian village is now a faculty club.

Where you walk in Israel, you walk on injustice.  This original wound has festered for seventy-three years and counting.

The perpetual wounding

Israel did not have to hold on to the West Bank, Gaza, still less East Jerusalem after the 1967 war. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported Senator Fulbright’s 1970 proposal ‘that America should guarantee Israel’s security in a formal treaty, protecting her with armed forces if necessary. In return, Israel would retire to the borders of 1967.…As Israeli troops were withdrawn from the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank they would be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. Israel would agree to accept a certain number of Palestinians and the rest would be settled in a Palestinian state outside Israel.’ 

But the wounding continued. The strategic Israeli aim of acquiring and retaining Palestinian land, but removing as many Palestinians from it as possible, has been and continues to be the principle and reference point of Israeli policy. What began in 1948 continues. It is now fifty-four years and counting, of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.