Canadian Arab News Such is the case with Remembrance Day. As I wrote two years ago around this time, the poppy has become a symbol of hypocrisy, and the moral lesson of the World Wars is now a perverse anachronism that is exploited to justify the sort of cruelty we fought against: “The men and women who died in these wars gave their lives so that we today could live free from tyranny. But do we seriously believe that our soldiers, airmen and sailors fought against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan only to bequeath to us a world terrorized by Israel, the U.S. and Great Britain? What right do we have to indulge the conceit of our own virtue when we have become the enemy and are doing to Arabs and the Middle East what Hitler did to Jewish Europeans and Europe?”
So long as the ramifications of WWII persist, we should not pretend that the war is over and indulge our selective memory. In the name of honesty and respect for whatever may be left of the Western, democratic virtues that our veterans died for, “Remembrance Day” should be abandoned in favour of Nov. 29 “Catastrophe Day.” It, at least, is relevant to our times. It was on Nov. 29, 1947, that the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 (“The Partition Plan”) by which it carved a Jewish “national home” out of Arab Palestine. The great moral imperative behind the resolution was the collective guilt that the West was made to feel because of Hitler’s crusade against Jews. No amount of rationalization, though, can obscure the criminality of the resolution, since the UN has no authority to take land from one people and give it to another. Even David ben Gurion conceded the point in 1935: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” One casualty of the zionist theft of Arab land is village was the village of Suba, 10 kilometers west of Jerusalem. In 1945 the Muslim population totaled 620 with the land divided as follows: Arabs, 4,082 dunams; Jews, 15; public, 5. (1 metric dunam in Palestine at the time equalled 1,000 sq. ft.) From July to October the city was attacked repeatedly by the Haganah and Palmach. The village was destroyed and those civilians who were not killed were expelled. Suba was one of more than 468 Arab villages destroyed by invading Jewish armies. In all, from Nov. 29, 1947 until Dec. 31, 1948, nearly 800,000 Arabs were made refugees in their own land. Even Gen. Moshe Dayan admitted in April 1969 that not a single place built in Israel did not have a former Arab population. We should mark Nov. 29 on our calendars because the Partition Plan is the great progenitor of Palestinian suffering, and every aspect of Middle East violence can be traced to this one event. Moreover, such an observance would force us to acknowledge past and future Canadian complicity in this violence. For example, then-foreign minister Lester Pearson was an integral proponent of the partition of Palestine, which initially saw 57% of the land go to invading Jewish colonists. For his efforts in pushing through the partition, Pearson was awarded the medallion of valour by Israel. Pearson would later win the Nobel Prize in 1956 for his intercession in the Suez Crisis, and is widely viewed as one of Canada’s great diplomats, yet he is at least partly responsible for the greatest human tragedy since the end of World War II. Second, a Nov. 29 observance would focus our attention on the ease with which zionist interest groups flout the law at will. Technically speaking, the Partition Plan, does not exist. It originated in the General Assembly and as such had to be ratified by the Security Council for it to exist in any legal sense of the word. Since it was never ratified, the division of Palestine into Jewish and non-Jewish areas was also procedurally illegal. Third, when David ben Gurion declared Israeli statehood on May 15, 1948, the mandate of the Partition Plan still had three months to go. Thus, his declaration was nothing more than a profession of theft—sanctified by the world community, of course. Finally, “Catastrophe Day” would focus our attention on the farce of Israeli victimhood. We hear ad nauseam how Israel has the right to defend itself, has a right to exist, blah, blah, blah… but look at its borders now compared with those of 1948:
Can there be any wonder that Palestinians live in abject misery and fire rockets into Israel? What purpose did the Partition Plan serve if Israel never had any intention of respecting it? These are the sort of questions we should be asking ourselves. To persist in treating the Palestinians as aggressors and the Israelis as victims, is just as odious as siding with Hitler against the Yiddish Jews of Europe. This year Nov. 29 will be marked by the bulldozing of a Palestinian elementary school. To all of this, our government, the same one that lays memorial wreaths on Remembrance Day, says nothing.
In the (updated) words of another November commemoration, the Gunpowder Plot of Nov. 5, 1605: Remember, remember, |
