About The Image Of Jews Among Elderly Palestinians Experienced
The 1948 (Nakhba) Catastrophe!
By Dr Salim Nazzal
09 August, 2013
Countercurrents.org
In 1995, I conducted a number of interviews with elderly Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1948. This generation, have known the Jewish terrorism, and experienced the pain of loosing relatives, and the pain of loosing their homes. The interviews were made with various categories of Palestinians: those expelled from Palestinian cities and villages and with persons of various educational backgrounds, and both Muslims and Christians.
All absolutely agree that Palestinians view the Jewish minority in Palestine as friendly people. None of them say anything negative about Jews. But all make a clear distinction between Palestine Jews living alongside Palestinians (Palestine Jews are like us in everything: food, music, language!). And, between the terrorist Jews who came mostly from Eastern Europe.
Most of them expressed their shock to the level of brutality and immorality, of the East European Jewish terrorists. One of them, literary said he could not believe that Jews are capable to be that brutal to this extent.
For most of them, it was difficult to grasp the rationale of this brutality, bearing in mind that Palestinians do not view the Jews as enemies. In their experience, the Jew is the friendly and peaceful man whom they live with. This situation led to confusion when the brutal Jews arrived to Palestine.
This, in my view the reason which might explain the confusion of the Palestinian mindset of that period. Which likely weakened the Palestinian resistance to some extent, based on the simple logic that says to fight an enemy you have to hate the enemy? This made me come to the conclusion that one of the major reasons that Palestinian lost their home in 1948 is apart of the Zionist brutality is that they do not hate Jews.
On the other side, the Jewish terrorists were mobilized to hate the native Palestinians, due to the indoctrination of the Zionist movement, already before they arrive to Palestine. I think they hate Palestinians not because they are Palestinians, but simply because they saw them as an obstacle for their colonization project .And they would have done the same if Zionists decided to make their Israel in Uganda as thought earlier, and if that happened, the Ugandan people would be suffering now.
All interviewed expressed their strong wish to go back home (if they give us the paradise we won’t exchange it with Palestine) many of them passionately emphasized.
Conclusion: I think as long as Zionist Jews continue to deny the native Palestinians right to live as a free nation in their ancestral home (with the help of the west), the chance of finding a solution is next to impossible.
Dr. Salim Nazzal, a Palestinian-Norwegian historian on the Middle East, He has written extensively on social and political issues in the region.
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