Imagine for one moment being a Palestinian living in Palestine. You are a subsistence farmer like so many of your neighbours and you live in peace. The year is 1860.
The Zionists have decided they want to create a home for themselves and they have decided they want to create it in Palestine.
The aim seems reasonable but for the fact that Palestine was already inhabited. That fact was carefully ignored, though not by all Jewish leaders – Ahad Ha’am, when visiting, observed that it was hard to find land that was not cultivated. There was an indigenous people, predominantly Muslim, living in that area who had to be displaced if Israel was to be created. Their rights were not considered.
So they move to an area just outside the Old city of Jerusalem and set up a neighbourhood.
Just 30 years on in 1890, prior to the rise of Zionism, the Jewish population in Palestine numbered 43,000 (approx. 10%), Christian Arabs 57,000 and Muslim Arabs 432,000, with a total population of around 532,000.
In 1914 Palestine had a population of 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews.
Step forward to 1917 and The Balfour Declaration.
In 1917, before the start of the British Mandate (1920-1947), British Secretary of State, Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild (a member of the British Jewish community) promising to help the "establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people", essentially vowing to give away a country that was not theirs to give. Britain considered that the Jewish need was of greater importance than the rights of the Palestinians.
Step forward again to 1935 and 60,000 more European Jews from Nazi Germany arrive in Palestine. The approximately 380,000 Jews now make up almost 30% of the population of Palestine and have displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and their land.
In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched a large-scale uprising against the British and their support for Zionist settler-colonialism, known as the Arab Revolt. The British authorities crushed the three year revolt violently; they destroyed at least 2,000 Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps and subjected them to violent interrogation, including torture, and deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders. More than 5,000 Palestinians were killed and at least 15,000 injured.
At least 10% of the Palestinian male population had been killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned.
The British government then tried to curtail immigration of European Jews into Palestine but Zionist lobbyists in London overturned their efforts.
In 1944, Zionist armed groups declared war on Britain for trying to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine when Jews were fleeing the Holocaust. They launched a number of terrorist attacks against the British - the most notable of which was the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 where 91 people were killed.
In early 1947, the British government announced it would be handing over the disaster it had created in Palestine to the United Nations.
By now, 30% of the population of Palestine was Jewish and they now had about 6% of the total land area.
On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into 2 states, one Jewish for zionists and the other to remain as an Arab state.
Under the UN partition plan, immigrating Jews were allocated 55% of the land, encompassing many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities and the important coastline from Haifa to Jaffa. The Arab state would be deprived of key agricultural lands and seaports, which led the Palestinians to reject the proposal.
The 15th May 1948 is a day known to the Palestinians as 'Nakba’ or ‘Catastrophe' referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It is the day that the State of Israel came into being. The creation of Israel was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state.
Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees. Zionist forces had taken more than 78% of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.
And Now - 2017:
Tragically it does not end there. Sadly the Palestinians still suffer daily under the apartheid state Israel has created. They do not have freedom to move through their own country. They do not have freedom of speech and they do not have freedom even to peacefully protest the occupation.
The Palestinians currently have a population of over 12 million worldwide and the Jewish Israelis nearly 6.5 million. 79% of land that was Palestine is now under Israeli control leaving only 21% considered Palestinian.
Palestinian Refugees:
According to the UN, there are still over 5.5 million Palestinian refugees who have been forcibly displaced from their homes and their homeland. Over 1.5 million Palestinian refugees still live in camps in countries around Palestine and about 4 million Palestinian refugees live in neighbouring countries but outside of refugee camps.
During 2016, Israeli occupation forces arrested 6,440 Palestinians, including 1332 children and 164 women. At the end of the year, the number of Palestinian prisoners had reached approximately 7,000, including around 300 children, 53 women (among them 11 girls), 700 administrative detainees and 22 journalists.
On a daily basis, young people were among those most vulnerable to arrest campaigns carried out by the Israeli army during the year.
Nearly 71% of prisoners in Israeli jails are Palestinians and a 2010 report revealed that Israeli military courts have a 99.71% conviction rate; meaning, out of 8,854 cases there were only 26 acquittals of Palestinians.
However, when Palestinians report cases of Israeli offences to Israeli authorities, the system is not so tough. Yesh Din, an Israeli organisation committed to highlighting Israel’s human rights violations, reported that between 2013 - 2016 there was only an 8% conviction rate.
Since 1967, 20% of all Palestinians and 40% of Palestinian men have been imprisoned.
Israel has used its power to detain at will as a means to control the Palestinian population and repress any political activism that aims to challenge Israel’s occupation. This violates their basic human rights, values and norms. Even Palestinians peacefully protesting the confiscation of their lands are subject to arrest and detention.
Sadly their land and their homes continue to be forcibly confiscated or bulldozed, their olive trees dug up or burned and free access to their farms denied.
In areas around illegal Israeli settlements, Palestinian movement in and out of towns and villages is often controlled by roadblocks and army outposts, limiting free access to schools, family, friends or places of work.
Water is diverted to illegal Israeli settlements restricting water to Palestinian farmers.
Re-writing the law:
The Office of the High Commissioner at United Nations Human Rights produced a report into a proposed Israeli law which would enable the confiscation of privately owned Palestinian land. The report was titled: 'Proposed Israel law “gives green light to theft of Palestinian land” – UN expert'.
Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk said he was deeply concerned at the proposal to legalise more than 100 illegal outposts in the occupied West Bank, which passed its first reading in the Knesset on 16 November 2016
“Unauthorised outposts, most of which have been established on private Palestinian land and are located deep within the occupied West Bank are considered illegal under Israeli domestic law. Their retroactive ‘legalisation’ will be another nail in the coffin for the two-state solution,” said Mr. Lynk.
“These outposts undermine the Palestinian right to self-determination, violate their rights to property, freedom of movement and development, and continue to confine the Palestinians into smaller and smaller cantons of non-contiguous lands within their own territory.”
Unemployment:
The unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip was 41.2% compared with 18.0% in the West Bank in the 1st quarter of 2016. The unemployment rate for males in Palestine was 22.3% compared with 42.8% for females in the 1st quarter of 2016. The highest unemployment rate in the 1st quarter of 2016 was 43.0% among youth aged 20-24 years.
Gaza currently has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world.
Next time you read about Palestine, try and put yourself in their shoes.
