The writer’s Palestinian friend, a blind school principal, has resisted eight years of Israeli efforts to drive his family out of Jerusalem. Ethnic cleansing is not just the moment of violence when a family is uprooted, or a neighborhood emptied.
Morris decries the “idiocy” of the Malmab in hiding these materials, since “the whole story was told and publicized since 1988 in many books in Hebrew and English, from my pen and from others”.
How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs. Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba.
The famous – and by now overused – expression that history is written by the victors can be countered in many ways. One way is by unpacking the victors’ publications in order to expose the lies, fabrications and misrepresentations, as well as their less conscious actions.
The Zionist conquest of Palestine, which began haphazardly in the early 1880s and intensified after the turn of the century, reaching its apogee with British invasion and occupation of the country before the conclusion of World War I, was the inaugural moment of what became known as the Nakba.
The Nakba is not a just a memory, it is an ongoing reality. We can accept that we all must eventually die; in Gaza, the tragedy is that we don’t get to live.
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