Elias Sanbar: Gaza is 'remake' of the Nakba, but Palestinians learnt their lesson
Speaking to AsiaNews, the former ambassador of Palestine to the UN draws a parallel between the war in Gaza and the exodus of 1948. Today the Palestinians "have learnt their lesson" and know that if they leave, "there will be no return". Israel uses its “special status” to strike with impunity, but “all this won’t work”. A duplicitous United States condemns raids against civilians but supplies weapons.
Beirut (AsiaNews) – Former Palestinian ambassador to UNESCO, Elias Sanbar, 76, has published a booklet titled La dernière guerre? (The Last War? in French) in a new collection called "Tract", published by Gallimard, in which he argues that the real goal of the current war waged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza is completing the Nakba that began under Ben-Gurion.
"A lot of books have been written about the war in Gaza, to tell us what is happening there," says Elias Sanbar, reached by phone. “But few books have been written to say what it is. What is happening in Gaza is a remake of 1948, but this time it won’t work.
“In 1948, many Palestinians left their homes, keys in their pockets, certain that they would soon be back home. Some even slept under the stars, thinking it was a matter of days. The camps came later. But the Palestinians learnt their lesson. They now know that if they leave, it will be without return, that it will be the definitive curtain call of the Palestinian people.”
In his analysis, the diplomat insists on the fact that the expulsion of the Palestinian people, in 1947-48, took place in two stages: first between the adoption of the partition plan for Palestine by the United Nations (29 November 1947) and the proclamation of the State of Israel (14 May 1948), and second, after this proclamation, when the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt, crossed the borders of Mandatory Palestine.
“But before that date," he says, "the 'transfer' of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians was already a fait accompli, and the expulsion of those who followed completed the disaster, the Nakba."
“The current war," he explains, "is the second one that really brings the two peoples, Palestinian and Israeli face to face. The previous wars, those of 1967 and 1973, were proxy wars. The negation of our existence, which we thought could be transcended thanks to negotiations based on sharing, is now once again thrown in our faces, carried by the madness of a policy that envisages completing the Nakba of 1948.”
“Concerned to forestall the criticism that such an admission would arouse, [Israel’s] war cabinet is waiting for the final fate, the destruction of Palestine, to be a reality, and for an irreversible fait accompli to render obsolete the ethical and moral condemnations” aroused by this war.
“Israel is playing it smartly, because of the suffering that preceded its creation in Europe,” enjoining “a special status, a right to understanding, whatever its actions. This is one of the forms that impunity takes."
"It won’t work!"
“But it won’t work," Sanbar says on the phone. “The Israelis thought they would wrap things up in two weeks. They have accustomed Arabs to blitzkriegs. We are now in the 11th month. Their relentlessness on the civilians of Gaza, the daily reprisals against civilians, are a sign of their powerlessness. In Gaza, a war crime is being committed every hour!”
But where are we going? “We are heading for a regional disaster!" says Sanbar, who has mourned the two-state solution and stresses the "Samson syndrome" that affects the current Israeli government.
He quotes Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari for whom "Israel is facing a historic defeat, the bitter fruit of years of disastrous policies. If the country now prioritises revenge over its own interests, it will put itself and the entire region in grave danger.”
Israel's defeat, Sanbar analyses, is also the result of a real cancer that is undermining a large part of Israeli society.
The diplomat says that “it has been established that the Israeli government was informed about Hamas’s preparations, but that it ignored them, even scorned them, thinking that the 'Gaza vagabonds' were incapable of doing anything. This is what happened in the October 73 War, according to Sanbar.
Under the eyes of the whole world, the Egyptian army had trained, on a mock-up battlefield, to cross the Suez Canal. But Golda Meir, then prime minister, did not believe the Egyptian army capable of taking action. She had to resign.
“Contempt is a cancer of the settlers; it's deep racism,” says Elias Sanbar. He castigated the "global chatter" and verbal condemnations of the massacres that are taking place in Gaza without a single country condemning them by withdrawing its ambassador, not to mention America’s duplicity of repeated calls for a ceasefire coupled with continuous airlifts to deliver weapons.
GATEWAY TO THE EAST IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO THE MIDDLE EAST. WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE IT EVERY TUESDAY? TO SUBSCRIBE, CLICK HERE.
.png)
