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As both Hillary Clinton and former Australian PM Julia Gillard – credit where it’s due to both – have recently observed, the pro-Hamas mobs storming university campuses and social media are singularly ignorant of history. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country,” Clinton said.
“It worries me that people get their understanding of history off social media without ever touching any of the real facts,” Gillard agreed.
One of the greatest black holes of ignorance for the pro-Hamas idiots is the foundation of Israel itself.
For a start, it was not a ‘colonialist’, unilateral British diktat: it was, in fact, a United Nations mandate. (Interestingly, the left and Muslims never say a word about the Kingdom of Jordan, which really was conjured unilaterally by the British from nothing.) Nor was the so-called “Nakba” the violent, colonialist ‘genocide’ that they so fervently believe.
In fact, the whole “Nakba” narrative is one of the most breathtaking lies of the whole ‘Palestine’ narrative.
Contrary to the mythology, almost all the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs who left Israel did so voluntarily – for a variety of reasons. Some fled because they were terrified that the victorious Israelis would treat them as horrifically as they had treated Jews in the years leading up to 1948. Yet, apart from a very few, isolated incidents, the Israelis went out of their way to persuade them to stay (as noted in a British Foreign Office communique).
It was Arab nations who encouraged them to flee, to make way for the invading Arab armies determined to wipe the Jewish nation from the map. “Temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination,” instructed Egypt’s Al-Azhar Mosque. Some Arab states actually offered financial bounties to Palestinians to leave.
Cynically, having successfully encouraged millions of their fellow Arabs to flee their homes, the same Arab states have refused for nearly 80 years to allow them to become citizens. Instead, Arab states, along with the UN, have forced former Palestinians to become permanent ‘refugees’, in a way that no other peoples have.
This is the other glaring hole in the pro-Hamas mobs’ understanding of history: that the “Nakba” was just one, and far from the largest, mass displacement of populations, as former empires collapsed in the first half of the 20th century. Not just European empires, either. The unravelling of the Ottoman empire, beginning with the Greek War of Independence in 1821, was the beginning of the flood of mass displacement.
As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854–56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.
The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.
The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.
The Australian
An international agreement passed by the UN’s precursor, the League of Nations, in 1923 mandated the deportation of Christians from Turkey and Muslims from Greece. The agreement specifically ruled that the deported would lose their original nationality and have no right of return.
Having got a taste for it, large-scale, forced and permanent population displacements went into full swing.
Protestants in the new Irish Republic were shunted off to England or Northern Ireland. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, 12 million ethnic Germans who’d lived for centuries in Central and Eastern Europe were forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany. They, too, were stripped of their nationality and possessions.
Indian independence the year before the “Nakba” truly was a disaster: 18 million people were shuffled between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan (which, again, no Muslim or leftist calls ‘illegitimate’, despite being created by foreign powers out of nothing). The process was, to say the least, anything but peaceful: “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, as it’s been described.
Nobody today talks about a ‘right of return’ for forcibly displaced Hindus or Muslims in either country.
Nor does any Muslim country offer a ‘right of return’ to the nearly one million Jews forced out of the Arab lands they had lived in for millennia. Instead, they were robbed of their assets and forbidden to ever return.
Not that Arab nations were done forcibly removing populations – this time, Palestinians themselves. Nearly half a million Palestinians were rudely evicted from Kuwait after the First Gulf War. Not one Arab state made a murmur.
And not one ‘pro-Palestinian’ protester will be aware of any of this inconvenient history.
