Photo Credit: Coalition of Peace with Justice
May 15th – a day with dual purpose and paradoxical response. It was on this day in 1948 that the nation of Israel was created. Jews around the world are celebrating today the birth of their nation. However, at the same time that they are celebrating, Palestinians around the world gather in somber recognition of this day that they call Al Nakba – the day of catastrophe. For today in 1948, many of their parents and grandparents were forcefully displaced from their land and forced from their homes by the Israeli Army – an estimated 700,000 people transformed from residents into refugees in an instant.
This video from Aljazeera English provides perspective and context for this complex anniversary from the Palestinian Perspective. Unashamedly as an African in America who chooses to remember Maafa and a Follower of The Way of Christ (of which I see no contradiction), I have an ideological propensity to cast my weight with the marginalized and downtrodden believing, as liberation theologians have suggested, that only the oppressed possess the potential energy to be used of The Almighty as liberating instruments for both the Oppressed and the Oppressor.
Our collective Humanity depends on us remembering Al Nakba, Maafa, Shoah, Nunna Daul Isunyi, and the countless other catastrophes where we laid our “human-ness” down and became something else – far different from The Holy Other who formed us all.
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!This 1948 action was a failure of dynamic proportions for more reasons than one. I often wonder how people who have suffered a similar fate can turn around and inflict the same kind of harm on someone else who is weaker than them?
Just by reading the Bible, a reader knows that Israel experienced displacement several times itself over its history as a nation. One could conclude then that Israel was actually not any different from those nations that it criticized. Israel, and particularly the European Jews who repatriated Israel, had no qualms about the desultory behavior of the United Nations.
Israel's behavior in my mind, then and now along with its friend and ally the USA was and is comparable to the policies and behaviors of Hitler and the Third Reich! Germany and Austria had Adolf Hitler, and Israel most recently had George H.W. Bush and before him other American presidents in their pockets. I pray that President Obama will 'muster up the strength and courage to do the right thing'!