8th May
As the Israeli flags continue to increase in number around Israel in the run-up to the “Independence” celebrations, marking Israel’s 60th birthday, the absence of the party spirit in Palestine is conspicuous.
The reason for this is that there is no reason to celebrate. There is no aspect of the dispossession that can be looked back upon with joy. No, from this side of the Separation Barrier the celebrations appear simply as salt in old wounds, and these are wounds that run deep, both in time and in feeling. Wounds that have not grown tired with age, unlike their hosts. The weary Palestinians look back on this particular anniversary with a mixture of sadness and fear - sadness for the past, fear for the future. At the current trajectory, the 70th anniversary will be being ‘celebrated’ from substantially worse conditions.
Looking back over the previous sixty years, the overriding sensation is of injustice – sensational injustice. Also noticeable is the sense of failure. Failure everywhere from the Palestinians’ failure to mount a successful resistance to Israeli occupation, from Israel’s failure in its original stated aim of creating a ‘safe haven’ for Jews – nowhere in the world is more dangerous for Jews than in Israel today. When was the last time you heard of a massacre of Jews anywhere else? After all the discussion, argument and impassioned debate, one question remains – what good has actually been achieved by all of this? So therefore, what is actually being celebrated?
There is a well known joke that sums up the nature of Jewish holidays – They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat! The same cannot be said for Palestinian holidays, perhaps because they are the ones who actually are being killed. Slowly, discreetly, definitely. For them, there is no reason to celebrate, no reason to eat. The Zionist mantra that Israel was a land without people, for a people without a land has been a self-fulfilling prophecy, true in all but the name. For it has turned out to be Palestine that will be left without a people, and the Palestinians that will be left without a land.
