Lebanon and Palestine

Many readers wonder why I defend the Palestinian cause after all that the Palestinians did to Lebanon between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

My answer is: Humanistic integrity and intellectual honesty. The Palestinian tragedy and the creation of Israel are the single worst calamity of the 20th century. Yes, the Germans committed the Holocaust (maybe 15 years of suffering, from 1930-1945), and yes, the Turks committed the genocide of the Armenians (also another 10-20 years between 1905 and 1925; correct me if I am wrong). And yes, the Kurds were denied their country in 1920, and yes, so much inhumanity has been visited by humans upon other humans .... But the Palestinian suffering - the Nakba - is beyond imagination, for it has been going on for 100 years in plain sight of the international community which did - and still does - nothing to stop the unfolding genocide and catastrophe. Mistakes were committed by everyone, and the mistakes of the Palestinians cannot be used as a pretext to deny them their humanity and their country.

What the American colony of Israel is doing is not novel. White English America did it with the native Amerindians, and now English America is doing it again with the Palestinians: Instead of one wholesale instantaneous genocide that history might remember for centuries, they are slowly, very slowly, one Palestinian at a time, one home demolition at a time, one assassination at a time, one teenager at a time, one confiscated hill at a time, one denied construction permit at a time, one olive orchard at a time ...  slowly eroding the links between a people and its land... with the illusion that the world will not notice. Of course, labeling the Palestinians as terrorists helps because in our subconscious, fed as it is by the dominant media, the word terrorist has come to mean disposable, worthy of killing.

It is unbearable for me to imagine what it is like to see your own country invaded by foreigners from 5,000 miles away, who proceed to chase you out of your homes, villages and cities, herd you into refugee camps, massacre tens of thousands of your people with weapons and know-how imported from Nazi Germany, erase 500 of your villages and towns from the map and replace them with foreign-sounding names. 

And to add insult to injury, they continue to deny your history and your humanity by falsfying it and propagating the Zionist lies that you were never in Palestine, that Palestine was an empty wildnerness when the invaders arrived, that you are squatters from other Arab countries when the fact is that the Israeli invaders are themselves the foreign squatters, that the invaders were poor wretched refugees from Nazi Europe, and that your efforts at fighting back are acts of terrorism when a Jewish-Nazi regime controls every minute detail of your life in order to draw every last breath of resistance remaining in you and force you to abandon the fight and leave the country to them. AND, the world believes their lies and treats you like vermin because you are fighting back.

There is nothing sacrosanct about any specific group of humans. We are either all sacrosanct or no one is. Anyone can make claims of superiority over others, on fucked-up grounds fantasized during the Bronze Age: Chosen people (Jews), last prophecy on earth (Islam), Son of God, the true message, the true religion, messiahs, mehdis, prophets... but that does not make any of this religious bullshit true, this fiction written by ignorant nomadic tribes in the Arabian desert some thousands of years ago, nor does it give any group license to mistreat and abuse another group. The Palestinians hold the exact same human dignity and are capabe of the same suffering as any other group of humans, including fanatic American Jewish settlers, and given the miserable conditions under which the Israelis make them live, the Palestinians deserve the support of anyone with an ounce of decency, integrity and intellectual honesty.

The cowardly Jews of Europe were led to the slaughter like cattle. They did not fight back. That is why they were never accused of being terrorists. And now they have the luxury of accusing the Palestinians of being terrorists because they never stopped fighting back for the past 100 years.

If the native indigenous Palestinians are terrorists because they are fighting foreign colonizers,

then,

The native indigenous Lebanese were terrorists for fighting 30 years of Palestinian-Syrian occupation. 

The not-so-native American colonists were terrorists for fighting the English.

The native indigenous South African blacks of the African National Congress (ANC) were terrorists .

The native indigenous Algerians of the Front de Libération Nationale were terrorists.

The native indigenous French Résistance were a bunch of terrorists fighting the German occupation.

The native indigenous Amerindians in north America were terrorists and savages.

The native indigenous Amerindians across Latin and South America who are still fighting white Spanish rule today are terrorists.  

The exception to all the above being the wimpy native indigenous Jews of Germany and Europe who did not fight their extermination. Instead, they migrated their incompetence, alienation and hatred from their own native Europe to a less sophisticated Palestine where they implemented the same extermination methods used against them by overpowering European armies. The Jews of Europe and America, with their wealth and knowhow, took advantage of a peaceful, mostly rural, unsophisticated Palestinian population and raped it and plundered it to establish a Western (British-American) colony near the nascent oil fields of the Arabian desert. This is in line with what the British did across the globe: They raped India, they raped China, they raped Palestine, they raped every country and continent they set their feet on, and left behind them torn nations in constant turmoil. Why would the British do differently in Palestine what they did elsewhere? Then the dumb Americans took over.

The story of Anne Frank, the young German girl who spent 2 years holed up in an attic in Amsterdam out of fear of the Germans, is very sad especially that she was eventually deported and killed in a concentration camp. But her ordeal has been elevated by propaganda to the summum of suffering, an exclusive suffering, such that the millions of people who heard her story think that nothing of the sort can happen to other young girls. Yet, her ordeal is nowhere near the suffering of millions of young girls her age in our time. Yes right now, there are literally millions of Anne Franks living horrendous lives across the world. In Palestine itself, imagine the thousands of refugee girls holed up for generations in miserable refugee camps in their own country of Palestine dying every day by hypermilitarized Israeli criminal butchers disguised as a legitimate army fighting terrorists. Anne Frank's ordeal pales in comparison.

In the early 1900s, Lebanon and Palestine were sister nations slowly emerging from under Turkish Ottoman occupation. In many ways the two countries were similar: Cities and towns with all the accoutrements of urban life (banks, hotels, courts of justice, newspapers, museums, an urban elite, etc.), and villages with olive groves, grape vines, and mediterranean climate and traditions. Many Lebanese went to work in Palestine and many Palestinians came to work in Lebanon. Under the Ottomans, there were no borders: It was all part of one huge empire. When WWI ended, nations became countries with borders. The French and the English obtained a mandate from the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) to lead these new countries into creating institutions.

In Lebanon, the French succeeded in establishing a functioning country between 1920 and 1943, then after the French left, until the late 1960s when the heartache created by the British crooks in Palestine overwhelmed the Lebanese state which welcomed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fleeing British-enabled Jewish barbarity and atrocities in Palestine.

In Palestine, the British crooks promised a state to the native Palestinians WHILE at the same time giving the same Palestinian land to European Jewish colonizers (this was thirty years before the Holocaust, so no poor victims escaping Nazi Germany yet) as payback for Jewish bankers funding the British war effort. British deception and imposture are at the heart of the tragedy of Palestine and its repercussions on Lebanon.