Tell Me Master: Why are there Refugee Camps in Gaza?

Gaza's and the West Bank's Refugee Camps: The result of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by illegal Jewish migrants from Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of Gaza's people live in eight refugee camps that were set up following the violent mass expulsion by illegal Jewish immigrants of native indigenous Palestinians during the war that created the state of Israel in May 1948.

Over 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what is referred to by Palestinians as the "Nakba" (Catastrophe in Arabic). Around 180,000 fled to Gaza, with the rest scattered across the West Bank and neighbouring Arab countries, specifically Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

In 1949, the United Nations set up a dedicated agency, UNRWA, to provide them and their descendants, who also have refugee status, with basic services, including health and education. More than two-thirds of the 2.4 million people living in Gaza are registered refugees.

Israel has persistently rejected their "right of return" in violation of a 1948 United Nations Security Council Resolution. Israel thus demonstrates that it is fully aware of the human tragedy its creation has caused the native people, and is determined not to allow these refugees to return to the 500 or so villages and towns in Palestine it ethnically cleansed with massacres, rapes, and forced explusions.

While the term refugee camp conjures up images of people living in tents, multi-storey cement-block buildings have long since replaced the tents in Gaza. This is on account of the time that has elapsed since 1948 because of Israel's renegade and rogue status as the top violator of international law. Israel is in effect a fake colonial entity created for the simple reason of giving Britain and the US a foothold in the Levant for close access to the oil fields. The armed (naval bases) presence of these two colonial countries in the Arabian Gulf is not sufficient to grant easy access to the Arab oil fields, primarily because the Gulf states are weak and could decompose and implode at any time. But Israel is proving that it too is a weak link in the colonial imperialist supply chain of oil.

Conditions in the eight camps around the Gaza Strip, like all the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have always been grim. Millions of Palestinians languish in them with support of the UN agency UNRWA. The dilemma for their host countries is that if integrated into the host country's population, the refugees would lose their Right of Return and would be a gift to a brutal colonial invader. That explains why both Jordan and Egypt have refused to accept Gaza's 2.4 million population as refugees; they would be encouraging their ethnic cleansing by Israel, yet again.

Israel's relentless brutality against Gaza has so far killed over 10,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, women and children. For the past 15 years or so, Israel has imposed a tight air, sea and land blockade after Hamas scored a victory in democratic elections in 2007. Israel routinely uses "collective punishment" as a means to deter Palestinian resistance against occupation: It bombs innocent civilians to punish terrorist-resistance groups; it demolishes the parents' home of a teenager who throws a rock st Israeli occupation forces; it blockades an entire people for electing leaders Israel disavows.

Jabalia -- the biggest camp in Gaza, where the first intifada or uprising against Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories began in 1987 -- has been repeatedly bombed since the start of this latest offensive. The Israeli army uses the pretext of targeting Hamas members to strike with American-supplied weapons UN-run schools  and hospitals that host thousands of internally-displaced refugees.

UNRWA said that as of November 1, over 530,000 people were sheltering at its facilities in central Gaza, Khan Yunis and Rafah, adding that the shelters were full and that many people were sleeping in the street.

Imagine yourself a native citizen of a country emerging from a brutal 400-year-long Turkish Ottoman occupation at the end of WWI. You're full of hope that the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) which has granted France and Britain a mandate over Palestine, Jordan and Iraq (Britain) and over Lebanon and Syria (France). In all these countries except Palestine, the two mandatory powers built institutions and helped these countries write their consitutions, and in a matter of 20 years between WWI and WWII, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq emerged from the second world war as independent countries. Except Palestine.

Why? Because the crooked British imperial criminals promised a club of wealthy Jewish bankers from England and Central Europe to allow them to build themselves a colony in Palestine where they hoped to enslave the native population and use it to increase their wealth by investing in the nascent oil industry in the Arabian desert nearby. As the mandatory power, and in typical hypocritical fashion, the English began shipping boatloads of European Jews to Palestine. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the nativer Palestinians began resisting this rape of their country, but couldn't possibly win this war: They were rural villagers and townspeople with few means (emerging from 400 years of Turkish ocupation), compared to the wealthy and sophisticated Jews of Europe who created several terrorist organizations (Haganah, Stern, Lehi...) and proceeded to undertake a full-fledged ethnic cleansing of Palestine of its native people. 500 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground and their populations massacred or expelled, to make room for the Jewish invaders who built Israel out of the charred ruinsof historic Palestine.

How would you feel is this were to happen to you? Would you lay low and crawl under the sands of oblivion, or would you fight back? For the past 100 years, the Palestinians have been fightiung back against the tremendous odds stacked against them. And their cause hasn't disappeared, as their American and Jewish enemies had hoped for. The latest episode in this one of the longest wars of occupation, colonialism, dispossession and dehumanization is unfolding before our eyes in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Will the Palestinian people just disappear so that secular Jews can have a resort on the Mediterranean, while religious Jews can claim to have returned to a land that never belonged to them, unless you subscribe to the filth and barbaric garbage of the bible?