OPINION:Independence for Israelis has ripped Palestinian society apart and forced people into destitute conditions of constant terror, writes Hikamt Ajjuri.
YESTERDAY, THE state of Israel celebrated its independence day in this, the 60th year since its foundation. Unfortunately, the establishment of that state was built on the destruction of Palestinian society and, in the six decades since then, the self-determination of the Israeli people has always rested on the denial of self-determination to the Palestinian people.
Thus, every year when the Israelis celebrate the achievement of their statehood, the Palestinians mourn the nakbah (catastrophe), the great historical calamity that saw the sinews of their society shredded, their towns and villages invaded, their cities sacked and depopulated, their people - the rightful owners of the land - uprooted, evicted and scattered across the Arab world.
In the Israeli version of history, the Palestinians brought this catastrophe upon their own heads.
Their leaders, it was said, refused an honourable United Nations partition of the Holy Land in November 1947.
It was also said that when the Arab armies invaded Mandate Palestine in January 1948, the Palestinian people fled behind the invading forces, thus leaving their ancient farms and villages either of their own accord or at the behest of the Arab command.
Today, no one, not even most Israelis, credits this nonsense: Israeli and Palestinian historians have long since demolished this version of events as a self-serving Zionist myth. The Palestinian leadership rejected the UN partition plan of November 1947 because the deal it offered was completely one-sided.
The plan awarded 56.47 per cent of the land area of British Mandate Palestine to the proposed Jewish state, even though the Jews in Palestine in 1947 constituted less than one-third of the population. The Jewish state proposed in the plan would have had a virtually 50 per cent Arab population, while the proposed Arab state would have been 98.7 per cent Arab.
Most Israeli and Palestinian historians now agree that the Zionist gangs conducted a concerted campaign of terror designed to drive the mostly unarmed and unprepared Palestinians from their lands. The Zionist method was to strike terror into the peasantry so that they would flee lands of strategic value and thus allow the Israelis to increase their territory beyond the partition awards and to secure better borders.
By 1948, the Israeli army numbered 80,000, many of whom were trained regulars and veterans of the second World War. The ill-trained and ill-equipped Arab regular force never crossed the 50,000 threshold (see Ilan Pappe's Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine).
The Zionist leadership adopted "Plan Dalet" in March 1948 (though this had been conceived four years earlier), which aimed to consolidate control of Jewish areas and to seize strategic areas allotted to the proposed Arab state before that state could be established.
In 1949, the Zionists widened their territorial control on every front and, in the end, commanded 78 per cent of historic Palestine.
In the same short period, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, many forcibly. They thus found themselves homeless and stateless refugees.
The Palestinians did not flee. Instead, their society was dismantled by tactical massacres, forced expulsions and terror-induced panic. We have seen other examples of mass expulsions of this kind in other lands, recently in Kosovo. Now the world calls such events "ethnic cleansing".
Many societies suffer terrible historical tragedies and have no option but to get on with what is left, to leave the past to the past and to look to the future. The difficulty for the Palestinians is that they have never been free to make a new future for themselves.
Ever since it was founded, the state of Israel has done everything in its power to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state, ostensibly because it might threaten its security.
Israeli security, in other words, has always been paramount to Israel and to its western allies. And hence Palestinian self-determination has always been delayed, if not ignored.
Since 1967, when it conquered the remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli leadership, both left-wing and right-wing, has supported a massive policy of colonial settlement in these regions, these settlements eating away year by year the land on which a Palestinian state might eventually be formed.
At one time or other since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians, or 25 per cent of the total Arab population of the occupied territories, have been detained. Some 18,000 houses have been demolished in this period. Coupled with daily torture - or, at best, humiliation - by the Israeli occupying forces, the Palestinians continue to live the nakbah, or great catastrophe, to this day.
Sixty years later, that great calamity is not an event frozen in times past: instead, it is an ongoing, relentless daily reality.
Six decades on, the massacres also continue. On April 28th, when the Abu Me'tiq family in the Gaza Strip gathered to eat breakfast, Israeli tank fire ripped through their home, killing the mother and her four young children.
Since the start of the second intifada, or resistance, in September 2000, the Israeli occupying forces have killed more than 5,000 Palestinians, 20 per cent of them children. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been injured and maimed.
In Gaza especially, where the population lives in overcrowded and destitute conditions, everyone lives in terror.
Whenever the Israeli leadership says it feels threatened it feels free to serve collective, indiscriminate punishment on the entire population there.
Even in their own homes the families of Gaza live in constant fear for their lives. They suffer constant trauma and anxiety: depression is widespread among all ages and sectors of that imprisoned people.
Today, just like 60 years ago, the Israelis tell us that this is all the fault of the Palestinian leadership. But the world should ask itself: in which society, Palestinian or Israeli, did the religious right first come to political ascendancy? The historical record is clear: it was in Israeli society.
Could any of this have gone on for 60 years if the great world powers were not prepared to tolerate it?
When these great powers stood up to ethnic cleansing and ethnic persecution in Kosovo, things quickly changed and the stronger power had to come to heel.
The best way for the world to spread genuine freedom and true democracy in the Middle East is to end the Israeli veto on Palestinian self-determination.
Until that veto is ended there will be no progress.
It is high time for the Israelis to realise that it is neither territorial expansion, based on their nuclear deterrence, nor the unconditional support of western leaders that would grant the Israelis the security they need.
Rather, it is the regional acceptance which was unequivocally offered to them by all Arabs at their last three summits and was reiterated at the Annapolis meeting of November last year.
The Arab initiative calls on full normalisation between Israel and all Arab and Muslim countries in return for the Arab territories which were taken by force by the Israelis in the course of the 1967 war.
I accordingly believe that the Israelis should be advised - or, even better, pressurised - by all their European supporters to upgrade their relationship with the region in which they belong (the Middle East) before they seek to upgrade their relationship with Europe.
Dr Hikamt Ajjuri is head of the General Delegation of Palestine to Ireland