The Jews have the Holocaust. We have our Nakbah, writes Hikmat Ajjuri
On Tuesday this week, we Palestinians commemorated, for the 59th time, the worst event in our history - the Nakbah catastrophe of 1948. The name of the event comes from its consequences - 700,000 non-combatant Palestinians were forced to leave their homes and more than 500 of their villages were wiped off the face of the earth by Zionist gangs.
Israel was created on the land lost by the Palestinians, the majority of whom have lived in refugee camps in neighbouring countries since that moment. The irony is that those who perpetrated the catastrophe were the survivors of another catastrophe, this time referred to as the Holocaust, the inhumane crime perpetrated against the Jews by the Nazis.
The name of Palestine is an ancient one and gives both name and identity to its people - the Palestinians. Palestinians had lived in the land of Palestine and cultivated it for thousands of years before the first Jewish tribes invaded that land, occupied it and established their kingdom which survived for approximately 70 years, 3,500 years ago. The Torah, the Jewish holy book, mentions Palestine and the Palestinians farming in it more than 70 times.
Palestine has never been a desert and has always been known as the land of honey and milk.
Only a few days separate the Israelis commemorating the Holocaust from the Palestinians commemorating their Nakbah catastrophe. One would expect therefore the pain inflicted on both peoples would be enough to force them to look for non-painful alternatives to settle their struggle.
In the absence of a universal measure of human suffering, one finds it impossible and probably unfair to compare the two painful events; however, they differ in that the Nakbah is an ongoing process.
The 1967 war, the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacre, the 2002 "operation defensive shield", the 2006 "summer rains" operation in Gaza and the daily incursions into the towns and villages of the West Bank - are all committed by the same aggressor, the Israeli occupying army. The Holocaust, regardless of its inhumane nature, remains a frozen moment in history although, unfortunately, it has been used as a political asset against us, the Palestinians.
I, on many other occasions, have recognised the Holocaust as a shameful chapter in the contemporary history of Europe. While we expect the West to feel guilty we should, more importantly, expect them to employ every effort to prevent any likelihood of another Holocaust.
This task should not be left to the Israelis alone to achieve, because they have proven to be wrong with the tools they are using: conquering other people's land, occupying other nations by force and deterring their neighbours. I know that security is important to the Israelis as it is for every one else including the Palestinians. Yet, we all learned from history that whoever lives by the sword dies by the sword. We have also learned that security threats need political responses.
I, for one, believe that the role of the West is to protect the Jews from being exposed to another Holocaust and that this should be imposed if not invited. It is the guilt so far that makes the West deaf and blind against all those atrocities committed by the Israelis against its neighbours and people under its control (the Palestinians).
The growth of extremism in our region is obviously an outcome of the lack of justice; an outcome as well to what is perceived by the people of the region as complicity, the blind support to their aggressor by the western democracies, in particular America.
Last March's Arab summit in Saudi Arabia offers all those who care for the world's safety and security an opportunity that should not be missed, particularly by the West. They should use it, as part of their role, in order to bring to an end the decades-long struggle between the Palestinians and the Israelis, if not by choice then by force. The alternatives are truly scary as they pose a threat to the whole world, bearing in mind that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is at the heart of the problems in the region including Afghanistan, Iran and of course Iraq.
The only assurance that both catastrophe/Holocaust will become frozen moments in history is by granting the Palestinians their undeniable right to celebrate their independence as their Israeli neighbours do.
Dr Hikmat Ajjuri is the Delegate General of the General Delegation of Palestine in Ireland