‘Al-Nakba denial’ pervades letter

Mariah Leung, Eugene

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“Claire Gumbs’ Dec. 4 letter, ‘Palestine no longer exists,’ provides a flagrant example of ‘al-Nakba denial.’ No less objectionable than Holocaust denial, our human rights community should protest this ignorance.

Gumbs’ letter reflects a carefully orchestrated, 59-year campaign of al-Nakba memoricide in an attempt to legitimize an apartheid state supported by U.S. taxpayer money. Gumbs states, ‘there is no such thing as … a Palestinian.’ Please tell that to the indigenous refugees and their families of the 531 villages and 11 urban areas that were brutally ethnically cleansed in 1948.

Palestinians with U.N.-registered claims against Israel now number more than 4 million, the world’s largest refugee group, now spanning four generations. Called ‘al-Nakba’ (‘the catastrophe’), this Arabic term should be as familiar to us as the Holocaust which it soon followed.

The campaign to expel as many Arabs as possible — in any way possible — was executed against a largely defenseless population by the Jewish terrorist groups Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang. Israel’s Palestinian victims continue to be denied their basic human rights under the U.N.

Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and some 90 U.N. resolutions against Israel. Peace in Israel-Palestine will elude fruition until Israel’s 1948 crimes against humanity are acknowledged and the right of return or just compensation is granted to the refugees as required under U.N.

Resolution 194 and pledged by Israel upon admission to the United Nations. For background, read Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s book, ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.’”

Context added by this archive

A reader answering another reader by name, ten days later, in the same letters column.

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"‘Al-Nakba denial’ pervades letter," The Register-Guard, 14 December 2007, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2007-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2007-005

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