Any Palestinian would not trade the pomegranates in their garden for all the shopping malls in Dubai.
In 1937, a prominent Briton testified to the Royal Peel Commission on the issue of the empire’s partition of Palestine following the 1936 Palestinian uprising, proclaiming “I do not agree that the dog in a manger [the Palestinian Arabs] has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
That famous Briton was Winston Churchill.
The Nakba of the Palestinians did not begin on the 15th of May 1948, the day Zionist gangs and militias declared the existence of a Jewish state in the land of Palestine for the first time in over 2,000 years. “I do not deny that this is an adventure. Are we not to have adventures,” said Lord Balfour to defend the hijacking of Palestine.
It did not begin in 1917, with the infamous Balfour declaration acting as World Empire’s declaration of war on Palestine. The roots of this unprecedented catastrophe precede Balfour and began with the landing of Napoleon Bonaparte at the shores of Akka. The inherently anti-Semitic roots of Zionism are thus exposed, Napoleon had prepared a letter and was set to announce the establishment of a Jewish homeland from Haifa to Damascus in 1799, and he did so out of a desire to rid his army of any “Jewish elements.” In 1840, the Convention for the Pacification of the Levant was signed between the great imperial powers of the day to prevent the consolidation of control over Bilad Asham by nationalist leader Muhammed Ali Pasha. Said treaty called for the “pacification of the Levant,” and authorized the use of force to “compel” Muhammed Ali to relinquish control over the region, and cede it back to the Ottoman Empire. This same region would be partitioned by European empire after the significant weakening of the Ottoman state and its subsequent defeat in the First World War.
Its branches extend into Syria today, where NATO/GCC contras seek to destroy a secular and anti-imperialist Arab nation and replace it with sectarian states indebted to the Anglo-American empire, just as the Zionist and Saudi states before them. “Jewish self-determination” was a rallying cry to recruit foot soldiers. The fragmentation of both the people & land of this nation is essential to continuing imperial dominance.
It is not just Palestinians that Empire sees as “a dog in a manger,” it is all the Arab masses & indeed all the masses of the world who obstruct their hegemonic objectives. Consider it no coincidence empire declared war on the Arab world in Palestine, as it is the center of so much, in the heart of the Arab world and in the heart of the transcontinental solidarity movement between the oppressed, colonized people of Asia and Africa, which is a key reason why the Anglo-American empire chose to implant a foreign state physically between them, to obstruct such solidarity and keep them imprisoned.
Zionism and imperialism chained a previously interconnected region and its peoples, one where you could wake up in Gaza, have lunch in Haifa, and dinner in Damascus. The centrality of greater Syria’s trade networks, dating back millennia, is part of the reason why Empire has targeted it for domination. Zionism and imperialism destroyed the connectivity of our region and built cages for us instead. This world was not lost, it is still here, but bound by wires and walls and chains wrought by the Anglo-American empire. Zionism and imperialism have been occupying the skies of the Arab world for over 100 years.
To push normalization, hasbara agents have touted the potentials of the traitorship of un-elected government to their peoples, such as the potential for direct flights between Arab lands and “Israel.” They are mimicking the regular wishes of our people to see each of our loved ones & lands we have been denied entry to when we enjoy the fruits of liberation, taking this & inverting it to serve their status quo of slavery. Any Palestinian would not trade the pomegranates in their garden for all the shopping malls and palaces in Dubai. That is because to a colonized people, the most important value is the land. The only being on this earth among the people and land that share her name to still travel freely is the Palestine sunbird. The birds tomorrow will return while they are still here.
The indifference of sectarian Arab leaders in the Palestinian cause is only a result of Arab laziness and failure, they are people who are more interested in intimating the West and abandoning their heritage and the inheritance of their ancestors.
