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By HELENA COBBAN
An argument that I heard from many peace activists in Israel and Palestine during my recent visit is that the Nakba-- that is, the dispersal of the Palestinians from their homes, primarily in 1948, and the expropriation and frequent destruction of the properties they had left behind-- was not a one-ff affair, but is a continuing process.
Current news photos of Palestinians in Gaza or Jerusalem who have been expelled from their homes through Israeli acts of violence, and are forced to live in tents while Israelis either take over or demolish their homes, are continuing evidence of this.
Recently I read Meron Rapoport's painfully evocative article "History Erased: The IDF and the post-1948 Destruction of Palestinian Monuments". It originally appeared-- I believe only in Hebrew-- in Ha'aretz in July 2007, and was published in English in the Jouranl of Palestine Studies in Winter 2008. Sadly, it's behind a pay-wall.
Rapoport gives some information about a controversy that arose inside the Israeli bureaucracy about the IDF's July 1950 demolition of the Mashhad Iman Husain (Iman Husain Mosque) in what had been the Palestinian town of Majdal-- now, in Israel, Ashqelon.
According to local Islamic tradition, the mosque was the spot where the head of Husain ibn 'Ali, one of the Shiite tradition's most revered founders/martyrs had been buried.
After the mosque was levelled by the IDF, Shmuel Yeivin, the director of Israel's department of Antuities, became quite angry.
Noting that the mosque in the nearby, abandoned Palestinian "village" of Ashdod had also been blown up, Yeivin wrote to the head of the "department for special missions" in the defense Ministry, "I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should be brought to trial and punished, because there was no justification for a swift, war-contingent operation."
Guess what. It never happened.
Rapoport also noted that Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti has written of the 160 mosques in Palestinian "villages" incorporated into Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements, "fewer than 40 are still standing."
This makes me want to go and read Benvenisti's 2000 book on the subject, Sacred Landscape; The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention the work of the two Merons here, because I recall that a few years ago some of the Israeli apologists who comment here at JWN were claiming there was no evidence at all regarding widespread Israeli destruction of Palestinian places of worship and cemeteries inside Israel.
Au contraire. There is lots of evidence-- even for Engish-speaking readers. We just need to know where to look.Source
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