Only by understanding the Nakba as a unified continuing strategy can we hope to reverse it, writes Serene Assir Jamila Moussa was 19 when she and her husband fled Kfur Yassin, her village in Akka, north Palestine. They had just had their first child, Nicolas, who now has children of his own. Fearing for his safety they fled, hoping they would return within a matter of weeks. Since that day, Moussa has witnessed several wars -- though none of them in Palestine. In interview with Al-Ahram Weekly this spring, from her home in Dbayye refugee camp, Lebanon, she recalled that the force of their expulsion was "a violence like I have never seen since, or had witnessed before. The British used to burn homes, yes, but the Jews, they were flattening our houses, so they no longer existed." Though Moussa will soon turn 80, she tells her story with remarkable detail, perhaps sensing the foreclosure of time. She has transmitted her memories countless times to her children and grandchildren, all of whom were born refugees, reminding them of who they are. Now, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe) of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, her story takes on new significance. Of the 6.5 million Palestinian refugees dispersed around the world today, precious few carry firsthand memories of their home. Often discussion of the Nakba treats the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians -- the 60 plus massacres, the depopulation of over 420 villages and the dispossession of at least 700,000 Palestinians that culminated in 1948 -- as a thing of the past, mourned annually on 15 May while pressure to forget or even move on is ever increasing. Yet as we approach the 60th year after Israel was established, literally on top of Palestine, it is important to note that several writers in recent years have pointed to the continuity of the Nakba. Indeed, the crimes that culminated around 1948 (though by no means did they begin there, as proven by Palestinian writer Salman Abu Sitta) have not ceased. The massacre in Jenin of 11 April 2002 is not, in political, historical or legal terms, separate from the massacre at Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948. Not only did both massacres involve the committal of mass crimes, including the killing of children; they are both cruel manifestations of Israel's historical denial of the right to self-determination the Palestinian -- a right that in international law has peremptory character. In spite of the bloodshed, land theft and agony of dispossession, justice -- and crucially time -- is still and irrevocably on the side of Palestine. "In any adequate examination of international crimes, we need to look for the intent underlying the crime," UK-based human rights lawyer Amr El-Bayoumi told the Weekly. As scores of statements issued by Zionist and Israeli leaders prove, from the inception of Israel to the present day, the intent of Israeli state policy is no less than the destruction of the Palestinians. In 1937, David Ben-Gurion -- Israel's "founding father" and first prime minister -- uttered the clearly criminal phrase, "we must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force [then] we have force at our disposal." More starkly, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir denied in 1969 the existence of Palestinians altogether, saying, "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people." More recently, in 1989, former prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu commented, "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focussed on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." And in 2001, former tourism minister and supporter of Israel's policy of extrajudicial assassination, Rehavam Zeevi, said, "each one eliminated is one less terrorist for us to fight." Such policy statements correlate directly with Israel's crimes against the Palestinians over the past 60 years, leading up to the current siege -- which constitutes collective punishment and is illegal under international law -- on Gaza. Under international law such purposive destruction constitutes genocide. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Prohibition of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948, genocide is defined as the committal of one or more acts "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," and involves, among other acts, killing of members of an enumerated group and also the deliberate infliction "on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." Importantly, if intent is critical to understanding Israel's crimes of transfer and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, it would be historically and legally wrong to view these crimes but within the same frame as today's crimes of extrajudicial assassination, collective punishment and deprivation of fundamental human rights, including the rights to life, education, water and work, and not least the alienable right to return to one's country. As such, it has been proven by legal experts, including Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, that Israel's crimes during the Nakba are continuing violations; not violations committed in and belonging to the past. That the realisation of Israeli state policy has been gradual by no means relieves its responsibility, for there are no statutory limitations on the redress of mass crimes. In public international law, "a crime remains a crime until it has been remedied," Habitat International Coalition coordinator and human rights lawyer Joseph Shechla told the Weekly. Remedies for international crimes -- as explicitly laid out in UN General Assembly Resolution 60/147 -- include restitution of victims "to the original situation" before the violations occurred, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of the non-repetition of violations. If compensation has been proposed by Israel as a remedy for mass expulsions committed over decades since its inception, it has proposed inappropriately, because compensation is afforded "as part of a package. It is not the package," according to Shechla. Furthermore, compensation must be offered for damages incurred over time, including accumulated rent and profit from agriculture had the Palestinians not suffered the Nakba. "One way of calculating that would be by looking at the Israeli economy," Shechla says. Regardless, compensation does not absolve Israel of responsibility to provide additional remedies, including restitution, which includes the inalienable right of return. Even among the youth that has never seen Palestine, the prospect of return remains a sacred goal. "If I were able to go back to Palestine, I would go immediately," said Arwa Saleh, a 25-year-old Palestinian journalist living in Cairo. "Why would I give up my right? I can't imagine that anyone would." What legal analysis reveals is that the foundation and continuity of Israel -- as Israeli and Zionist leaders and their US and European supporters and donors know full well -- are in themselves war crimes because the provision of adequate remedy would mean undoing the Nakba and the state that emerged on its back. In this regard, it would be by no means improper to invoke the responsibility of the international community for its recognition of the state of Israel and the assistance -- ideological as well as material -- provided to it through the decades. According to Elna Sondergaard, professor of public international law at the American University in Cairo, it is incumbent upon international lawyers, in the absence of moves to enforce state responsibility, to take it upon themselves to "bring cases to courts and human rights bodies", related to more than six decades of Israeli crimes in perpetuity against Palestinians. Failure to do so undermines all faith in legal solutions, thereby leaving recourse to rebellion -- affirmed as a right by all means in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- as the only option. Indeed, until effective legal action is taken it is inevitable that direct resistance is embraced by an increasing number of dispossessed Palestinians and Arabs. In this, international law is on their side, in lieu of its own failures.
