Go back to where you came from

My topic today is a serious one, but I will begin with an old anecdote, to lure the reader in. One day, Juha was sitting on the doorstep of his home, watching people go past him in the street, and was bored. He thought of amusing himself, so he told people that at the edge of town a rich person's wedding and a huge banquet were taking place, open to all. The people began to repeat what Juha said and hurried toward the supposed wedding. Juha saw them running before him, and said to himself, maybe there really is a wedding at the edge of town, and ran along with them, having believed his lie. The criminal gang called the government of Israel is Juha today, as it believes its lies and deceives itself, along with the rest of the world. Israel has been silent about the unrest in Syria for 15 months; it occupies the Golan, and not a single bullet has been fired there for 30 years. The war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu believes that the end of the Syrian regime has drawn near; he issued a statement showing sympathy with the people of Homs, asking for international intervention to save them. In Israel's prisons, there are around 10,000 Palestinians, including women and minors, most of them there without trial. Israel confiscates their lands on the West Bank, to build settlements and imposes a blockade on Gaza, turning it into a large, Nazi-style concentration camp. Then, Netanyahu remembers the people of Homs. All of the Arab revolutions have installed regimes that hate Israel and oppose it more than their predecessors. If there is regime change in Syria, the new rulers will be openly hostile to Israel and Netanyahu will learn about what people in Homs think of the occupation of the Golan, and the Zionist entity. I barely had time to wake up from the lie of Netanyahu's sympathy for the people of Homs before I read that members of the Knesset had dedicated a session to studying the idea of commemorating the Armenian Genocide, from the days of the Ottoman Empire. The massacre is nearly a century old, and from the establishment of Israel on the ruins of Palestine in 1948 until the end of the 20th century, or about 50 years, Israel was in an alliance with the Turkish military, which ran things in the country from behind a decrepit democratic façade. Then, the Islamists came to power in Turkey, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Turkish authorities distanced themselves from Israel; they condemned Israel's crimes against the Palestinians, and one of Israel's reactions was to kill, in international waters, participants in a freedom flotilla that had left for Gaza. Israel is a state of crimes and an occupation; it does not have the right to exist on Palestinian territory in the first place, to then see its fascist government suddenly remember the Armenian massacres. Which brings us to how Palestinian Armenians and everyone else emigrated after Israel's occupation, because they also could not stand the Israelis. My history and geography teacher in high school was a Palestinian-Armenian, as were two of my classmates at the American University of Beirut; Palestine's ambassador to Britain is Professor Manuel Hassasian. I would say that Palestinian Armenians hate Israel as much as the people of Homs do. From one lie to another: members of the United States Senate, who have been bought by the lobby with dollars, want to know the number of Palestinian refugees who benefit from UNRWA assistance, in a resolution named after Senator Mark Kirk, who proposed it. Every white person in the US is a refugee, or a descendant of refugees, and the Palestinians who were displaced in 1948 after the Deir Yassin and Qibya and other massacres numbered 750,000 people. They now number five million people, and the elderly among them can take Senator Kirk by the hand and show him their families' homes, fields and lands, which are now occupied by the Israelis. A final lie: the American Likudnik magazine Commentary recently published an article entitled "Dividing Jerusalem is Physically Impossible," with the "proof" being that an American walked in its streets and saw the intertwining of housing and populations. Fine, there is a solution. I say to the Israelis, "Go back to where you came from." --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.