After 60 years it seems that the collective memory of the West is in danger of fading

* By Iqbal Jassat   
 
After 60 years it seems that the collective memory of the West is in danger of fading. Much worse is that concurrently, the West desires that the collective memory of the entire world also evaporates. This is wishful thinking simply because the world is aware that what the West hopes for is driven by a need to erase its guilt in the criminal dispossession of Palestinians six decades ago.
 
Britain’s role as the crown in the colonial pack of Western nations in turning over Palestine to a Zionist movement is certainly at the heart of the ethnic cleansing which finally resulted in European Jews claiming Palestine as Israel.
 
Europe’s genocidal anti-Semitism, which Johann Hari cites as the core reason, which drove Jews to Palestine during and before 1948, can justifiably, be viewed today to have remained the same. Except that they direct the anti-Semitism against Palestinians in the hope that their liquidation by the other Semites – aided, supported and shielded – will absolve them from any inquisition about their complicity in the original crime.   
 
What Palestine is faced with today is nothing less than a monumental crime perpetrated before the illegitimate act of proclamation on 15th May 1948 which announced the establishment of Israel over the ruins of destroyed Palestinian towns, villages and farms. The 60th anniversary celebrations by the Jewish state and its supporters are therefore comparable to the macabre dancing on the graves of its innocent victims.
 
The West in general has been pretty vocal in extending congratulatory messages to Israel. Some leaders such as Gordon Brown have indeed hailed 60 years of Palestinian loss and suffering as a glorious era of Jewish excellence. Incredible! By extolling the virtues of an apartheid regime they are in fact willing to allow the enormous pain inflicted upon the helpless victims of Israel to continue unabated.
 
The untold story shielded from public scrutiny is bitter for not only does it chronicle a narrative which reveals direct western complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; it also lays bare the pious hypocrisy of Western leaders.
 
Yet, like it or not, the explosion of fireworks across the stolen land will cast a new light upon the losses of victims. In addition to illuminating the sky above Jerusalem and other cities, Palestinians mourning the Naqba will be reminded that their long walk to freedom has many more hurdles to overcome. Also that their walk will remain lonely and peppered with rocks in the form of Apache helicopters, F16s, tanks and bulldozers – courtesy of the Americans and Europeans!
 
* Iqbal Jassat is Chairman of Media Review Network, an advocacy group based in Tshwane (Pretoria).

13/05/2008