78 Years after Al Nakba, Palestinians still Struggle to Free Palestine
78 Years after Al Nakba, Palestinians Struggle on To Free Palestine from genocidal Israel and its Jewish Supremacy.
The good Jews debate as to when their Zionist Settler Colony went wrong while the bad Jews pursue "Mein Kampf in reverse" at the enormous cost to indigenous Arab Palestinians over three generations.
As Daily Dispatch (14 May 1948) stresses, “History is often written by the victor. But the truth does not disappear. It simply waits to be told.”
On this historic day of Al Nakba, I wish to add my thoughts to the incredibly rich and painful body of thoughts, voices and emotions of solidarity and empathy to the Palestinian people.
Growing up in Mandalay as a Pavlovian admirer of Israel
Exiled permanently in UK since 2005, I came from Myanmar (formerly Burma), which I learned, as a kid, was the first outside the West to recognize Israel, officially founded on 14 May 1948. In her autobiography, My Life: Israel’s Only Female Prime Minister, the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir characterized as “a love affair” the bilateral relations between my birthcountry in Southeast Asia and her settler colony Israel. She was herself a settler coloniser, born Golda Mabovitch in (Tsarist) Kiv (in 1898), raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and settled as a die-hard Zionist in post-Ottoman Palestine in 1921.
In my youthful days during General Ne Win’s dictatorship under the veneer of faux socialism, I grew up in Mandalay, admiring socialistic Israel and disliking, if not despising, “hostile Arabs” who ganged up on a little brave Israel populated by Europe’s Jews whom the evil Hitler and Nazis tried to exterminate wholly.
In my early teenage years, I remember reading headline news about the Israeli war hero General Moshe Dayan’s visit to Burma as a guest of our dictator.
I grew up with a rosy view of Israel and its historical development as a socialistic democracy in the midst of those Muslim Arabs. Many of our military intelligence officers were Mossad-trained, something prestigious. Yes, our public view too was tinted with the “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” narrative.
So, I was excited when I discovered that Louis Walinsky who played a fatherfigure role in my young exile years in the United States (1988-2005) made his own contribution to the founding of Israel. Uncle Lou presided over my wedding in Washington, DC almost three decades ago. He was in charge of the vocational training program for the thousands of (Jewish) Displaced Persons, or “Holocaust survivors” in today’s lingo, in the Allied Occupied Germany in 1946 and 1947, before they were transported to Palestine where they became settler colonists.
But my warm and fuzzy feelings about Israel, both its inhabitants and state, changed radically, if not overnight but over time when I began to learn the ugly truths behind Israel’s creation and conversely see the systematic and pervasive lies and deceptions about what came to be known as “the Jewish state.”
The effects of the victor’s history wore off in the face of irrefutable truths: Israel was built as an European settler colony under the patronage of Anglo-American colonial/imperialist powers on the overwhelmingly Arab majority land through the use of terror, violence and fear, in short, genocidally.
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My first encounter with a high profile Israeli.
A decade before the Palestinian jail break on 7 October 2023 and the resultant war of extermination in Gaza by Israel, I felt both sufficiently informed and angry enough to confront ex-Admiral Ami Ayalon former Director of Shin Bet (or Shabek), Israel’s internal security agency, at a private posh fundrasier in London for Haifa University of which he was Chair of the Board of Trustees. I wasn’t hostile or aggressive.
I just asked a simple factual question: why doesn’t Israel honour the right of return of Palestinian peoples from their diaspora? After all, Israel promotes the Jewish return to the biblical homeland over a few generations since its founding in 1948.
To my shock, the highly decorated Israeli spook and ex-Naval admiral completely lost it. He was visibly enraged by my question, and dismissed it in these angry words verbatim: “I don’t care about fairness or justice (for Palestinians)”.
When Israel’s genocidal onslaught hit world news headlines, I spotted Ayalon on different TV interviews, from CNN to Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo. It turned out that he was showing empathy for Palestians, to my delight, and relatively speaking.
Since Israel’s own genocide in Gaza - or “Mein Kampf in reverse”, as ex-General Moshe Yaalon put it in a videorecorded Hebrew comment during a meeting of the Commanders for the Security of Israel in July 2025 - I paid two visits to the Occupied Palestine, including a Gaza crossing on Israel’s side, and has been politically active 24/7 in support of Palestinian people’s struggle to end the occupation and genocide, and to establish a free and sovereign nation. Needless to say, all in my own small ways.
Since the post Oct-7 genocide in Gaza, there have been a number of high profile Jewish Israelis who are scathingly critical of Israel, that is, the state, the ruling coalition regime and the Israeli Jewish society, drawing Israel-Nazi comparisons.
They were all born into the Zionist project of believing in, building, maintaining and defending Israel, . Among them are former Chief of the IDF General Staff and ex-Minister of Defence Moshe Yaalon, ex-chief of Mossad Tamir Pardo, the renowed Hareetz journalist Gideon Levy, the Brown University holocaust historian Omar Bartov, genocide scholar Raz Segal at Stockton University, besides Ami Ayalon.
Added to their criticisms of Israel, there is also a growing number of Jewish American journalists, academics and writers who have come to reject the rosy Pavlovian view of Israel and its deceitful narrative of building a Jewish homeland on the land without any people.
There have been so many legitimate voices and writings by those who have incomparably more insightful and grounded views than I do on the subject of Al Nakba - and, conversely, Israel’s founding as “the Jewish National Homeland”, all on the unknown number of corpses of Palestinian people and the ruins of their lives, the land, cities, towns, and villages, and the loot of Palestinian property.
Palestinian Voices & Perspectives and anti-genocide Jewish Israeli Voices
I have compiled a short collection of both Israeli and Palestinian voices and perspectives on Al Nakba, specifically, and on the settler colonial project of building a categorically European Jewish majority ethno-state on the Arab majority land of Palestine.
What better voice that should be heard than an excerpt (pp-111-112) from “Palestine or Israel” (1970), a 22-page pictorial booklet which a young Palestinian refugee undergraduate at Durham University in UK named Mohammad Tarbush published in 1970, using his own scholarship stipend. His attempt was to counter a very effective Zionist propaganda which “successfully portray Zionism, settling in the already inhabited lanmd of Palestine, as a national Jewish liberation movement” (p.109), the propaganda that was also equating falsely “anti-Israel” criticism with “anti-Semitism.”
Tarbush detaialed these orchestrated false premises in his autobiography “My Palestine: An Impossible Exile”.
Unfortunately, Tarbush didn’t live to see his book in print. He literally dropped dead in his own in Northern France shortly after he finished his manuscript. His surviving daughter Nada Tarbush, whom I call “my little Palestinian sister”, saw to it that her father’s manuscript saw the light of the day. It was published posthumously in London by Haus Publishing in 2024.
Like many Palestinian Nakba survivors of his generation, Tarbush’s personal and professional life was inseparably linked to his quest for reclaiming his Palestinian birth nation which his parents were completely and violently uprooted. Neither they nor Mohammad Tarbush nor Nada have had the right of return.
The biography is an absolute page-turner about a young Palestinian teenager who was determined to get a good education for himself in Europe, despite all odds against him. in the early 1960’s, the young Tarbush - at 15 - hitch-hiked to the heart of Europe to find a Swiss tourist couple he by chance met, growing up as a refugee kid in Jerico, and finally getting British university education at Durham and Oxford. As a finance expert, he “made it” in Europe’s banking industry, having reached the position of a Managing Director of the Deutsch Bank and UBS, and, needless to say, used his resources, energy and network to buttresss Palestinian struggle for liberation.
When the state of Israel was founded in 14 May 1948, Mr Tarbush was 1 month old baby, born into a well-to-do Palestinian family in the village of Beit Natiff, about 10 kilometer from Bethlehelm. Like the iconic Palestinian revolutionary, poet, journalist, artist and writer Ghassan Kanafani, Mohammad Tarbush was educated at the UNWRA school, Kanafani in Dasmascus and Tarbush in Jerico.
In 1947 and 1948, the 3 major Jewish militias, David Ben Gurion’s Haganah, Menachan Begin’s Irgun, Yikzak Shamir’s Lehi, engaged in ethnic cleansing of majority Arab areas - made up of 11 towns and cities, nearly 600 villages, countless orchards and farms and 1,000 Muslim and Christian places of worships 90% of Arab Palestinians fled in all directions. Some ended in Gaza. Many headed towards Jordan and stopped in Jerico. And still others reached Damascus and Beirut.
In fact, Tarbush went to meet his fellow Palestinian exile Kanafani in Beirut and wrote for Al-Hadaf of which the latter was the editor.
The second is the 46-minutes podcast, an interview with Abed Abou Shhadeh, whose Arab Palestinian soldier grandfather refused to leave as the Arab majority most cosmopolitan city Jeffah, fell to the Jewish militias in 1948. For he saw the miserable lives of war refugees in Syria and places as a young soldier. Upon “the liberation of Israel” in 1948, Shhadeh’s grandfather and family became among the 3,000+ who were all ghettoised and rendered instantly “minority” in the newly created Jewish majority Israel.
Of the original population of 120, 000 of Jeffa and its surrounding villages, the rest fled, and were never able to return to their orgiginal homes which were either taken over by the Jewish settlers, or the newly established state of Israel or simply demolished to build parks, new residential buildings, commercial establishments, seafront fancy hotels and so on, which now form genentrified neighbourhoods of “Muslim Free Tel Aviv”, to borrow Ilan Pappe’s words.
The story of Jeffa reminds me the Jewish Quarter in Krakow, the most vibrant Ashkanaze Jewish community, before Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. After the Third Reich’s downfall, there were only 2,000 who returned, out of 70,000 original Jewish population. Most of them were “liquidated” - Nazi euphemism for mass extermination - about 60 kilometer away in Auschwitz.
As is well-known, a large majority of Arab Palestinians from Jeffa fled by sea along the Meditatarian coast to Gaza, 54 kilometers away.
The history of Israel in Jeffa (and by extension Gaza) since October 7, 2023 feels like another Mein Kampf albeit this time Israelis are Nazis and the Palestinians are Jews.
"I felt like, like, like a Nazi... it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews." (Source: Jewish Voice for Peace, 17 Jan. 2025)
As a Burmese, I belonged - note my choice of the past tense here - to the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar that perpetrated the crime of genocide against our own indigenous Muslim population in Rakhine state adjacent to Bangladesh. As a rights activist and a student of genocide, I could not remain patriotic to my old society and native country, when I realized that both the society and state have been fully engaged in this heinous crime. I had to make a choice between my humanity - that is, my conscience, empathy and a set of moral principles I say to myself I live by - and my Pavlovian identity as a Burmese and a Buddhist. I was a militant patriot all my life. But the genocide is my absolute red line.
So, it is fascinating - if painful - to watch the two Jewish Israelis who found themselves debating with each other over whether Israel - and the Zionist project and attendant Zionism - is evil, criminal and sinful from its very inception, or Zionist Project and Zionism have evolved into something horrific.
With the benefit of the hindsight, it is abundently clear and even self-evident that Zionism, as a mono-ethno-supremacist ideology, its inherent strategy of settler colonialist terrorism and the site of implentation, is criminal, genocidal and evil, from the very get-go.
It is gut-wretchening to see a world renowned Holocaust scholar and historian intellectually and morally degenerate into, in effect, normalizing Zionism as one of many other ideologies for self-determination and ethno-nationalist liberation for the world’s Jewry. He categorically failed to note that national liberation or self-determination struggles were waged by the colonized indigenous people against the alien White Man’s colonial yoke, and on their own native soil.
Besides, when Bartov was framing the Zionist movement and Zionism as a vehicle and ideology of liberation for the Jews, he must have Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern and Central Europe in his mind.
For the Arab Jews didn’t feel a need to be liberated or needed a “Jewish national homeland”, as evidenced by the fact that Mossad had to resort to false flag anti-Semitic bombings targetting Arab Jewish gatherings and synagogues to instill panic and fear in these well-integrated Jewish communities across Persia and Arab worlds.
Recently, the American Jewish author of “Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund”, Molly Crabapple pointed out that the Jewish labour movement known as Bundists saw Zionism as the most evil enemy of the Jewish proletariat.
So, when Bartov frames Zionism as the ideology of liberation for the Jews, he is blind, both ethnically and class-wise.
The good Jews can and will continue to debate over the evils of the settler-colonial idea of the Jewish self-determination on other people’s land while the bad Jews are ever more brazenly terroristic, Fascist, genocidal and violent.
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