Victimhood

Practically every facet of the Palestinian Cause has been based on portraying themselves as victims the past 75 years, but do many of their more aggressive actions belie this stance.

The first sign of Palestinian ‘victimhood’ – although they were merged with general Arabs of the area at the time – came in 1948 with claims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and what they commonly termed ‘The Nakba’ (‘The catastrophe’), relating to the displacement of 670,000 Palestinians in the 1948 war. This was blamed wholly on the Israelis, even though a factual analysis by historians has shown that 40% moved due to instructions from combined Arab-Palestinian forces, 45% due to the ravages of war (as with many wars), leaving only 15% moved by Israeli forces – mainly to secure battle lines due to being shot at from behind from village positions.

Also ignored in this claim was the fact that far more Jews – a total in fact of 1 million - were ‘ethnic cleansed’ from combined Arab and North African territories in the same period. Israel very rightly saw this as an ‘exchange of populations’ very similar to the population exchange that took place between Turkish Muslims and Greek Christians in 1923, involving 1.6 million between the two sides.

The 1 million Jews were accepted smoothly between Israel and some Western nations, but the neighbouring Arab nations mostly rejected absorption of the 670,000 Palestinians, preferring to keep them as refugees. It comes to something when the Arab nations that had guided/enforced a Palestinian exodus, then turned their back on them when it came to acceptance in their own nations.

A stance which one of the first UNRWA representatives, Lt. General Sir Alexander Galloway, archly criticized. In an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph in 1952, he wrote: 'It is perfectly clear that the Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.'

The other factor conveniently ignored when the ‘ethnic cleansing’ term is bandied about is the fact that a far higher percentage of Jews were removed from Arab-Muslim territories than the reverse with Arab-Palestinians from Israel. A 22% Arab population remained in Israel, whereas the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab nations and North Africa was 98%. In East Jerusalem, Judea-Samaria-West Bank and Gaza – captured by Jordan and Egypt respectively in 1948 – the number of Jews removed was 100%. Something rarely focused on when the subject of ‘ethnic cleansing’ arises.

This airbrushing out of any Jewish rights can also be seen in the next term to ride alongside the ‘Nakba’, ‘They stole our land.’ However, Jews had been steadily buying land in the area since 1860, often at double the going rate, and the main transfer of land was in fact public govt land. Notwithstanding, a ‘private land compensation board’ was established in 1950, with a rule set that any private Palestinian landowners who had lost their land be compensated at a rate of market price plus 20%. No such board was established in Arab or North African nations to compensate the 1 million Jews who had been expelled/fled.

So, with these two main early terms, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘lost our land’, Jews were by far the bigger losers than Arab-Palestinians. Though this did set the benchmark for much that followed, as if saying: ‘Palestinians must always be depicted as victims, and Jewish/Israeli rights should be ignored, whilst also always labelling them as the aggressors.’

Although in those early 1948 days, it was hard for anyone in the West to buy into the Palestinians being ‘victims’. After all, they were aided by the Arab forces of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – with a combined population of over 100 million – up against a fledgling Jewish-nation population of only 700,000, many of them holocaust survivors. The sympathies of the West at the time were firmly with Israel, and the cries of Nakba and ‘land theft’ were mainly for a more sympathetic Arab audience.

Indeed, the sympathies of the left-wing for Israel in the 1960s could be gauged by the fact that many University students used to spend their summer breaks on a kibbutz – whereas now they’d more likely be taking part in anti-Israel street marches. The main sea change did not in fact come until after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, at which time neighbouring Arab nations gave up their efforts to destroy Israel, and the ‘Palestinians’ were then seen as a more isolated, disadvantaged people, their fight against Israel carried on purely through terrorism.

This clinging to ‘victimhood’ could however be seen with the terms that followed over the next few decades: a forty-year suicide bombing campaign by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP – and the network of fences, walls and security barriers that derived were dubbed an ‘apartheid divide’, despite their obvious security links; with countless terrorist attacks a month, particularly in Judea-Samaria-West Bank, the necessary extra soldiers and security at checkpoints and barriers were suddenly labelled an ‘occupation’. Although to hardliners, every single metre of the combined Israel-Palestine area is considered ‘occupied’, thus the banners proclaiming ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be Free.’

But throughout, the pattern is the same: Palestinian militants and Jihadists launch countless terrorist attacks against Israelis, ranging from simple rock throwing (some in fact aimed at Jewish kindergarten children) to car ramming’s, knifings, shootings, rocket and bomb attacks – and never a mention that Jews/Israelis might be ‘victims’ from all of this.

Even with October 7^th – the second largest civilian terrorist massacre of the past 70 years, and by far the largest mass kidnapping – sympathy for Israel was short-lived. Indeed, within 5 days, while an Israeli military response was still in the preparation stages, a mass protest march was taking place in London once again propounding Palestinian victimhood. Almost as if no matter what the Palestinians did, including a massacre of immense proportions, they must never be portrayed as anything other than ‘victims’.

This could be seen in particular with the UN – despite the horrific level of Hamas atrocities on October 7^th – failing to come out with an official resolution condemning their actions. Aside from a failure to condemn Hamas’s massacre, Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur, tried to justify it: ‘Today’s violence must be put in context. Almost six decades of hostile military rule over an entire civilian population are in themselves an aggression.’

Of course, Albanese’s comment is made nonsense of by the fact that Oct 7^th didn’t come about because of ‘occupation’ or military rule, but a lack of it. If Israel had remained in Gaza after 2005, there would have been no 300 miles of tunnels built, no thousands of rockets stored; thus, no Oct 7^th or ensuing war.

Albanese, along with many others, also strived to discount claims of torture, beheadings and rape by Hamas – even though much of this they had filmed on their own go-pro cameras. Almost as if, in the eyes of the UN, Palestinian ‘victimhood’ was now set in stone, and an official memo had gone out to that effect: ‘No matter how horrific the atrocities from Palestinian radicals and terrorists against Israelis, these must be either denied, sidestepped or justified – because to do otherwise might undermine the Palestinians’ claim to victimhood’.

Other organizations – whether unwittingly or otherwise – also found themselves clambering aboard this ‘Palestinian victimhood’ bandwagon. Despite numerous reports and testimonies of rape on October 7^th, groups like ‘Believe Women’ and ‘Silence is Violence’ – who have been championing women’s rape victim rights for decades – showed little or no support for Israeli pronounced victims. Feminist and human rights groups such as Amnesty International and National Organization for Women followed a similar line, staying mute or showing little support for these rape claims, when normally they’d be up in arms about them.

Then finally we discover what lay behind this apathy: the fact that it went against their ‘Palestinian victimhood’ stance over the Gaza war, even going so far as to accuse the Israeli government of ‘weaponizing rape’, ‘In order to justify their genocide in Gaza.’ It comes to something when the clarion call of ‘Palestinian victimhood’ has reached such a level that groups dedicated for decades to defending female rape victims would suddenly abandon those principles because the victims were Israeli Jews.

The issue of ‘Palestinian Victimhood’ has now reached such a level that all other potential victims are conveniently ignored. The latest ‘victim card’ to be raised is that of a famine in Gaza, despite all the evidence against this. The last photos of Hamas leaders captured or killed show a number of them at least 20 lbs heavier than previous photos. Hamas propaganda photos show young children of seven or eight, plump and well-fed in full combat gear and brandishing an AK-47 that would cost $3,000 on the black market – enough to feed a whole family for almost a year.

The number of aid-food trucks going into Gaza has in fact been 62,000 over 19 months for a population of 2 million. Contrast that to Sudan, where there is a real famine, yet a total of 13,000 trucks of aid have gone into feed a population of 50 million over the same period. But we see nothing like the same level of news coverage or outrage over the situation in Sudan.

At heart, the main reason for the change in seeing Israel as victims in 1948 and seeing the Palestinians as victims now is that meanwhile – through continually having to defend itself – Israel has established a powerful army. Whereas initially the main armies and threat came from surrounding Arab nations and Israel was seen as the more isolated ‘underdog’. But what tends to be overlooked is that today Hamas and Hezbollah are both supported on a ‘proxy’ basis by a powerful nation, Iran, with a population of 80 million versus Israel’s 9 million, and part financed by Qatar, one of the wealthiest Gulf nations.

Even if there was a natural inclination to support terrorist ‘underdog’ groups when up against national armies, that then begs the question: where was the support for ISIS and Al Qaeda over and above the coalition armies of the USA and UK? Once again it appears as if different rules have been applied to Israel.

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John Matthews is an experienced writer and journalist. The author of 24 books, including two centred around WW2 and the holocaust in the name of J.C. Maetis (his father’s original Jewish name) his first experience of writing about the Middle East came as a war correspondent covering the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, which led to his second book, ‘The Crescents of the Moon’. He has since written on the subject for a number of journals, including The Times, Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The Spectator. He was also in the run-up to the millennium editor of European Brief, the main magazine for the European Parliament, editing the likes of Tony Blair, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger on subjects ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and European unity, climate change and nuclear fusion to, once again, the Middle East. He lives in London with his wife and family.

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