Israel celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut or Independence Day from the evening of Tuesday 26 April to the evening of Wednesday 27 April 2023. Israel follows the lunar calendar.
Yom Ha’atzmaut is the national day of Israel, commemorating the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948. The day is marked by official and unofficial ceremonies and observances. It is generally a joyous occasion.
This year celebrated Israel’s 75th anniversary of independence.
Two days before this, Israel commemorated Yom HaZikaron from Monday 24 April until Tuesday 25 April 2023.
Yom HaZikaron is Israel’s official national remembrance day. The day is dedicated to fallen soldiers and the civilian victims of terrorism. It is truly solemn.
It begins with a siren being sounded across the country at 20h00. Israeli citizens are expected to stop whatever they’re doing and wherever they are, and stand firm to honour those they’ve lost with a minute of respectful silence.
The most astonishing sight and quietude occur when Israelis stop their cars wherever they are driving, including highways, to observe the call of the siren. (If anyone knows anything about Israel’s highways, they are always busy and Israelis don’t have the best driving skills or manners).
The experience is affecting and sobering.
President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, sent a message of friendship to Israel in honour of the country’s 75th Independence Day.
‘Today we celebrate 75 years of Israel’s independence and friendship with Europe,’ she tweeted.
‘A dream was realised’
Addressing herself to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and all the people of Israel, Von der Leyen said: ‘Seventy-five years ago, a dream was realised, with Israel’s Independence Day. After the greatest tragedy in human history, the Jewish People could finally build a home in the Promised Land.
‘Today, we celebrate 75 years of vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Seventy-five years of dynamism, ingenuity, and groundbreaking innovations. You have literally made the desert bloom, as I could see during my visit to the Negev last year.
‘Today we also celebrate 75 years of friendship between Israel and Europe. We have more in common than geography would suggest: our shared culture, our values, and hundreds of thousands of dual European-Israeli citizens have created a deep connection between us.
‘Europe and Israel are bound to be friends and allies,’ she concluded. ‘Your freedom is our freedom. Happy birthday to all the people of Israel.’
The Palestinian response was as unsurprising as it was false.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) called Von der Leyen’s message ‘inappropriate, false and discriminatory’.
The PA said her remark about Israel making ‘the desert bloom’, in particular, was an ‘anti-Palestinian racist trope’ and the day instead marks 75 years of Israel’s ‘colonial project’.
The PA claimed that her ‘trope’ ‘dehumanizes and erases the Palestinian people and falsifies their rich history and civilization’.
It is an extraordinary press release. The ‘trope’ is not a trope: Israel has made extraordinary strides to turn otherwise unusable land into land that supports agriculture.
The PA claims that the ‘trope’ dehumanises and erases the Palestinian people. In what way is not expressed, because it does no such thing. For once in the media war between Palestinians and Israel, this is not about the Palestinians.
Von der Leyen’s comments do not erase ‘their rich history and civilization’. The Palestinians’ (to mean Muslim Palestinians) history and civilisation is tied to Muslim history in the Middle East more broadly. Palestine itself, which was only ever a part of the Ottoman and British empires, had no particular civilisation as distinct from that of the Middle East.
Israel’s occupation
The press release goes further: it says that the European statement ‘whitewashes’ Israel’s occupation of lands Palestinians claim for their hoped-for future state and denies what they call ‘the Nakba’ (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) of 1948.
In 1948 there was no claim for a future Palestinian state. Palestine was regarded as part of Greater Syria. The claim for a state came decades later.
Some 700 000 Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their homes in the war that followed Israel’s creation. However, two facts never get mentioned by Israel’s detractors: first, the war was started because of an invasion by five Arab states. Their plain intent was to destroy the Jewish state. In Islam Jews cannot be in authority over Muslims. Israel did gain more land through fighting the war, but the war ended in an armistice, not a peace agreement. The Israelis didn’t win, but nor did Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
Second, Israel does not deny forced expulsions of Arabs. (In the PA’s eyes, some fled.) However, in consequence of the declaration of independence, approximately the same number of Arab Jews were expelled or fled from Muslim lands they had lived in for centuries before Islam was even founded. The trigger for the governments they fled from was the founding of Israel, not anything they had done against the countries they lived in.
In 1947 the Muslim population of Palestine was 1 135 269. By mid-2022 there were about 14.3 million Palestinians in the world, of whom about 5.35 million lived in the West Bank and Gaza.
In 1939 the world’s Jewish population was 16.6 million. As a consequence of the Holocaust, as of 2022 the number of Jews was estimated at 15.2 million. The number of Jews in the world has still not recovered to its pre-Holocaust levels, according to figures published recently by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
The Palestinian Authority urged Von der Leyen to issue an apology to Palestinians.
A spokesperson for the Commission told the BBC: ‘The EU is unpleasantly surprised by the inappropriate statement of the Palestinian foreign ministry accusing the president of the European Commission of racism’.
‘Unacceptable reaction’
‘We are requesting clarification from the Palestinian authorities regarding this unacceptable reaction to her video.’
Whether you love Israel or hate it; whether you think Jews deserve to be killed or expelled or live under a Muslim government authority, it doesn’t take away from the fact Israel has existed for 75 years fostering extraordinary human and material development.
Organisations that monitor Palestinian Authority media and accurate reporting on Israel (CAMERA, Memri, Palestinian Media Watch, Honest Reporting) watch out for antisemitic tropes and fallacious reporting. They monitor all the reporting in Arabic; the reason is to ascertain what the Palestinian Authority is saying to its population. It is often diametrically opposed to what they say to the international community in English.
It seems on this occasion the Palestinians were expressing their real thoughts and tropes to the international community.
[Image: Ri Butov from Pixabay]
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