The never-ending Nakba and Western complicity

Recently Western governments and other authorities have offered apologies for crimes against humanity committed in the past, for which they were directly or indirectly responsible. We have heard apologies for colonialism, slavery, racism, the Holocaust, genocides, failure to protect victims of mass killing - such as in Srebrenica -, anti-Semitism, discrimination, child abuse and sexual violence. The government of the Netherlands, represented by the King or the prime minister, did so on a number of occasions, in recent times more often than before. Those apologies were the result of intensive political debates. Most apologies sound sincere, others a little superficial. Many apologies led to fundamental policy reforms; some to substantial compensation measures and finance. 

When will we witness an apology by the international community for the injustice done to the Palestinians? Crimes against people living on Palestinian soil started right after the formation of the State of Israel. Whatever the reasons of the international community before 1940 may have been – reestablishing so called historical rights of Jewish people to live in Israel en supporting them to return;  or establishing a Western stronghold in the Middle East in order to control the Arab world – and whatever the political disputes and violent skirmishes preceding the creation of the new state, finally it was a decision by the international community, made in the highest organs of the United Nations and fully in accordance with international law, to fully accept Israel as a new member. According to UN General Assembly Resolution 273 (1949), and upon recommendation from the Security Council, the international community welcomed Israel as a ‘peace loving state’ after it had declared that it ‘unreservedly accepted obligations of the UN Charter and undertakes to honor them from the day it becomes a member of the United Nations’.

So, Israel thanked its existence to established international law and to the UN. And as soon as Israel had become an independent nation state it had not only the same rights as other states, but also the same obligations: respect international law in all its modalities -  human rights, non-discrimination, law of war, humanitarian law, the duty not to commit genocide and to prevent this, non aggression, the duty to care for people in occupied countries and territories, the obligation to obey resolutions of the Security Council and judgments of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Some rules and obligations did not yet exist when the state of Israel was created in 1948. Quite a few were called forth in later periods, such as the obligations stemming from in the non-proliferation treaty regarding nuclear arms, or the Convention of the Rights of the Child or the principle of the responsibility to protect. But all of those were based on the Charter of the United Nations and the International Bill of Human Rights, essential pillars of the family of nations which had given birth to the state of Israel. However, from the very beginning of its existence the state of Israel has violated these principles, knowingly and deliberately. 

The Other Exodus

It started by driving Palestinian people out of their homes and villages. Authorities and new media in the West eagerly bought the Israeli line of reasoning that the Palestinians, far from being expulsed, had been incited to leave or had themselves spontaneously chosen to go. That was not true. As my former UN colleague Erskine Childers already wrote in the 1950s, scrupulous investigation of all messages from radio Damascus has not delivered any proof. On the contrary, people were advised for safety reasons to stay at home. Many left, not spontaneously, but out of fear, because they were intimidated and threatened to kill, while their homes were destroyed. It was panic and terror.

Erskine has described this forced flight as The Other Exodus, in the opposite direction of the Exodus set out in the book by Leon Uris. As a young student I was impressed by the story of the ship Exodus which brought Jews who had survived the Holocaust to a country where they could find protection. Most people felt the same: the survivors of the Shoa and all yet unborn Jews deserved a new safe house of their own. 

In Europe political leaders were plagued by severe guilt feelings about the Holocaust, which were shared by most of the people who had survived the war, while the Nazi’s had slaughtered six million Jewish fellow citizens. Those guilt feelings were legitimate, but they were bought off by shifting the burden to people in an Arab and Islamic region in the Middle East, Palestine. People living there had not been responsible for the plight of the Jews during World War 2. However, they paid the bill and lost their land.

In European countries such as the Netherlands most attention was given to the wars between Israel and Arab countries protesting the establishment of the new state. In those wars European sympathy was with Israel, even during the Six-Day War 1967 which was started by Israel itself. The Israeli were seen as the victim and the sorry plight of Palestinian people was overlooked. Christian churches preached solidarity with the Jews and with Israel. These were identified with each other. Criticism of Israel was tagged as anti-Semitism, rejection of all Jewish people living in Israel or in any other country of the world. 

The same message was given in schools and universities. As a student in those years, I was not aware of academic research unveiling the reality on the ground. For me, as a young scientist at the University of Rotterdam, it lasted until the end of the nineteen sixties when I wrote an essay about the economic situation in the region, before I became aware of the inequalities and injustices attending the establishment of the new state. The number of refugees and displaced people was appalling. 

Shifting solidarities

In 1973 I became minister for International Development Cooperation in the Netherlands, shortly before the Jom Kippur War. All political sympathy concerned Israel, this time under attack. My colleague Henk Vredeling, minister for Defense, delivered weapons to Israel. He was criticized, not for the decision itself, which was applauded by the media, but because he had done so without consulting his colleagues, including the minister of Foreign Affairs. A year earlier the cruel attack by Palestinian militants during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munchen was met by fright and incomprehension. The hijacking of airplanes in the following years had the same effect. 

It took time before in Western Europe the awareness of injustice done to the people of Palestine gained ground. Gradually solidarity groups, drawing attention to inequality and injustice, were able to get the attention of the public. The Palestina solidarity committee in the Netherlands invited me together with other opinion leaders to pay a visit to Lebanon to speak with PLO representatives. At that time, I was member of parliament and the first Dutch politician meeting Yasser Arafat. In the nineteen nineties, again as member of the government I had the opportunity to meet him and his colleagues frequently in Gaza. During that decade, the tides had turned. Talks in Madrid, followed by the Oslo and Paris Accords, all of them with tacit or public support from western countries, offered a perspective on peace. As a minister for Development Cooperation, I was able to finance projects in Gaza and on the West Bank to support the Palestinian economy. The Israeli prime minister Peres assured me that his government did not object. On the contrary, he asked me to help furthering economic ties between Israel and Gaza. 

However, towards the end of the decade everything changed again. The new government of Israel launched attacks on all projects, including a harbor which we were building to support Palestinian export. They were bombed to pieces. Tripartite talks which we had started at ministerial level between the Netherlands, Israel, and Palestine to develop long term cooperation guaranteeing equal access to water resources were broken off by the Israeli. The Paris talks on economic cooperation had a similar fate. The agreements reached were not implemented. In her PhD thesis presented last year, one of my former Israeli students, Libby Lahar, described these talks in detail. She concluded: the failure is due to a complete lack of will at the Israeli side.

At the turn of the century, the mood in the West drastically changed. Twenty years earlier, as Deputy Secretary General of UNCTAD I had been responsible for the presentation of an annual report on the social and economic situation of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The report was purely factual and demonstrated structural social and economic deprivation of Palestinians. We had been mandated by the UN General Assembly to put it on the agenda of our Board which consisted of representatives of all countries. I was appalled: at the Western side we met total disregard, indifference and even hate. 

After 9/11 I noticed the same attitude throughout Europe, also during the three military operations against Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014. As a member of a delegation of the Rights Forum, a group of international lawyers and former ministers of all democratic political parties in the Netherlands, I visited Gaza right after the operation Cast Lead. We saw destruction and despair. Our group was led by former prime minister Dries van Agt. We discussed with the leadership of Hamas opportunities for peace, but back in the Netherlands we met indifference and nonchalance. As my colleague in the Den Uyl government in the nineteen seventies Van Agt had supported Israel, but twenty years later, after a visit to Palestine, he had become – in his own words – a convert. In public debates Van Agt went all out to defend the case of the Palestinians, but he met sheer hostility. 

Western hostility

Hostility is indeed the right term to describe the attitude of Western politicians and opinion leaders in the two decades behind us. As I have argued above, before and after the establishment of the State of Israel in the West four ideas had prevailed to strengthen the foundations of the new state: a Zionist colonial discourse, geopolitical neo-colonial rationalizations, Western guilt feelings about the Shoa, and finally a legal founding. The last one, embedded in international law, was the most important one, but in the course of time its significance eroded, and the implied obligations were nullified. Nationalist and increasingly fanatic religious Zionism together with new geopolitical hegemony aspirations of the big powers, made international law increasingly futile. Half-hearted Western guilt feelings led to a double standard policy based on flawed ethical reasoning and self-indulgence, condoning violations of human rights of Palestinians. All these developments were fed by another new belief, preached by right-wing opinion leaders: Western identity and interests are threatened by foreigners - immigrants, asylum seekers, people with other religions, Arabs, Islam. This fivefold combination of ideas made Palestinians, more than any other people, the focal point of Western fortification and self-righteousness. It meant that Israeli political leaders could do as they wished in an atmosphere of absolute impunity. Israeli politicians got into a habit of classifying Palestinian people as animals, as humans who do not have the right to be, or to be where they are. 

The international community which had welcomed Israel in its midst as a peace-loving state looked aside every time Israel violated its obligations. Western countries were silent, deliberately silent. The Nakba continued: more occupation, more settlements, more houses demolished, more expulsions, more killings, in Gaza and the West Bank. We just let it go. 

The Gaza War

All this culminated in the atrocities of the present war. No misunderstanding: the attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023, killing more than 1200 Israel civilians, most of them unarmed men, women, old age people and children, was a brutal crime which must be punished. Any liberation movement has the right to fight an occupying power and to use violence against the oppressor. But liberation and resistance movements have the same obligation as the oppressor: respect human rights, spare civilians, do not attack them. The Israeli reaction was out of proportion, overkill, collective punishment of innocent civilians for the acts of perpetrators. The Israeli army started bombardments flattening houses, schools, hospitals, and refugee camps, killing more than 50.000 people. A blockade began, barring humanitarian aid, cutting off all supplies of water, food, and medicine, driving people into the abyss of famine.

UN Secretary General Guterres spoke about the “killing fields of Gaza,” “floodgates of horror,” and an “endless death loop.”  UNRWA, the only agency with a capacity to sustain the survival of victims, was forbidden to conduct the mandate given by the General Assembly. Its Head, Lazzarini, described the consequences as “manmade and politically motivated starvation.” According to international humanitarian law starvation as a weapon of war is a war crime.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Prime Minister Netanyahu and the minister of Defense Gallant. The International Court of Justice reminded all countries that they have an obligation to prevent genocide. The Court also concluded that the State of Israel’s continued presence in all Occupied Palestinian Territory, the West Bank as well as Gaza, was unlawful. The Court declared that Israel should end this unlawful occupation as soon as possible, while all other countries were obliged to not assist in maintaining this unlawful presence.

However, these calls by official organs of the United Nations fell on barren ground. The government of the Netherlands declared that Israel had an absolute right to defend itself and deserved full and unconditional support. When asked whether there was a limit to “unconditional”, the answer was: ‘There is no red line, nowhere and never’. Upon receiving these assurances Israel intensified the killings. Together with other countries the Dutch made themselves complicit to mass murder and genocide. 

Netanyahu declared: ‘It is time to launch the concluding moves’.  Endlösung is in the making. Israeli authorities announce large scale invasion, seizure of the whole territory and forcible relocation of Palestinians to the South and to other countries. This is nothing else than ethnic cleansing. 

The United States have chosen to ignore all this and did send weapons instead. Netanyahu got the green light to do as he sees fit. President Trump proposed, after the removal of two million Palestinians to neighboring countries, to develop the territory into the Riviera of the Middle East. Such suggestions fit in a pattern of the Israeli policy driving Palestinians within Gaza from North to South and back, from East to West, from one city to another, and then to the beach and abroad. The final stage of Nakba: a JoJo game in combination with Russian roulette. 

However, Western countries persisted in looking aside. The only step taken so far is a proposal to investigate whether Israel has violated international law. Really, is it still necessary to figure out what we all know already for more than a year? According to the minister of Foreign Affairs here in The Hague, the international city of justice and peace, the announcement was meant as a stripe in the sand. Indeed, that is what it is: one day later it will be blown away by the wind or washed away by the flood.

Today we remember the start of the Nakba, 77 years ago. During the last seven days every night between fifty and hundred people were killed. When will the day that we in the West apologize for having been accomplice? Or better, and more urgent, when will it stop? And what are we going to do, today, to bring the ever-continuing Nakba to an end? 

 

 

Jan Pronk

Address Nakba Commemoration, 

Humanity Hub, The Hague, May 15, 2025