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Rabat – “We went to Israel, when Israel wasn’t Israel yet,” is a statement made by a holocaust survivor, whose video has been trending in the past couple of days amid Israeli aggression targeting Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.
The video shows the survivor admitting that before the establishment of Israel, hundreds or probably millions of Jews, including herself, left Italy and many other places across Europe to settle in Palestine.
The video has gone viral online over the past week, with many pro-Palestine activists and commentators sharing it on multiple social media platforms to help make the case for the illegitimacy of Israel’s claim over Palestinian lands.
The resurfacing of the video comes as Israel escalates its war on the Gaza Strip in retaliation for an October 7 attack in southern Israel by Hamas, a Palestinian resistance movement. In addition to blockading Gaza and cutting off electricity, water, and fuel supplies to the Palestinian enclave, Israel has mercilessly bombed residential neighborhoods, including hospitals and schools.
Some of the frustrated online protesters have used the video to stress Palestinians’ legitimate rights to stand against Israeli aggression, occupation, and the illegitimacy of Israeli settlements.
“There was no state of Israel, it was Always Palestine, Israel was illegitimately manufactured and the nation of Palestine was erased from the map,” one netizen wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
‘Jammed like cattles’
Many used the video, which also shows an excerpt of a video of US media describing Jews as “cattles” while migrating to Palestine.
The video shows the news commentator describing the immigrants as “cattles” as they were “jammed” in boats carrying them to Haifa.
The commentator added: “Two former US military vessels carrying nearly 4,000 Jewish refugees arrived at the port of Haifa, Palestine.”
Meanwhile, many have also shared old documents showing how Israelis broke or disregarded their own vows to be “loyal to the government” of Palestine when they entered the land of Palestine.
One of the photos that went viral shows a form of an application for a visa to Palestine. The applicant was former Prime Minister Shimon Perez, who in 1935 received a permit from the Palestinian Immigration Office to immigrate to Palestine to work as a laborer.
The Palestinian Information Center shared the same document in 2017, revealing that Peres was a “farmer” when he arrived in Palestine from Belarus.
However, the center said that the document was Peres’ application for Palestinian citizenship.
“Peres’ signature appears clearly in the citizenship application, which includes a statement saying, ‘I swear to be faithful and loyal to the government of Palestine,’” it added.
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The case of Jews immigrating to Palestine started under the British Mandate following the Balfour Declaration, a statement documenting the British support for the establishment in Palestine of a home for the Jewish people.
The Balfour declaration takes its name from Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary who in a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of a British Jewish community, suggested the idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine.
The year 1923 would then see the establishment of the British Mandatory Government, which facilitated mass Jewish immigration to Palestine.
A partition plan introduced by the UN in 1947 exhibited the situation as it called for granting to a Jewish state 55% of what many scholars and specialists often refer to as “Historic Palestine.”
The plan was unsurprisingly rejected by Palestinians, paving the way for tensions and subsequents conflicts between Palestinians and an increasingly bold community of Israeli settlers. As Israel won a series of conflicts in the intervening years, Israeli settlers went on to expel Palestinians from even more lands.
As a May 2021 Al Jazeera article pointed out, Jews accounted for about 6% of the population in Palestine prior to the British Mandate. During the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which lasted from 1947 to 1950, Zionist military forces drove out at least 750,000 Palestinians and seized 78 percent of historic Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza Strip received the remaining twenty-two percent.
All of historic Palestine was taken over by Israeli soldiers in the 1967 war, and another 300,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, the article added, noting that Israel still forcibly removes Palestinians from their homes and territories in Jerusalem and the West Bank, where Jewish Israeli settlers frequently take up residence.
