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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Kosovo's real precedent
By Ghada Karmi *Ever since the crisis in Kosovo began, Western media coverage has stressed the parallels between the behaviour of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and that of the Nazis. Images of Jews being herded into concentration camps, echoing those of Albanian refugees pouring across the border, have been invoked. Israel, however, which should have been among the first to draw these comparisons, has maintained official silence throughout this crisis beyond offering humanitarian aid. There has been no official Israeli condemnation of the Serb onslaught against Kosovo, nor an official endorsement of the NATO bombing of Serbia.
On the contrary, as the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reports (30 March), the Yugoslav ambassador to Israel has received expressions of pro-Serbian sympathy from many Israelis. Furthermore, relations between Yugoslavia and Israel have been getting warmer since the Dayton Agreement of 1996. Ambassadors were exchanged and trade between the two countries has steadily increased -- it was estimated to be $19 million in 1998 -- while Israeli tourism to Yugoslavia has been brisk. In 1997, the Yugoslav foreign minister visited Israel and, in the same year, the Israeli trade and industry minister went to Belgrade.
This closeness should not surprise anyone, for more than diplomatic and economic ties bind Israel and Yugoslavia. The real parallel to Milosevic's policy in Kosovo lies not with the Nazis, as the Israelis well know, but with the Palestinian expulsions they carried out 50 years ago. The imperative then, as now in Kosovo, was to create an ethnically pure state. To this end, between 1947 and 1949, 750,000 Palestinians, my family amongst them, lost their homes and became refugees. This was the result of a deliberate Zionist policy to reduce the Arab population of Palestine and to make way for an ethnic Jewish state.
Due to various methods of harassment and intimidation, as well as physical expulsion -- which of course do not compare to the much greater brutality of current Serbian methods -- over 70,000 native Palestinians left the country between December 1947 and May 1948, when the state of Israel was established.
When, immediately afterwards, the Arab armies attacked the new state, the war gave the Zionists the cover they needed to evacuate the country. For decades afterwards, Israel was able to claim that the Arabs had fled due to the exigencies of war. Accordingly, the vast bulk of the expulsions, amounting to 80 per cent of Palestine's population, took place during the year in which the Arab-Israeli war took place.
Likewise in Kosovo, although 65,000 Kosovars had already been driven from their homes in the month preceding the start of NATO bombing, the 450,000 expulsions currently cited have occurred since then. In 1948, the huge exodus of Palestinian refugees devastated the ill-prepared Arab countries, just as today, the Kosovars are streaming into neighbouring states which cannot cope.
Serb soldiers are reported to have terrorised the departing Kosovars so much they cannot think of returning, just as the Israelis in 1949 mounted a terror campaign of intimidation against the expelled Palestinians encamped on their borders to prevent them returning. As the "temporary" camps go up in the Balkans for the refugees, it will be interesting to see if they, unlike the Palestinian refugees before them, are ever repatriated.
Accompanying this ethnic cleansing, a propaganda campaign to lay the blame on the victims themselves has been mounted. The fables being fabricated are strikingly similar: the Kosovars are alleged to have fled before the NATO bombs, which they themselves had precipitated; or they are linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army. Most of the Serb population does not actually know what its government is doing in Kosovo and does not believe foreign reports. Likewise, the Palestinian flight was attributed to the war or to orders to evacuate issued by Arab leaders. Ordinary Israelis have never been told the true facts and to this day they still cling, bar a small minority, to the official version.
As the Kosovars leave, all evidence of their presence in Kosovo is being eradicated. Their papers, personal effects and property have been confiscated so as to make it impossible for them to prove they ever had a link with Kosovo. In 1948, 440 Palestinian villages were demolished, all habitable Palestinian homes were labelled "abandoned" and occupied by Jews, while other buildings and land were taken over by the state as "absentee property", never to be relinquished.
The eradication of Palestinian culture and history has continued ever since. A common mythology, which lays claim to an ancestral homeland but takes no account of subsequent history, lies behind these two examples of ethnic cleansing. The Serbs venerate Kosovo as the cradle of their identity and its loss to the Ottoman Turks in 1389 is still commemorated by a national holiday. Though its inhabitants during the 600 years since then have been 90 per cent ethnic Albanians, this has not extinguished the Serb passion for Kosovo. On a par with this, but with less historicity, is the claim to Palestine as the Jews' ancestral homeland of 2,000 years ago. Though overwhelmingly populated by non-Jews since then, the myth of Jewish prior claim has remained alive and was successfully invoked by the Zionists in the creation of Israel 50 years ago.
There are, however, important differences between the two situations. In 1948, no TV cameras were on hand to show the ugly reality of ethnic cleansing. No Western power was prepared to bomb the Israelis or help the Arab countries that became hosts to the refugees; the UN's special agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, was only set up in 1950. Most importantly, the Palestinian exodus did not stir the world's conscience as has happened with Kosovo today. It was something that happened out of sight, "over there", and the pernicious idea that the refugees could be absorbed into the Arab world, as if they were indistinguishable, became a convenient evasion of international responsibility.
Worse still for the Palestinians, the perpetrators were Jews, for whom Europe nurtured a special guilt, and so the Palestinian tragedy became invisible. No one understood the full human cost of that ethnic cleansing and even now, there is enormous unease about drawing parallels between Serbs and Israelis.
With a few exceptions, Palestine has not featured at all in the Western coverage of the crisis to date. And yet, there is an opportunity here to redress the past. Now that Europeans have seen what forcible displacement did in Kosovo, perhaps they will understand the dreadful reality of that earlier displacement in Palestine.
And perhaps even Israelis, who have lived shielded from what they did in 1948, may bring themselves at last to confront their own history and make amends to those they have wronged. And that, in turn, could be the starting point for a proper resolution to this bitter and long-standing conflict.
*The writer is visiting professor at the University of North London.
