AL-WATAN newspaper recently published a revealing caricature in which US President George W. Bush asks his Secretary of State Colin Powell: "Tell me, how long have the Palestinians lived in Israel?"
Leaving aside the question of whether US leaders are ignorant of the history of the rape of Palestine or whether they know all the details, historical facts and deeds show that the land owned by Jews from 1855 to 1918 did not exceed 2 percent and from 1920 until the end of the British Mandate in 1948, Jewish ownership did not exceed 6 percent — 1,425 sq km as opposed to 21,975 sq km owned by Arabs.
After the occupation of Palestine by immigrant Zionist terrorist gangs, the State of Israel was declared composed of 22,920 sq km out of a total land area of 23,400 sq km. After the 1967 war and the capture by Israel of the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel seized a total of 2,767 sq km, on which to begin its program of Zionist settlements.
As for the inhabitants, the percentage of Jews resident in Palestine was 8 percent until 1918 and 82 percent Palestinians. The percentage of Jews continued to rise with the increase in Zionist immigration to the occupied territories, reaching 11 percent in 1932 and 31 percent in 1947. With the Zionist gangs having occupied Palestine and proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel plus the increase in horrific slaughters and mass killings of Palestinians and the beginning of mass Palestinian immigration to neighboring countries, the percentage of Palestinians fell from 82 percent in 1918 to some 18 percent in 1948.
According to the information from the American Housing Office, the number of displaced Palestinians is estimated at about 6,450,000 who are resident in 16 Middle Eastern or African countries in addition to half a million who live outside the Middle East. Donna Ezret, a law professor at Syracuse University in New York, confirms this, estimating the number of Palestinian refugees at 6,375,800. She says that this number will rise to 8,265,000 by the year 2005. This is an officially accepted document by the American government, as mentioned in a report published in a Kuwaiti political newspaper on Oct. 29, 1999.
This is the crux of the Palestinian problem but a crux which everyone seems to have agreed not to talk about. What is no longer a secret though is that the American administration, since the days of Bill Clinton, has worked diligently to prevent Palestinian refugees — around 60 percent of Palestinian nationals — from having the right of return to their homes. Efforts have been made instead to settle them permanently in the places where they live. In other words, the camps where they have lived for more than half a century. At the same time, Israel plans to bring more than a million Jews from the four corners of the earth to settle in Israel.
It is strange that the Arabs and Muslims know so little of the misery of the Palestinian refugee camps and the ordeals and humiliation that these refugees have had to live with for more than 50 years. The relief foundations’ income has been falling and its allotments dwindling to disgracefully low levels while the United States spends billions of dollars annually to support Zionist occupation, its military machine, programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and plans to expand and increase the number of settlements and rape what little land is left to the Palestinians. In addition, the Americans support both politically and monetarily all programs that draw tens of thousands of immigrant Jews to the occupied territories every year.
The US is said by many to be a terrorist state; this has been put forward by UAE’s Minister of Information Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed. America funds, arms, and defends the rape of the Palestinians and all that they have suffered: Is this not terrorism? If that were not sufficient to indict it, then its tyrannical role, efforts and pressures, both declared and hidden, to merge more than six million Palestinian refugees into the lands where they have fled and deprive them of the right of return to their homes and country, which is contrary to America’s call for justice, humanity and human rights, certainly are sufficient. These acts qualify America to be a symbol of outright oppression and an example, not only of the support and funding of terrorism but of the method of washing away its remains, of suppressing any and all evidence of the crime and finally of burying its victims. This is the essence of the Palestinian question and one that all sides seem to be ever so careful to keep out of the spotlight.
