The conflict in Palestine has been going on for several generations. If we consider a generation is about 20-25 years, then it’s been roughly since my grandparents, who were born in the 1890’s. There was no Israel when I was born in Jerusalem, Palestine. Months after I was born, the United Nations divided Palestine and gave over half of it to the Jewish people. So 56 percent of Palestine had to be emptied out of its inhabitants so that the Jewish people could move in.

The Palestinians were never consulted or negotiated with. It was a settler colonialists project and the Palestinians resisted what was happening to them. Wouldn’t you? War erupted and the Jewish
people won. After all, most of them came from Europe, were well equipped and organized. And, at the end of the war in 1949 the Jews had gained control of 78 percent of original Palestine, not
just the 56 percent they were given.

Now the question was: How to get rid of 750,000 people, over half of the Palestinian population at the time. Well, with a lot of violence and massacres. That’s what happened to my family. My dad was a teacher, and he came home from work one day and told my mother to get the kids ready because we had to leave right away. The violence and massacres were getting too close to where we lived.

I was an infant at the time, the youngest of six children. We fled across the Jordan River into another country and became refugees, living the life of poor refugees for the next 10 years, until we were able to come to America. No one who was forced out or fled was ever allowed by the Israelis to return to Palestine and was never compensated for loss of home and property. Over 500 villages in Palestine were systematically bulldozed.

I heard another story this week about a family in Haifa shortly before the Nakba, the catastrophe that happened to the Palestinians in 1948. Some relatives living in Haifa knew a neighboring 
family whose married daughter was living in Nazareth and was about to have a baby. The mother decided to go to Nazareth to help her daughter and stayed longer than planned. The father then decided to go to Nazareth to visit them all, and when they finally returned to Haifa, there was somebody else living in their home, some Jewish people from who knows where. “What are you
doing here,” they asked. “Who are you? This is our home!” “No it’s not,” was the response. “This is our home now.” And they shut the door. This really happened. Can you imagine that happening to you? It’s happened numerous times to other Palestinian families in Palestine. Do you think people forget that kind of trauma?

There’s so much history here, but I’ll briefly tell you that Palestinians have continued to resist the theft of their homes and properties. In 1967 another war erupted, and the Israelis won that war
too. Over 300,000 more Palestinians were displaced from their homes. Most of them went to Gaza. The result of this war was a complete military control over all historic Palestine to this day.
That’s what is called the Occupation.

Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappé in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” have written extensively about this and have exposed the Zionist goal, their unspoken policy from the beginning, of taking all of Palestine with as few Palestinians as possible, no matter how long it took. Which is exactly what has been happening for generations. It is what is happening in Gaza now.
The genocide going on in Gaza now did not begin with Oct. 7, as the media would have us believe. That’s why it’s important to know the history. Palestinians in Gaza don’t want to leave their homes, because they know they will never be allowed to return to them. And war has always been an excuse for the Israeli government to snatch more land from the Palestinians.

For example, last week the settlement planning authority in Israel gave permits for building 3,500 new illegal settlement housing units in the occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

The West Bank is only 22 percent of original Palestine. And already there are about 800,000 illegal Israeli settlers living there and terrorizing the Palestinians, because they want them gone. Nobody in the West or the US is doing anything about that massive land theft. And Israel is getting away with it. It’s against international law, but the West has allowed such violations to happen in Israel since the beginning of Israel’s establishment.

Is it not crucial that we understand the pent-up anger and frustration caused by decades of injustice towards the Palestinians?

Human beings will explode when denied basic rights, when under siege, as Gaza has been for 16 years. This is not to condone violence, but to try to understand its roots so that we can do something about it. Just think about the staggering disproportionality of the violence, the genocide happening in Gaza right now – worse by far than the Nakba of 1948. All supported and paid for by
your tax dollars and mine.
Therese Mughannam was born in Jerusalem before the partition of Palestine by the United Nations. She is a co-founder of North Coast Coalition for Palestine.