Why are Palestinians paying the price for what the Europeans did to the Jews in Europe?

Let us remember that on your continent, dear Europeans, wild, brutal anti-Semitism raged for centuries, resulting in bloody pogroms, mass killings, expulsions, dispossession and harassment of European Jews. When a movement emerged within the Jewish community calling for a mass exodus to Palestine, European anti-Semites encouraged it.

One of them, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour signed a pledge in 1917 that the British government would support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, on the lands of the indigenous Palestinian population. The Holocaust, the peak of European murderous anti-Semitism, was followed by European countries unanimously backing the creation of Israel in a United Nations vote. More than half of the world – still under colonial rule – could not vote.

The indigenous Palestinian population, of course, was not asked whether it wanted to pay the price for European anti-Semitic brutality. The following year, Israeli militias ethnically cleansed more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in what we call, the Nakba, the catastrophe.

As American writer James Baldwin aptly put it in a 1979 article reflecting on this reality:

“The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests … The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”

It has been 75 years of this “guilty Christian conscience” now, dear Europeans. One has to wonder if ever you would ever feel guilt for your complicity in what is happening to us, Palestinians.

It should not be that difficult to look critically at the brutality Palestinians have been subjected to, and ask yourselves if it is right. It should not be that difficult to open a history book and read and learn about what has happened in Palestine and understand our struggle for self-determination and return. It should not be that difficult to read the myriad of United Nations resolutions reaffirming our rights – to resist, to be free of occupation, to return to our homeland.

It is a disgrace to talk about human rights, equality and democracy and then fail to question the brutal policies of a country that engages in settler colonisation and apartheid.

—Majed Abusalama (@MajedAbusalama)