ISIL, Israel and cultural cleansing

“How on earth one manages to mention Israel when discussing #ISIS destroying #Nimrud…smh, unbelievable! @marwanbishara.”

This was one of the reactions I got to my interview about the historic context of the bulldozing of archeological sites in Iraq’s Hatra, Nimrud, and the destruction of various statues in Mosul museum by militants of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

It’s a rather predictable response from a Zionist, but it also shows how so many are in denial over their past and cannot see why the horrors in Iraq and Syria – as ugly as they might be – are neither new nor the exception.

As I mentioned during my interview on Al Jazeera, historically speaking, more than a few conquerors have attempted the same or worse when they occupied or colonised others’ lands. Whether that was the Japanese in Korea, the Germans in Poland, the Serbs in Bosnia, the Israelis in Palestine, or westerners in their colonies.

Historical facts

There’s no denying these historical facts; none that cannot be verified with a quick research.

No harm, indeed much good could come of the US, France, England, Russia, Turkey, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, etc, coming to terms with the dark aspects of their past.

Some nations have acknowledged their past sins while others remain in denial. The same goes for Israel and its Zionist friends.

To their credit, some Israelis have come forward in recent years to speak out on the ethnic and cultural cleansing of Palestine.

The Israelis, known as the new or “revisionist historians”, have defied the national conventional wisdom to expose decades-long state propaganda; one that is taught in Israel as “history”.

Some of these historians have dedicated their research for setting the record straight by exposing the grave historic injustice that resulted from the premeditated or default policies of the Israel’s founders against the indigenous people, the Palestinians.

Others however, while admitting the ethnic and cultural cleaning, are ideological in their approach. They justify the malfeasant policies as necessary for the survival of the “Jewish State”. They argue that the only way to erect a Jewish state was to undo what’s been there before it, hence destroying or erasing much of the Palestinian landscape.

Reconsecration of Palestine

In his book, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli political scientist and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, writes:

“The fate of the sites sacred to Muslims in the State of Israel can serve as an example of how victors arrogate for themselves sites that are sacred to their vanquished enemy and adapt them to their own needs, whether for worship or for secular purposes, even turning them to uses that are clearly sacrilegious. If they find no use for them, they leave them deserted and crumbling, and do not allow members of the defeated people to restore them, lest that serve as a ‘precedent’ for their return to the old landscape.”

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