The use of rape and other forms of sexual violence by Jewish forces in 1948 as weapons of war and instruments of ethnic cleansing has yet to be studied. In 1948 the rape of Arab women and girls was not a rare or isolated act commited by individual forces, but rather was used deliberately as an instrument to terrorise the civilian population and push people into fleeing their homes.

The evidence surrounding the Galilee expulsions shows clearly the existence of a pattern of actions characterised by a large number of massacres deigned to intimidate the population into flight.

Zionist methods have not only dispossessed the Palestinians of their own land; they have also attemted to deprive Palestinians of their voice and their knowledge of their own history.

Don't ever be suprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.

The immigrant-settler nation-state of Israel is a blatantly racist state, regarding its indigenous people - once by far the overwhelming majority population of historic Palestine - as less than human, as disposable, expendable and 'transferable'.

It has rained for five days
running
the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water
where small islands
are only beginning
to cope
a young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun
forget
and drown easily.

If you come as softly
As wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.

De løser sine åndetrær ved roten,
og blåser i alle skadde horn ved bredden.

Sår ved føllets mule,
gå med det til elvekongen.

In 1948 'Ayn Zaytun was an entirely Muslim farming community of 1,000 inhabitants, cultivating olives, grain and fruit, especially grapes; the name is Arabic for 'Spring of Olives'.

A recent study by Noga Kadman found that eighty-six destroyed Palestinian villages were inside the JNF forests.

That year, a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries...'The Palestinian people does not exist', said the new masters, and henceforth the Palestinians would be referred to by general, conveniently vague terms, as either 'refugees', or in the case of a small minority that had managed to escape the generalized expulsion, 'Israeli Arabs', A long absence was beginning.

A society that had existed as far as human memory can go back disappeared during a few months; the homeland, the place of residence, the land -- a major source of wealth, dignity and influence -- and the physical and cultural environment, the validity and endurance of which Palestinians had never questioned, turned out to be most insecure.
(Sa'di 2005: 7-26)

The JNF has always been and continues to be instrumental in the colonisation of Palestine and the expropriation of Palestinian land.

But race is the child of racism, not the father.

Dividing human beings into a hierarchy of races, ethnicities and cultures, the racist 'clash of civilisations" thesis reduced and dehumanised Arabs and Muslims.

I had to arrive as well at the heartrending realization that the dream that had been a balm to my soul, that of a Jewish national rebirth in my people's ancestral biblical home had been achieved by imposing a nightmare on the Palestinian inhabitants of the land, a nightmare that continues to this day.

Anger in its natural, healthy form is a boundary defense, a dynamic activated when we perceive a threat to our lives or our physical or emotional integrity.

"Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all costs, against all resistance."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

The most horrific aspects of the Nakba - the dozens of massacres that accompanied the etnic cleansing, as well as detailed description of the experience from the point of view of those 'ethnically cleansed' - can only be recovered when such a historiographical approach is applied.