The Road to Nowhere by Ismail Shammout 1930-2006, whose family was expelled from Lydda in 1948. The plight of the refugees is depicted in many of his most famous paintings | Displaced Palestinians
On May 14, 1948, the Zionist state of Israel was established by unilateral declaration in defiance of the United Nations and international law. It was established on the basis of 33 massacres and the dispossession and mass expulsions of the Palestinian people from their land by the foreign-armed Zionist state and its militias. Some 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee, registered as refugees with the United Nations. Contrary to the disinformation on the issue which insists that the Palestinian exodus was due to orders broadcast to them by their leaders – to deny the people the right of return – these actions were the consequence of a strategic master plan. We are reproducing a seminal work by Prof. WALID KHALIDI originally published in 1961, which exposed for the first time the full extent and criminality of Plan D (for Dalet), as well as a new introduction he wrote in autumn 1988 on the anniversary of the UN Partition resolution.
Dr Khalidi does not examine the covert involvement of the intelligence agencies of Britain and the United States in this strategy. The official files of the British Mandate are replete with not only reports of massacres and communal conflict incited by these agents of imperialism, but advance warnings of the massacres being prepared. Many can be cited but one will suffice, due to his rank, Pasha Glubb (John Bagot Glubb), the British general commanding the Trans-Jordan army and the most senior British military officer in the Middle East. In December 1947 a plan of serial massacres was disclosed to a British officer of the Jordan Arab Legion by a Jewish official of the Palestine Government. “The former is reported to have asked the latter ‘whether the new Jewish state would not have many internal troubles in view of the fact that the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish state would be equal in number to the Jews.’ The Jewish official is report to have replied: ‘Oh no! That will be fixed. A few calculated massacres will soon get rid of them.’” (Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: Palestine 1914-1979, Revised edition. New York: Caravan Books, 1979], p. 80.]
Today, the Palestinian people face ongoing occupation and increasing encroachment and dispossession by Israeli Zionism. Gaza has become one vast open prison. This year, on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophe for the Palestinian people, the “Great March of Return” has taken place over a period of six weeks or so, culminating in massive protests, which are still ongoing. Just as in 1948 and on March 30, Palestinian Land Day, the Israeli army forces prepared a massacre on May 14 of the Palestinians so boldly protesting – all the while peddling the same disinformation blaming the victims for their crime. Since the first protest on 30 March, according to the MoH in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed 104 Palestinians, including 14 children. In addition, 12 Palestinians have been killed during the same period in other circumstances, including five reportedly shot at the fence or after crossing into Israel, whose bodies are reportedly being withheld by the Israeli authorities. The cumulative number of injuries by Israeli forces is approximately 12,600, of whom 55 per cent have been hospitalized. One Israeli soldier has been injured. – Continue reading →
(First posted on this blog in 2014. Canada recently announced its military intervention in French-occupied Mali under the pretext of “peacekeeping.”) 
