75th Anniversary of Al Nakba • May 15, 1948: A Brief History of Palestine and Its People

The Road to Nowhere by Ismail Shammout 1930-2006. He was expelled from Lydda in 1948. The plight of the refugees is depicted in many of his most famous paintings.

Palestine, the mythic “land without people for a people without land” was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919.

The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine in the late 19th century to reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs’ inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists were then forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to today.

The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true.

Yom-el-Ard – Day of the Land: Symbol of Palestinian Resistance

On the 46th anniversary of Land Day

This article from our archives provides essential information on the vital issue of land and the rising of 1976, when the Palestinian citizens of Israel revolted against the Israeli government, which had just announced new and extensive land expropriation plans in the Galilee.

The Illegitimate State of Israel (I): Zionist Terrorism and Crimes in Palestine – 1939-1945

A series published on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Al Nabka, May 15, 2023

Complied and edited with an introduction by Tony Seed based on the Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem authored by the late Issa Nakhleh

The Illegitimate State of Israel, Part I – 1939-1945 

The Illegitimate State of Israel Part II – 1946 (forthcoming)

The Illegitimate State of Israel, Part III – 1947 (forthcoming)

The Illegitimate State of Israel, Part IV – 1948 (forthcoming)

The Conspiracy to Expel and the Expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, Part V – 1948 (forthcoming)

Introduction

(Updated May 23, 2021) – On May 14, 1948, the Zionist state of Israel was established by unilateral declaration in defiance of the United Nations and international law on the basis of 33 massacres, terrorism and the dispossession and mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian people from their land by the foreign-armed Zionist state and its militias with the backing of the great powers, the United States in the first place, as well as Canada. Some 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee. Palestinians were forced from their lands and homes due to military attacks by Zionist forces, supported by the British and U.S. governments. The Israeli Zionist forces attacked 774 cities and villages, and occupied 80 per cent of the Palestinian soil after killing nearly 15,000 Muslim and Christian civilians.

Of this population, approximately one-third were forced to migrate to the West Bank, another third to the Gaza Strip, and the remainder to neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, registered as refugees with the United Nations and forcibly denied the right of return.

Another 350,000 were dispossessed in 1967 following the Six-Day War during which Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. The number of Palestinians in the Diaspora now numbers over 5 million people. “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return … The old will die and the young will forget,” said David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, in 1949. But the young ha, both those born in Palestine and those born in Canada, have not forgotten.

For the information of readers, we are serializing in five instalments chapters from the Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem (1999), a 1,000-page work in two volumes by the late Issa Nakhleh*, a distinguished lawyer and statesman, which provide detailed information on the years 1939-1948, as to the nature and methods of the illegitimate Zionist conquest of Palestine of May 15, 1948. These are not otherwise available on the Internet. Much of the information is derived directly from British Colonial files in London. To proceed directly to this exhaustive work, scroll down the page.

Heartfelt condolences and solidarity to the people of Beirut

Vigil at the Lebanese consulate in Montreal, August 6, 2020.

A reflection, from a Facebook post, August 5, 2020

My heartfelt condolences and solidarity to the people of Beirut, the families and victims, the comrades from Beirut, the city which I came to love, having spent a memorable week there in summer of 2014. A huge disaster and tragedy on the eve of the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am only glad that so far those whom I came to know are safe.

On a personal note, I owe a debt in addition to the Lebanese community in Halifax which dates back to the 1920s if not before and who schooled me in the tapestry of their rich history, culture and politics, beginning from the time in 1982 when we marched together to oppose the Israeli invasion. From that moment we shared weal and woe on many issues, as have the Canadian and Lebanese people. In October 2002 Father John of the Greek Orthodox Church freely provided facilities of his parish for the launch of our Dossier on Palestine, defying the united pressure of local Falange and Zionist elements, as he did on other occasions.

Sabra & Shatila, 1982 – never again

The world watched in horror as the story of the inhuman massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon first emerged in September, 1982 | An entire generation of the Palestinian people has grown up in their shadow | The general at the centre of this butchery is today the prime minister of Israel – Ariel Sharon | The scale of the infamy has changed, but not the methods, the perpetrators or their allies | The past is always present

Sabra and Chatila – two undefended refugee camps in Beirut where hundreds of unarmed Palestinian refugees, including babies, were massacred 16-18 September 1982. (Click to enlarge)

From the Dossier on Palestine (2002)

By PIERRE PÉAN*

TWENTY years have passed, but reread the accounts or speak to survivors in what remains of the Sabra and Shatila camps, and the words still drip red. Time has not washed away the blood. All through my investigation I was horrified as I listened to story after story about children with their throats slit, or pregnant women with their bellies slashed open, or heads and limbs hacked off. I felt physically sick.

About the Balfour Declaration

Setting Off by Amin Shammout | Photo by Tony Seed

By Dr. ISMAIL ZAYID*

We are reproducing below an excerpt from the essay by Dr. Ismail Zayid titled “Ethnic Cleansing and Dispossession,” reprinted from the Dossier on Palestine (Halifax: New Media Publications, 2002), and originally presented as a lecture at the Conference on Palestine, Vancouver, May 23, 1998.

This Day. Faris Awdah martyred

Seventeen years ago the Palestinian hero, Faris Awdah (Fares Udah), 13, was martyred while facing Israeli occupation tanks during an attack on the outskirts of Gaza City on 29 October 2000. The youth survived the encounter with the tank only to be assassinated by an Israeli sniper a week later on November 8th under the pretext the youth was a “terrorist”. Faris was memorialized on the front cover of the acclaimed Dossier on Palestine (Shunpiking Magazine, Halifax, 2002).

100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration: Palestine – Ethnic cleansing and dispossession (Excerpt)

By Dr. ISMAIL ZAYID*

Click to enlarge.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

[…]

It was the second of November 1917 when Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued his infamous declaration in the form of a letter written to Lord Rothschild. It read:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

It is interesting to note that the four-letter word “Arab” occurs not once in this document. To refer to the Arabs who constituted, at the time, 92 per cent of the population of Palestine and owned 98 per cent of its land, as the non-Jewish communities is not merely preposterous but deliberately fraudulent. I do not need to tell you that this letter has no shred of legality, as Palestine did not belong to Balfour to assume such acts of generosity. Dr. Arnold Toynbee described the British role, in issuing this document, accurately:

“We were taking it upon ourselves to give away something that was not ours to give. We were promising rights of some kind in the Palestinian Arabs’ country to a third party.”

Similarly, the well-known Jewish writer, Arthur Koestler, summed it up aptly when he described the Balfour Declaration as a document in which “one nation promised a second the country of a third.”

Event: Heroes & Villains

Palestinian Resistance, Stephen Harper & the Middle East

Join the discussion of the Palestinian national cause and the role of Canada-Israel relations at JustUs Coffeehouse, 5896 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, on Thursday, January 30 at 6 pm. Discussion led by Dr. Ismail Zayid, president of the Canada Palestine Association and Gary Zatzman, co-editor of the Dossier on Palestine. 

The people of Canada and Quebec in their hundreds of thousands have repeatedly opposed the pro-Zionist course of Canadian governments led by Stephen Harper.

For the last 9 months, under the guise of seeking a peace accord with the Palestinian National Authority with the Washington authority as “honest broker”, the Tel Aviv authority has announced and opened tenders on plans to construct thousands more settlement units throughout the occupied West Bank in batches of hundreds at a time. As part of this, thousands of dunums of Palestinian-owned land become annexed, entirely illegally, to the State of Israel.

CIC Award for Media Excellence – Letters from Colleagues across Canada

25 November 2006

Tony Seed,

Editor & Publisher,

Shunpiking Magazine, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Dear Tony,

Congratulations on receiving the Award of Media Excellence 2006 from the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC). For many years we have been journalistic colleagues and kindred spirits in building an independent media that tells the truth and provides Canadians with information relevant to their concerns. Your journalism, embodied in the ongoing work of Shunpiking Magazine and elsewhere, is at the same time fully partisan in its unrelenting defence of the rights of all, and most especially, those singled out for attack by the Canadian state and world reaction.

CIC Award for Media Excellence 2006

Speech of Acceptance by TONY SEED

Dr Mohamed Elmasry, CIC president, presents award to Tony Seed of Shunpiking Magazine

THE Canadian Islamic Congress 2006 Award for Media Excellence was presented to Tony Seed of Halifax on 30 October in Ottawa. Shunpiking Magazine’s editor and publisher was also invited to address the CIC’s Annual Gala Dinner – held in the West Block of the Parliament Buildings – on the topic of “Muslims and the Media.”

Invited guests included community activists and Muslin delegates, politicians, senior government officials, Ambassadors of 26 Muslim countries as well as professional and business leaders from across Canada.

The notion of the ‘Jewish state’ as an ‘apartheid regime’ is a liberal-Zionist one

The charge of apartheid serves as a diversion | GARY ZATZMAN

Poster of the Halifax Symposium on Palestine, March 15-16, 2003.

The cause of Palestine consists of the restoration of the national rights of the Palestinian people and enabling the Palestinians to exercise their right of self-determination in their own territory. Theirs is the territory illegally mandated to Great Britain by the League of Nations in 1920-21 and subsequently “partitioned” by the United Nations in 1947 to establish a so-called “Jewish state” enclave for the Zionist movement. Enabling the Palestinians to exercise their right of self-determination in their own territory means implementing the Palestinians’ right to return to their lands and to be restored in the property/properties that were taken from them in the course of acts of conquest by the Zionist movement, and in clear cut violation of international law, during 1947-48 and again in June 1967.

Halifax Symposium on Palestine, 2003

HALIFAX (March 24, 2003) – The first HALIFAX SYMPOSIUM ON PALESTINE – A LAND, A PEOPLE – A HISTORY, A FUTURE was successfully held on the weekend of March 15-16 at Dalhousie University. Over 30 people registered for the Symposium and, including the social function “An Evening with Palestine,” more than 60 people participated from four areas of Nova Scotia in all the proceedings and events.

The atmosphere at the venue of the Conference was warm and lively. Everyone listened with rapt attention as representatives, from eminent historians to student youth, shared their knowledge and experience with the participants. There was a feeling amongst that something new, something very positive, was beginning to take shape, and they are participating in the creation of this new.

The Symposium, initiated by Shunpiking Magazine with the support of six other political and educational organizations including the Canada Palestine Association, was held to broaden the understanding of Palestine at this critical period on the basis of elaborating and discussing themes from the recently-published, book-length Dossier on Palestine.

Halifax Symposium on Palestine, 2003 – Opening Remarks

TONY SEED, March 15, 2003

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

ON BEHALF of the different sponsoring groups*, we are convening this morning the HALIFAX SYMPOSIUM ON PALESTINE – A LAND, A PEOPLE – A HISTORY, A FUTURE. It will deal with one of the most pressing issues confronting the world today – Palestine and the right of the Palestinian people to self determination, the ceaseless striving of the Palestinian people to exercise control over their own lives which lies at the epicentre of the entire resistance of humanity to imperialist war and subjugation.

This Symposium is open to everyone who wishes to address their concerns or hear the views of others, regardless of their ideological opinions, political affiliation, national origin or any other consideration. Designated speakers who are knowledgeable in their field have been invited to address central issues through presentations or a panel and to provide information for discussion. Several Palestinian student youth have also come forward to come and speak about the problems they are facing as students in defence of their rights.

Dossier on Palestine – A Land, a People

A BOOK-LENGTH SPECIAL EDITION, Dossier on Palestine, from the editors of Nova Scotia’s Shunpiking magazine is already being acclaimed as the only publication of its kind in North America on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This original work is compiled with a host of excellent articles, ranging from up-to-date first person reporting from journalists, front-line doctors and activists to commentaries and in-depth essays on the situation. With unusual force and compelling effectiveness, this material brings stubborn fact and compassion at a decisive historical moment. Between its covers, a brilliantly diverse, enraging and engaging investigation of the latest Palestinian uprising unfolds, rich in essential insights.

Speech on Eid Mubarak introducing the Dossier on Palestine

Tony Seed, editor and publisher of the Dossier on Palestine, addresses 1,500 members of the Chebucto Mosque on Eid Mubarak

TONY SEED, Eid Mubarak, December 6, 2002

Brothers and Sisters,

Eid Mubarak. Assalamu Alaikum (peace greetings)

On behalf of the staff of Shunpiking magazine, I sincerely thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about the Dossier on Palestine on such a significant occasion.

In very brief, the word “shunpiking” means to shun the turnpike, those big American toll highways of so-called progress and the civilization of the west, and to take the back roads. For us, it is a metaphor for discovery. We distribute our magazine from one end of Nova Scotia to the other.

The Dossier on Palestine is a gift for the world’s people. It is not one man’s work but a collective and unique work, some six months and more in preparation, a labour of love, friendship and seeking of truth, a deed of the people of Halifax, of people who hail from various national origins and faiths.

Dossier on Palestine: A media of progress, enlightenment and freedom is possible

SHUNPIKING MAGAZINE hosted a special forum on the occasion of the publication of its new, book-length special edition, Dossier on Palestine, on 28 October 2002. Dr. Ismail Zayid, president of the Canada Palestine Association, longtime activist and a contributing writer, and Tony Seed, on behalf of the editorial staff, both provided their views on the significance of this initiative. Both presentations were repeatedly interrupted by applause. Despite the fact that the book launch was organized with only two days notice, fifty one people attended the lively function held in the hall at St. Antonios Antiochan Orthodox Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Participants expressed tremendous enthusiasm and a high regard for the quality of the information, historical context, photo essays, maps and information graphics, and perspectives contained in the 96-page work, of which 20,000 copies were printed as an initial press run. Initial orders were placed for 4,050 copies of the Dossier, which retails for $Cdn 5.00.*

We are reproducing the text of the address by Tony Seed, editor and publisher of Shunpiking Magazine, to the forum.

Dossier on Palestine – Contents

THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial: Standing for Justice

Introduction to the conflict Palestine: Fifty years of ethnic cleansing and dispossession (p. 4) Dr. Ismail Zayid

REPORTS:

• Operation Defensive Shield

• Palestine from near and far (8) Amnon Kapeliouk

• A crime against humanity?: UN Report on Jenin (10) Editorial team

• ‘If I have any regret, it is because we didn’t destroy the camp’: confession of an award-winning zionist soldier (12) Independent Media Centre, Israel

Standing for justice

EDITORIAL, Dossier on Palestine

The struggle of the world’s peoples for self-determination has assumed greater dimensions and intensity. Standing in the forefront are the valiant Palestinians. For decades, in extremely difficult conditions, they have been waging a titanic battle to return to their homeland and realize their inalienable rights to freedom and independence. Some five million refugees have been waiting for more than fifty years to return to Palestine.

Moreover, the Middle East continues to be an arena of repeated acts of intervention and war.