Fatah official vilifies Israel’s creation, claims “massacres” were carried out against Palestinians, and glorifies terrorism
Text posted on the official Fatah Facebook page, written by Secretary of Fatah’s Poland Branch Khalil Nazzal
Posted text: “Palestinian awareness and the Nakba (i.e., “the catastrophe,” the Palestinian term for the establishment of the State of Israel)
The world’s languages cannot find a reliable translation for the term ‘Nakba’ so that it conveys the full sense of the word that summarizes an entire people’s tragedy. Therefore, the word ‘Nakba’ has entered all of the world’s dictionaries as it is in Arabic. In this way they have submitted to the uniqueness of the Arabic word as it were, and recognized that what the word hints at is something that cannot be translated and described… The Palestinian people chose the term ‘Nakba’ since this word contains the secrets of the tragedy that befell this people… The Nakba is the expulsion of the Palestinian from his home and homeland and the settling of foreigners in his place, and it is the theft of land and the storming of properties. It is also the massacres, planned acts of destruction, expulsion operations, and destruction of entire villages. Nakba is the renaming of the villages and cities… the confiscation of land, the ban on expanding construction, encircling the Palestinian villages and cities withsettlements full of foreigners armed from head to toe with all the weapons of hatred… The Nakba is an entire Zionist plot that strives to uproot the Palestinian from his homeland and uproot the homeland from the Palestinian’s awareness, so that it will be replaced with a feeling of defeat, being broken, and self-blame…This is what the Zionist movement wanted to implement.
How hasour people succeeded in turning the term ‘Nakba’ from a synonym for loss of homeland into a factor of awakening the national awareness, which has turned the right of return into a synonym for the term ‘Nakba’ and its complement? …
In the refugee camps the families organized themselves according to the villages and cities from which they were removed. In the refugee camps the refugee held the key to his home… This key became the symbol containing all of the meanings of suffering, sacrifice, and longing. In this way the Palestinian succeeded in imposing his narrative… andinstead of feeling defeat, helplessness, and pangs of conscience, the Palestinian filled his consciousness with heroes embodying all of the meanings of resistance, heroism, and standing against the Zionist enterprise… and in this way Abd Al-Qader Al-Husseini (i.e., Arab commander in the 1948 war), Abd Al-Rahim Mahmoud (i.e., an author who died fighting in the 1948 war), Hassan Salameh (i.e., Nazi agent who died in the 1948 war), and many others became symbols of Palestinian nationalism, and an example for the following generations who took it upon themselves to fire the first bullet at the start of January 1965 (refers to attempted bombing of Israel’s National Water Carrier; see note below –Ed.).”