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December 30th, 2008
09:40 AM ET

Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony

[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/WORLD/meast/12/01/israel.gaza.aid.ship/art.vigil.gaza.afp.gi.jpg caption="Palestinian women hold candles during a vigil protesting the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip."]

Robert Fisk
The Independent

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.

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Filed under: Global 360° • Israel • Palestine
soundoff (One Response)
  1. Cindy

    Palestinians need to get over the fact that Israel now owns the land. The truth is that every nation at some point or time was owned by someone else. If we all gave up where we lived to it's first owners we'd all be in bad shape! Shoot..everyone in the U.S. would have to leave and give it all back to the Indians. For the Palestinians to think that they are any better is absurd. Israel is not going any where and will not just hand them over the land. They need to realize that and move on. All of the hostility and fighting does nothing but kill innocent people.

    Cindy...Ga.

    December 30, 2008 at 11:59 am |
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