Latest news with #Haganah
Buzz Feed
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Amelia Dimoldenberg Embraces Bella Hadid's Heritage
Bella Hadid has always been incredibly proud of her Palestinian heritage, and is one of the biggest celebrities to regularly speak out in support of Palestine. The 28-year-old model uses her public profile to advocate for Palestinian rights, raise awareness amid Israel's occupation of the country, and donate generously to relief efforts. For reference, Bella's dad, Mohamed Hadid, was born in Nazareth back in 1948, but he and his family were forced to flee to Lebanon before settling in Syria due to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. This saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs flee their homes or get expelled from their country by Zionist paramilitaries, Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi, which later merged to become the Israel Defense Forces once Israel was established. In December 2015, Mohamed shared a childhood photo of himself with his parents and three siblings on Instagram as he opened up about his family's history. He wrote at the time: 'Thats how we became refugees to Syria and we lost our home in Safad to a Jewish family that we sheltered when they were refugees from Poland on the ship that was sailing from country to country and no one would take them... they were our guest for 2 years till they made us refugees and they kicked us out of our own home. That my history.. Strange thing. That I and my family would do it again.' And while Bella's Palestinian pride has always been a huge part of her public image, the star has faced severe backlash from Israel's supporters in recent months. With that in mind, people were delighted by her recent appearance on Chicken Shop Date, where interviewer Amelia Dimoldenberg subtly let the star know she was in a safe space to discuss and embrace her heritage. 'You are half-Dutch, half-Palestinian,' Amelia began. 'So, out of your mom and your dad, who makes the best food?' 'My dad,' Bella immediately replied. 'Growing up, it'd be, like, spreads… He doesn't cook for four people. Anybody that's Arab knows Arab parents cook for 50 people, and that's pretty much it. My dream for him one day would always be to open a restaurant.' 'Take care of his heritage,' Bella continued, before appearing to hesitate over how to phrase what she said next. 'And, like, the legacy of our, uhm… You know, who we are as people, and… And what our food is to the world.' 'I think the Palestinian restaurant sounds amazing,' Amelia quickly and enthusiastically interjected, at which point Bella visibly relaxed and smiled as she said: 'It would be incredible.' Viewers were quick to pick up on this sweet moment between Amelia and Bella when the interview clip was shared to X, with one particularly viral tweet reading: 'I think Amelia let her know this was a safe space to say Palestine and I actually love that. You can see the hesitation a bit.''She was lowkey avoiding saying Palestinian, then Amelia said it,' a similarly popular tweet added. Somebody else wrote: 'Bella seemed so nervous to say the word so she just didn't (I don't blame her given the disgusting attacks on her), meanwhile Amelia made a point of saying the word Palestinian twice, making it really clear where she stood. Makes such a difference.''I really appreciate Amelia saying Palestine out loud bc watching Bella mince her words is actually painful to witness, she should never have to be so careful just talking about where her family is from,' another more theorized: 'bella wasn't afraid to say palestine for her sake but rather didn't want to create any controversy for amelia and her show but then amelia let her know she was an ally and i think that's wonderful.'While somebody else circled back to the original topic as they tweeted: 'I encourage anyone to try Palestinian cuisine if you ever wanna try some of the most incredible food you will ever eat in your life."
The Herald Scotland
18-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Diaspora gather for Europe's first Palestinian art museum in Edinburgh
A small collection box inside the main entrance of the non-profit, volunteer-run gallery offers a reminder: "It's not just human lives being erased in Palestine - art and culture are also targets." The date is significant: May 15 marks Nakba Day, when Palestinians commemorate the loss of their homes, lands, and sometimes lives in the creation of Israel. Read More: The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted in 1947, splitting the land into the new Jewish state and a Palestinian one. Around 56% of what was then British Mandatory Palestine was to be allocated to Israel, despite Arabs making up two-thirds of the population and, at the time, owning roughly 90% of the land. The plan was rejected by the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states, and its adoption led to a bloody civil war which went largely unchecked by the British. On March 10 1948 this time Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary group, implemented Plan Dalet to establish control of key areas by expelling Palestinians and destroying their villages. Soldiers were given lists of settlements, along with a detailed description - access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, level of hostility - and its fate: destruction, occupation, or expulsion. Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian, wrote: "The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear case of what is now known as an ethnic cleansing operation." Israel declared its independence on May 14, and the following day a coalition of neighbouring Arab states invaded. By the time of the armistice in March 1949 Israel controlled around 78% of what had been Mandatory Palestine, with more than 700,000 Palestinians forced out of their homes. They call this 'al-Nakba', the catastrophe. A short film is shown with a timeline of the fate of more than 600 Palestinian villages. Hamada Elkempt, Under Observation, 2024 (Image: Hamada Elkempt) Faisal Saleh, founder of Palestine Museum, says: "To the refugees in the room, watch for your village - mine is April 25." On the floor is a map of historic Palestine, showing the destroyed villages and the sites of close to 50 massacres. News of mass killings, such as those at Deir Yassin, greatly added to the number of Palestinians fleeing their homes. One of the refugees stands on the map, gesturing to the north and the coast of the Mediterranean sea: "They wanted control of the farming areas. The Zionist slogan was 'a land without a people for a people without a land' and this is what they tried to create." The Palestinians were overpowered, he says, with only one or two rifles per village. As for the Arab coalition, they were focused on stopping the Palestinians fighting. Jane Frere, who runs a community project which sews the names of the dead in Gaza onto banners speaks after a short film about the work. In it, the final name she places onto the banner is the husband of a woman who left for Lebanon to deliver their baby. The child's father, a doctor, was killed in Gaza. The art in the gallery, however, is altogether lighter. A landscape painting of an olive grove, kites flying in a clear blue sky, a woman in a headscarf standing in the sun-kissed sea. Nabil Anani, In Pursuit of Utopia, 2020 (Image: Ziad Anani/Zawyeh Gallery) On one wall are pictures drawn by children from Gaza, bright, crayon drawings. As Mr Saleh told The Herald: "There are not a lot of gory scenes and scenes of violence whatsoever. It's just regular, the kind of art you'd see in a typical modern art museum. We are trying to show that Palestinians are human, just like everyone else. "In general, we really are not very political." Some things are, of course, hard to ignore. When a speaker thanks Mr Saleh for his hard work in establishing the space he waves a hand and says: "Please, we are hanging out and having a good time - people are dying in Gaza." This is not an attempt to bring down the mood, but rather an example of the deep connection those of the diaspora, most wearing keffiyehs and other traditional clothing, feel to the land. Many wear keys around their necks, a symbol of the hope to return to their former homes. One of the speakers is a Palestinian woman who was forced from her village at the age of four. Speaking in Arabic, with translation by Mr Saleh, she explains: "The Arab countries told the Palestinians, 'go out and we'll take care of everything'." Her family left their home with little more than the clothes on their back - "like you see them now" - and fled to Gaza. There were no houses for them to go to. Initially there weren't even tents. That winter it snowed in Gaza. At the age of 81 she's seen every year of the conflict. She recounts praying in her home as a missile shattered the window above her, the screams of her children, the deaths of friends and family. Things now are worse than she's ever known. The diaspora, men and women, old and young, are sobbing as she tells her story. "What you see from Gaza now is only the areas where the journalists can go," she says. "And they are killing most of the journalists." The woman was able to leave on a visa to visit family in Scotland, and she thanks the nation for its hospitality and solidarity. She ends with two sentences: "May God bless you. May God never show you the things we have seen."
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
This 1929 massacre is key to understanding Israel
Many years ago, I wrote a thesis on pre-state violence and conflict in Israel. The project involved several months in Israel, Jordan and Egypt interviewing people from all sides who had witnessed events first-hand. One deliciously cool evening in east Jerusalem I sat with two elderly men, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who seemed angrier with their respective leaders than with each other. Suddenly the Israeli said to me: 'It's all about Hebron in 1929 you know. It all began then.' I looked at his Arab friend, expecting dissent, but he nodded. 'Yes, he's right, he's right.' The Hebron massacre in 1929 isn't widely known any more. Younger Israelis increasingly see the years before 1948 as ancient history, and their Palestinian peers have been fed an alternative narrative. As for the weekend warriors of the anti-Israel Left, their ignorance of the history of the region is notorious. In brief, on August 24 1929, in the city of Hebron, over 60 Jews were murdered; many others were horribly wounded and sexually mutilated; women were raped; and homes and synagogues were destroyed. A British police officer wrote that: 'On hearing screams in a room, I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut.' British High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, also later wrote: 'The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jewish men and women were murdered in cold blood.' Many of the reports sound horribly similar to those from October 7 2023. The Jewish community in Hebron back then was divided between Ashkenazi Jews who had lived there for a century and Sephardim who had been there for 800 years. The latter spoke Arabic and adopted Arab customs, and both groups were more religious than political. But Jewish immigration was increasing elsewhere in Palestine, and extremists such as Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, who would later praise and support Hitler, claimed that the Jews of Hebron were intent on conquering the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The propaganda was eagerly received. 435 Jews survived the pogrom, some of them hidden by Arab neighbours – though recent scholarship questions just how many of these cases there were, and it seems that it was the British police who saved most lives. Those who did live through it all were removed to Jewish areas for their own safety. The direct result was that the long history of a Jewish presence in Hebron, a deeply holy place for Jewish people, was ended in the summer of 1929 until Israel won the Six-Day War of 1967. The longer-term consequences were arguably more dramatic. Shortly before the massacre, Zionist defence leaders had visited Hebron and offered protection. Rumours were already spreading of what might happen, and it was suggested that a squad of armed men from Haganah – the Jewish paramilitary organisation – would be sufficient to guarantee safety. The offer was refused because the Jews of Hebron believed that their Muslim and Christian friends would not let anything happen. They believed in co-existence. Hebron wasn't the only religiously mixed town, and from this point on the Jews of Palestine for the most part lost all confidence that they could be safe in majority Arab areas. As for the Haganah, which would eventually coalesce with other groups to become the IDF, they increased in size, efficiency, and organisation. They also embraced a philosophy that their role was to protect all Jews, even those who might be naïve enough to assume that they weren't in any danger. David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, was a socialist who had imagined a joint society of Jewish and Arab workers sharing in the struggle for human dignity. Hebron shocked him into a new realisation that the Jewish people couldn't rely on foreign cooperation or protection. It was something his rival Menachem Begin, whose party is now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, had long argued. Less than seven years after the massacre the Arab Revolt began, and for more than three years there would be urban warfare. Any hope of a working relationship between Jews and Arabs, one that was once far more viable than we might now assume, had died in the streets and homes of Hebron in 1929 – and by 1948, after Britain's withdrawal from the region, the cycle of wars between the State of Israel and its neighbours began. By the way, one of the synagogues abandoned in Hebron after the 1929 massacre dated from 1540, built by Jews expelled during the Spanish Inquisition. These Israeli colonial settlers – will they never learn? Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
This 1929 massacre is key to understanding Israel
Many years ago, I wrote a thesis on pre-state violence and conflict in Israel. The project involved several months in Israel, Jordan and Egypt interviewing people from all sides who had witnessed events first-hand. One deliciously cool evening in east Jerusalem I sat with two elderly men, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who seemed angrier with their respective leaders than with each other. Suddenly the Israeli said to me: 'It's all about Hebron in 1929 you know. It all began then.' I looked at his Arab friend, expecting dissent, but he nodded. 'Yes, he's right, he's right.' The Hebron massacre in 1929 isn't widely known any more. Younger Israelis increasingly see the years before 1948 as ancient history, and their Palestinian peers have been fed an alternative narrative. As for the weekend warriors of the anti-Israel Left, their ignorance of the history of the region is notorious. In brief, on August 24 1929, in the city of Hebron, over 60 Jews were murdered; many others were horribly wounded and sexually mutilated; women were raped; and homes and synagogues were destroyed. A British police officer wrote that: 'On hearing screams in a room, I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut.' British High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, also later wrote: 'The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jewish men and women were murdered in cold blood.' Many of the reports sound horribly similar to those from October 7 2023. The Jewish community in Hebron back then was divided between Ashkenazi Jews who had lived there for a century and Sephardim who had been there for 800 years. The latter spoke Arabic and adopted Arab customs, and both groups were more religious than political. But Jewish immigration was increasing elsewhere in Palestine, and extremists such as Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, who would later praise and support Hitler, claimed that the Jews of Hebron were intent on conquering the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The propaganda was eagerly received. 435 Jews survived the pogrom, some of them hidden by Arab neighbours – though recent scholarship questions just how many of these cases there were, and it seems that it was the British police who saved most lives. Those who did live through it all were removed to Jewish areas for their own safety. The direct result was that the long history of a Jewish presence in Hebron, a deeply holy place for Jewish people, was ended in the summer of 1929 until Israel won the Six-Day War of 1967. The longer-term consequences were arguably more dramatic. Shortly before the massacre, Zionist defence leaders had visited Hebron and offered protection. Rumours were already spreading of what might happen, and it was suggested that a squad of armed men from Haganah – the Jewish paramilitary organisation – would be sufficient to guarantee safety. The offer was refused because the Jews of Hebron believed that their Muslim and Christian friends would not let anything happen. They believed in co-existence. Hebron wasn't the only religiously mixed town, and from this point on the Jews of Palestine for the most part lost all confidence that they could be safe in majority Arab areas. As for the Haganah, which would eventually coalesce with other groups to become the IDF, they increased in size, efficiency, and organisation. They also embraced a philosophy that their role was to protect all Jews, even those who might be naïve enough to assume that they weren't in any danger. David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, was a socialist who had imagined a joint society of Jewish and Arab workers sharing in the struggle for human dignity. Hebron shocked him into a new realisation that the Jewish people couldn't rely on foreign cooperation or protection. It was something his rival Menachem Begin, whose party is now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, had long argued. Less than seven years after the massacre the Arab Revolt began, and for more than three years there would be urban warfare. Any hope of a working relationship between Jews and Arabs, one that was once far more viable than we might now assume, had died in the streets and homes of Hebron in 1929 – and by 1948, after Britain's withdrawal from the region, the cycle of wars between the State of Israel and its neighbours began. By the way, one of the synagogues abandoned in Hebron after the 1929 massacre dated from 1540, built by Jews expelled during the Spanish Inquisition. These Israeli colonial settlers – will they never learn?
Middle East Eye
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Israel's genocide aims to revive the old Zionist dream of Gaza without Palestinians
Amid intensifying genocide, forced displacement, and the normalisation of ethnic cleansing targeting two million Palestinians, groups of powerful men in Washington DC, Jeddah, and Doha met calmly last month to discuss their fanciful plans for Gaza's future. The new colonial attitudes of Trump's Washington dominate, continuing those of Britain in the 20th century. Two Palestinian faces from 40 years ago illustrate these continuities: a grandmother in the Beqa'a refugee camp in Jordan was walking through the mud with her small granddaughter to collect Unrwa medical supplies for her family. Her shoes sank in the mire, and she turned back empty-handed, cursing the British under her breath, to the child's surprise. She explained to the girl that it was Britain - a small, faraway country - whose politicians gave away her home and land to foreigners, with a piece of paper called the Balfour Declaration, written in 1917 during the First World War. That was the year the grandmother, Leigh, was born in the Palestinian village of Iraq al-Manshiyya, between Gaza and al-Khalil, more than 200km south of what would become her home for half a century - a refugee camp in Jordan - until her death in 1993. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Her village was besieged and bombarded for 10 months in 1949 by a Jewish militia, the Haganah, and her family was expelled. From decades of attempted violent dehumanisation, Palestine has produced communities of dignity and respect For decades in that camp - which powerful colonial officials chose to forget - Leigh, who lost both her husband and her son as well as her home, embodied and transmitted the memory, the loss, and the resolute steadfastness of the Palestinian communities who endured the Nakba and resisted the British. The women and children of Gaza who lived through the horrors of genocide from late 2023 through 2024 and into 2025, and who in the days of ceasefire chose to return north and rebuild what they could on unrecognisable rubble, are Leigh's heirs. The first responders in Gaza - who day and night in the genocide race towards bomb sites, dig the injured out of the rubble by hand, carry the dead with respect, wrap them, and pray over them - are Leigh's heirs. And the 15 paramedics and civil defence teams assassinated on 23 March by Israeli military as they drove marked ambulances with full headlights responding to emergency calls from colleagues are Leigh's heirs. The Israeli military lies about what they had done are a repeat of military atrocities by the British, which Leigh lived through eight decades ago. From decades of attempted violent dehumanisation, Palestine has produced communities of dignity and respect - honoured by their writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians, scientists, doctors, and academics, who show the world a culture that stands tall. Colonial echoes Britain's government today echoes the shame of the colonial-era Balfour Declaration with its refusal to condemn genocide, even as the human cost of Israel's daily violation of international law - through massive US bombs raining down on civilians, mainly women and children in tents and hospitals - is witnessed by the entire world, except within Israel. The official figure of 50,000 Palestinians killed is believed to be a 40 percent underestimate, according to a peer-reviewed statistical analysis published in The Lancet. Yet international sanctions and arms embargoes - tools that helped end apartheid in South Africa 35 years ago and are in force against Russia today - are not applied to save Palestinian lives. Leaders in Washington, London, and much of Europe refuse even to discuss them. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage for all the latest on the Israel-Palestine war The British Mandate in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s was a litany of hubris and wilful ignorance towards the Palestinians it dehumanised. And today, their successors in power - in western capitals and their Middle Eastern allies - again choose neither to respect Palestinians nor to see and hear them. Decades ago, colonial Britain led in dealing out the horror in Palestine, particularly in its brutal suppression of the Arab Revolt of 1937, a response to Britain's encouragement of rising Zionist immigration and economic control. Israeli expulsion plans are not new: They were first proposed in the 1930s Read More » Just before the revolt, five key leaders of the Palestinian nationalist movement were exiled to the British colony of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean for 16 months. Others were exiled to the colonies of Kenya and South Africa. Britain had long exploited the remote Seychelles to exile inconvenient national leaders - from Yemen, Zanzibar, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Malaya, the Gold Coast (Ghana), and Buganda (Uganda), to as late as 1956, the Greek Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios. At the height of the revolt, Britain had 100,000 troops in Palestine - one for every four adult men. From 1937 to 1939, 10 percent of Palestine's adult male population were killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled, according to Rashid Khalidi's peerless history, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Some British soldiers would later admit to war crimes: setting homes alight, destroying villages, rounding up men, blowing them up, or stripping them naked and locking them in barbed wire cages for days with barely any water. Collective punishment, torture and executions ordered by British military courts were routine. Structural violence One of the leaders of the Arab Revolt executed by the British was Eid Alfdilat - the beloved cousin of Leigh, the refugee grandmother in Jordan whose children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were raised on the living history of this past. The granddaughter's book, Palestinian Refugee Women from Syria to Jordan: Decolonising the Geopolitics of Displacement (2024), is a deeply researched four-year field study of Palestinian women's lives, shaped by the interconnectedness of collective historical injustice - particularly the legacy of the Nakba. Its author, academic Afaf Jabiri, documents how settler-colonial structures have normalised Palestinian displacement, erased their history, silenced their voices, and exposed them to structural violence. Jordan's population is 60 percent Palestinian. But in 2013, the government introduced a no-entry policy for Palestinians - even as it welcomed half a million Syrians fleeing the war sparked by the 2011 Arab uprisings. Syria's largest camp, Yarmouk - a vast unofficial Palestinian camp - was virtually destroyed in sectarian fighting that displaced 160,000 people. The 2013 Jordanian policy was a watershed moment of "anti-Palestinianism" in state policies and international humanitarian practice. It produced a unique inhumanity in Jordan. Palestinians in the country are largely ignored by the international community - including humanitarian organisations, which Jabiri describes as "unforgivable". Displaced and erased Jabiri's research documents families permanently split, with some refused entry at the border; children denied the right to sit the vital tawjihi exams required for university entrance; pregnant women borrowing neighbours' ID cards to access hospitals; forced marriages; bribery; smuggling; illegal residence; and detention in Cyber City Camp in northern Jordan. The UN and other agencies routinely deny them aid, deeming them "Unrwa refugees" and therefore ineligible. Only a woman who had herself lived through such conditions - enduring gender-based violence and patriarchal control - could have written a study both intimate and academically rigorous. International aid workers knew the hellish conditions of these families can only be explained as happening 'because they are Palestinians' Her book's revelations of how Palestinian refugee women and girls from Syria, now in Jordan, have been systematically failed by the UN, other aid organisations, and the Jordanian state, amount to a sweeping indictment. International aid workers knew the hellish conditions of these families - which, Jabiri shows, can only be explained as happening "because they are Palestinians". Yet the courage, ingenuity, and perseverance of these women, as revealed in this book, affirms the enduring power of what Edward Said, in the 1980s, called "Palestinianism" - just as the daily writing, filming, and commentary from the people of Gaza does today. Now, a reckless, powerful clique of white men in Washington - nostalgic for apartheid South Africa's days of racial privilege and global impunity - speak matter-of-factly of forcing Jordan to absorb a million Palestinians from Gaza, while Egypt takes another million. They see the genocide as an opportunity to revive the old Zionist dream of Gaza without Palestinians - a fantasy real estate project, a "Middle East Riviera". The dream will fail, as all colonial fantasies have failed. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
