Eviction Notices and Gaza

I have seen dozens of black and white photos of the Palestinian Diaspora when they were forced to leave their land and homes in multitudes, ultimately exceeding several hundred thousand “refugees,” thousands of others dead. They were not given eviction notices, but bullets and fire. I had never seen faces so desperate and abandoned. The tears were all theirs. The conquerors were jubilant, while the Pan-Arab leaders were impotent as their rhetoric and deceiving as their politics. I remember looking closely at the faces of mothers and fathers, carrying on their bent backs all they could, while clinging to their children with their hands and, in one pointed frame, their teeth, as they crossed some bridge. The world cameras weren’t there. Their faces were masked by an international indifference that has done more to create a “problem” in the Middle East than any extremist group or explosion. One wonders what would have happened had there been the technology and access (like the Internet) to chronicle one of the greatest political and human disasters of the century. The current stress of the Jews of Gaza as they are escorted by force does not go unnoticed. But it does or should beg the question: What was it like for the Palestinians way back when, an event that the current peace process has yet to address, as if the elephant in the room will mysteriously disappear through the power of denial or revisionist apocrypha or the spread of Armageddon complexes and forged prophecies? I wish for peace, truly hope for it. I have no hang-ups with the proposition at all, of Jews and Muslims. But it can never happen without addressing 1948. God will not forget it.