For the Jewish refugees who have been arriving in Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport over the past several weeks, fleeing Putin’s war on Ukraine, any home not under Russian bombardment might serve as a safe haven. But given Israel’s plans to dispatch them to Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Naqab/Negev — where Palestinians have been, or are being, forced out of their homes — those same refugees are no longer inhabiting a singular role as victims.
This tension perfectly encapsulates a far bigger story: that of Zionism writ large since the early 20th century, and how the noble aim of saving lives and resisting oppression ends up being used to justify the oppression of another people.
It is a story of how the dispossessed and powerless become powerful agents of dispossession themselves; of how Europeans see the backs of the Jewish refugees running for their lives, but we, Palestinians, see the faces of the soldiers and settlers taking over our land and our homes.
The neat clarity of watching a refugee being transformed immediately — within a few hours or days — into a settler, deployed as a shield in Israel’s demographic-
— source 972mag.com | Raef Zreik | Mar 22, 2022