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Palestine's plight a blot on world conscience

It was treachery then, it is tragedy and torment now, one that will never be forgotten and remains at the core of the Middle East crisis.

It was treachery of the worst kind when Britain and the United States failed to keep their promises of protection that saw 700,000 Palestinians flee from their homeland 70 years ago in what is known as the Nakba, or the Day of Catastrophe. The great powers of the day took sides and plumped for a criminal regime, a mafia state that has continued to unleash atrocities on innocents.
It was the original sin. The Zionist regime has never paid the price for its excesses, and the international community should collectively hang its head in shame for letting them get away with such impunity. Now the US administration under President Donald Trump has added insult to injury on the Palestinian cause that could go down in history as the greater sin. It was treachery then, it is tragedy and torment now, one that will never be forgotten and remains at the core of the Middle East crisis.
On Monday, scores of Palestinians were killed in clashes in Gaza as the US Embassy shifted from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which is Palestinian land by history and right. The aggressor in chief gets more bloodthirsty by the day. Hearts were wrenched when homes were torn down in 1948, and the people and families who lived in them were driven away. All the uprooted who have been banished to distant lands are still seeking justice as the world has moved on to bigger conflicts, looking the other way, searching for deadlier foes when the chief among the violators is right here - in Israel.
It has transformed from an aggressor into a terrorist state. Palestinians only want justice and dignity. Is it too much to ask? What happened to the great western virtues of human rights and individual freedoms when Zionists ran amok and indulged in ethnic cleansing on a scale never witnessed before? Numbers do not lie. Palestine was overwhelmingly Palestinian at 94 per cent in 1946 before the purge, now only 15 per cent live there. Close to seven million of them live in foreign refugee camps today. The Palestinian issue must be treated as a crime against humanity, and the more we delay finding a solution, the bigger the blot will be on the world's conscience.