©AP Photo/Moti Milrod

Israelis carry placards during a protest by left-wing groups in Tel Aviv, Israel, June 7.

For 10 million Palestinian Christians and Muslims worldwide, Israel's 60-year anniversary is nothing to celebrate. It is a time for mourning and remembrance. Not because Israel is Jewish and the Palestinians are "anti-Semitic," but because Israel's establishment has meant Palestine's total destruction. It is this tragedy that the Palestinians refer to as the "Nakba," the Catastrophe. And for the victims, watching Israelis celebrate this anniversary is akin to Jews watching Germans celebrating Kristallnacht. The Nakba is the Palestinian holocaust, and they also say, "Never again!"

The gradual and inexorable ethnic cleansing of Palestine's non-Jewish population began with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. That year saw the dismantling and dismemberment of Palestinian Arab society and its many institutions, which had been part of the social, political, economic, cultural, religious and educational landscape for centuries. More than 80 percent of the native Arab population (about 750,000) was either forcibly expelled or terrorized into fleeing as a direct result of the dozens of massacres perpetrated by the Jewish terrorist organizations operating in Palestine since the early 1930s.

Palestine's 4.5 million registered refugees have never been allowed to come back to their homeland in accordance with international humanitarian law and United Nations resolutions. Instead, the Israeli government has confined them to squalid refugee camps and ghettos scattered about the Middle East, where they live a tortured existence that teeters on the edge of humanity. Their ancestral land, homes, farms, businesses and personal property have all been confiscated by the Israeli government decades ago, or looted and stolen by the Jewish settlers who occupied the abandoned Arab towns and villages. Moreover, more than 400 of those villages have been bulldozed off the face of the map.

As if dispossession and expulsion from their homeland were not tragic enough, Palestinian refugee camps have been routinely targeted for bombardment by Israeli war planes, tanks and artillery while being mercilessly punished with economic strangulation, starvation, curfews, raids, mass arrests and military occupation. As a result of subsequent Israeli aggressions in 1967, 1982, and during the Palestinian civilian uprisings of 1987 and 2000, more than 350,000 more became refugees, some of them for the second and third times.

Ironically, some of the most sobering observations regarding Zionism's tragic consequences for the Palestinian people have been made by Israel's most revered leaders. Take the comments made by David ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. During a conversation with another one of Israel's "founding fathers," Nahum Goldman, Ben Gurion stated: "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Why should they accept that?"

On July 30, 1973, former Israeli Defense Minister and war "hero" Moshe Dayan gleefully pronounced the death of Palestine to a Time magazine reporter when he said, "There is no more Palestine. Finished ...''

Of course, such honest assessments are rarely allowed to be heard in mainstream American circles. Thanks to the power of intimidation wielded by the panoply of well-connected Jewish pressure groups that constitute Israel's American lobby, anyone who dares to mention Israel's well-documented atrocities will be cowed into silence by accusations of being "anti-Semitic" or a terrorist sympathizer.

Alas, the only view of Israeli history that most Americans have is the kind of romanticized Zionist mythology about "dreaming" and "willing" Israel into existence that we were insulted with last week in the Community View. It's utter nonsense, of course. The Zionists stole, murdered and ethnically cleansed Israel into existence.

Contrary to that writers' contention, the real challenge for Israelis is to abandon the racist and brutal Zionist program for Palestine and to finally come to terms with their country's horrific past. For peace to prevail, the people of Palestine need justice and recompense, not violence, apartheid and oppression.