Israel cabinet decided to pass a legal initiative that would give a 3 year prison sentence to anyone who treats the Nakba of 1948 as a special event. This is an outrageous idea: it is the sum of the hopes of the Israeli Nationalists that the Palestinian minority in Israel will somehow disappear. It expresses a total denial of Palestinian history.

This compliments the denial of the Holocaust, which Israel has fought for the last 60 years. Denial of your history means that either you are an inventor of gas ovens, or you are just a victim of your own victimization complex. Denial of the right to express your mourning over events that happened to your family and many other people is a cruel and unusual punishment.

This is such a debasing ministerial call that Israelis of all walks of life should be ashamed of. It takes away the right of Jews to fight against Holocaust denial. The Turks have tried it against the Armenian minority: no mention was allowed of any massacre of Armenians by Turks. Of course the ban collapsed, and the Turks look worse for it. This is a bankruptcy of any moral standing by the present Israeli cabinet, and will make it easier for all the enemies of Israel to justify that another war as the only way. If your existence and history is denied, what do you have to lose?

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