Tag Archives: Nakba

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Nakba: The Truth Will Set Free Jews and Arabs.

Sami Jamil Jadallah
Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah

 

As Palestinians and Arabs around the world remember the Nakba and the forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian, Israeli and other Jews are simultaneously celebrating their ‘victory’ and the establishment of a Zionist-Apartheid State.

 

The Israelis and Jews on this day and till today choose not to admit their crimes against the Palestinian people and on this day and till now Palestinians choose to ignore their failures. The truth will set the Jews and Arabs free.

 

Present-day Israel, contrary to what Zionist Israeli history might claim, was not made in heaven nor was it created by Moses or his G-d. Instead, it was established by an armed gang dedicated to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from its native Arab people and the establishment of a state predicated on a racist ideology known as Zionism.

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Erasing the Nakba

Neve Gordon
Neve Gordon

Neve Gordon

Israel’s tireless efforts to conceal the historical events leading to its creation.

Be’er-Sheva, Israel - I first heard about the Nakba in the late 1980s, while I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at Hebrew University. This, I believe, is a revealing fact, particularly since, as a teenager, I was a member of Peace Now and was raised in a liberal home. I grew up in the southern city of Be’er-Sheva, which is just a few kilometres from several unrecognised Bedouin villages that, today, are home to thousands of residents who were displaced in 1948. I now know that the vast majority of the Negev’s Bedouin population was not as lucky, and that, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most Bedouin either fled or were expelled from their ancestral lands to Jordan or Gaza. Continue reading →

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Next Year in Jerusalem

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

If there was a moment defining the shift in Israel’s strategic position over the past year, it occurred in September when the Israeli embassy in Cairo was overrun by hundreds of Egyptian protesters, some armed with sledgehammers. A military plane, waiting across town, smuggled the ambassador and his family back to Israel.

It was not quite the fall of Saigon. But it indicated how in a few months Israel had gone from a state adept at shaping its regional environment to one increasingly buffeted by forces beyond its control. After decades of dictating to its Arab neighbors, Israel looked for the first time confused and vulnerable.
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Palestine’s ‘last village’ faces the bulldozers

Jonathan Cook
Lifta to make way for Jewish vacation homes
By Jonathan Cook in Lifta
On a rocky slope dropping steeply away from the busy main road at the entrance to West Jerusalem is to be found a scattering of ancient stone houses, empty and clinging precariously to terraces hewn from the hillside centuries ago.
Although most Israeli drivers barely notice the buildings, this small ghost town — neglected for the past six decades — is at the centre of a legal battle fuelling nationalist sentiments on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
Picking his way through the cluster of 55 surviving houses, their stone walls invaded by weeds and shrubs, Yacoub Odeh, 71, slipped easily into reminiscences about the halcyon days in Lifta.
He was only eight years old in January 1948 when the advancing Jewish forces put his family and the 3,000 other Palestinian villagers to flight.
Over the coming months, as the Jewish state was born, they would be joined by 750,000 others forced into exile in an event that is known by Palestinians as the “nakba”, or catastrophe.
Despite the passage of time, Lifta’s chief landmarks are still clear to Mr Odeh: the remains of his own family’s home, an olive press, the village oven, a spring, the mosque, the cemetery and the courtyard where the villagers once congregated.
“Life was wonderful for a small child here,” he said, closing his eyes. “We were like one large family. We played in the spring’s waters, we picked the delicious strawberries growing next to the pool.
“I can still remember the taste of the bread freshly baked by my mother and coated with olive oil and thyme.”
The village not only occupies a unique place in Mr Odeh’s affections. It has also come to symbolise a hope of eventual return for many of the nearly five million Palestinian refugees around the world.
In the words of Ghada Karmi, a British academic whose own family was forced from their home close by, in the Jerusalem suburb of Katamon, Lifta “remains a physical memorial of injustice and survival”.
The reason is that Lifta is the last deserted village from 1948 still standing in modern-day Israel.
More than 400 other villages seized by Israel war were razed during and after the war of 1948 in what historians have described as a systematic plan to make sure the refugees had no homes to return to.
Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian who examined the 1948 war in his book the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, has termed the villages’ destruction an act of “memoricide” — erasing for Israelis all troubling reminders of an earlier Palestinian presence.
The destroyed villages’ lands were used by the new state either to build communities for Jewish immigrants or to plant national forests, said Eitan Bronstein, spokesman for Zochrot, an Israeli group dedicated to teaching Israelis about the nakba.
A handful of other Palestinian communities, such as the old city of Jaffa and Ein Hod near Haifa, survived the wave of demolitions but were quickly passed on to new Jewish owners to be reinvented as artists’ colonies.
Only Lifta was neither destroyed nor reinhabited, its homes standing as a solitary, silent testament to a vanished way of life, said Mr Bronstein.
But even that small legacy is under imminent threat from the bulldozers.
In January the Israel Lands Authority, a government body responsible for Lifta’s lands, announced a plan to build a luxury housing project over the village, including more than 200 apartments, a hotel and shops.
The project, said Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councillor, would be targeted at wealthy foreign Jews, mainly from the United States and France, looking for summer vacation homes in Israel.
The developers have promised to incorporate some of the old buildings into the complex, although most observers — including leading architects — say that little of the orginal Palestinian village will be recognisable after the project is completed.
Instead, according to Mr Bronstein, Lifta will belatedly suffer the same fate as the hundreds of villages destroyed by Israel decades ago. “The message is that we are finishing what we started in 1948,” he said.
Esther Zandberg, a commentator on architecture for the Israeli Haaretz daily, agreed: “Although it is termed a preservation effort, it is in effect, paradoxically, an erasure of all memory of the original village.”
Critics have been joined by Shmuel Groag, one of the project’s original architects, who has accused the developers of failing to respect the basic rules of conservation in their treatment of Lifta.
Lifta’s families, backed by several Israeli groups, including Rabbis for Human Rights, petitioned the courts to stop the project, saying the site should be preserved in its existing state.
The Jerusalem district court temporarily froze the development in March, and is expected to issue a ruling in the coming days.
The families have also appealed to Unesco, the United Nations organisation in charge of educational, scientific and cultural matters, to declare Lifta a world heritage site.
The development, however, is backed by the leading conservation bodies in Israel, including the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and the Council for the Preservation of Historic Sites. The council’s director, Isaac Shewky, said the costs of a proper restoration would be “astronomical”.
Unlike most of the other 20,000 refugees and their descendants from Lifta, many of whom live in the West Bank and Jordan, Mr Odeh is able to visit his former village because he lives a few kilometres away in East Jerusalem.
He said he would ultimately like to see the families offered a chance to reclaim their former homes. “We will never forget Lifta. Our dream is to come back.”
Few observers expect such a scenario in the current political climate. The Palestinian right of return is widely seen by Israeli Jews as spelling doom for Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state.
That fear was only accentuated by the images of refugees in Syria storming border fences in the Golan Heights in May and June, in what was widely seen in Israel as an attempted return to their former homes.
Mr Bronstein said: “Lifta poses such a threat to Israelis because it offers a starting point for imagining how the right of return might be implemented. It offers a model for the refugees.”
Mr Odeh, who offers guided tours of Lifta, has to share the site with many Israeli visitors. Young religious boys have turned the still-functioning village pool into a mikveh, or ritual immersion bath. Other Israelis use the site as a favourite hiking spot. And in the evenings, drug-users take shelter in the homes.
Lifta is also facing rapid encroachment from West Jerusalem. It is ringed by major roads linking Jerusalem to the West Bank settlements; on the ridge above, a high-speed rail link to Tel Aviv is being built; and in the valley below a military complex is believed to house the government’s underground nuclear bunker.
Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

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Berlin Wall

Mazin Qumsiyeh

Mazin Qumsiyeh, 3 June 2011

I continue to be sad, shocked but also inspired by what I see and hear in my working tour in Germany. I remain cautiously optimistic because lessons of history, as sad as they are, provide an unmistakable map for the future.  Hitler (and Zionists) who aimed to leave Europe with no Jews have failed.  Here in Germany is the fastest growing Jewish population on earth and more than half of them come from Israel (the supposed haven of Jews).  Many of the activists for human rights here are ex-Israeli or ex-Zionist Jews. Gideon Levy explains in Haaretz this week how and why Israelis are getting foreign passports at unprecedented rates.

 

As you examine the sites of former Nazi interrogation camps and as you look at pictures and read stories of the past, you are struck by the idiocy of humans who thought they could get away with treating fellow human beings with such indignities. There are enough resources for everyone on earth but greed and racism seem to dog our species and rear its ugly head here and there.  The folly and arrogance of power confronting indifference and subjecting fellow humans to such cruelty is beyond description in certain periods of our history.  In other periods, denial (of the Nakba or of the Jewish holocaust) can hurt the feelings of survivors.  No human can claim they are not impacted by these things.  But I as a Palestinian found the microcosm of this all too human history truly disturbing and resonating with our reality.

 

Today, it was reported that the government of Israel is considering a new plan to move 30,000 Bedouins to concentration areas from their unrecognized villages in the Negev because of “environmental reasons”.  Seventy years ago, thousands of Roma (Gypsies) were also relocated to improve the environment.  Gypsies (Roma) are still treated bad in Germany and they are still around despite those early attempts to clear them out.

 

Seven years ago, uprisings in the Jenin Refugee Camp and in Nablus old city (ghettos) were put down brutally, sixty years before, an uprising in Warsaw ghetto was put down.  Stories about Jewish collaborators with the Nazis bear uncanny resemblance to descriptions of Palestinian collaborators with Zionist plans (including stories of extortions, use of family members, use of medical or economic levers etc).

 

Walls three meters high in Berlin are mostly gone but walls 8 meters high in Palestine still stand.  I bought a piece of the wall in Berlin.  I imagined that very soon, some Palestinians will be making a lot of money selling pieces of the Israeli apartheid wall. Dreams and memories and lessons and tears and hopes know no state boundaries and no national or religious boundaries.  I recalled the remarkable book by Jewish theologian Marc Ellis “Out of the Ashes” and his message that the lessons of horrors should be “never again to all humans” not “never again to my group.”  That is the lesson I hope will finally sink in to all of us.

 

We held a press conference about planned actions of bringing Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza in late June and bringing hundreds of peace activists to the rest of Palestine July 8-16 (sponsored by 30 Palestinian groups so far and supported by hundreds of organizations around the world, see PalestineJN.org).  The press conference was on the same day as the day that one year ago, Israeli navy commandos attacked humanitarian ships of the Gaza freedom Flotilla murdering 9 activists and injuring many.  All of us are inspired by the determination of the International civil society (people of all walks of life who act on their conscience) to keep working for peace with justice.  This determination stands in contrast with the collaboration of Western governments in supporting the last remaining apartheid colonial state.  As we see in the Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, we can safely bet on the power of the people.

 

Press Conference in Berlin May 31, 2011 (Gestrige Pressekonferenz mit Mazin):

http://www.publicsolidarity.de/2011/5/31/willkommen-in-pal-astina-mission-8-juli

 

Action in Palestine: A new colony has been put off on the land of Kufr Malek east of Ramallah. The villagers are planning the first in a series of protest this Friday  June 3, 2011 at 12:30

Please come and lend your support. For more information contact: Majed Fahim 0599201411

 

Action especially for those in the USA: Call TIAA-CREF

http://wedivest.org/2011/06/call-tiaa-cref-today/

 

International Women Peace Service seeks volunteer women for work in Palestine http://iwps.info/?page_id=380

 

Actions around the world: June 5th in front of Israeli embassies and consulates and at major apartheid barriers (borders, checkpoints etc).  For example Sunday there will be an event in Al-Walajah starting at 10 AM.

 

Remember we still seek volunteers and activists for Palestine.  Wilkommen

 

PS I will be in Stockholm June 3-8 (June 4-6 Sjövik Seminar, see http://www.sjovik.eu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=227&Itemid=169

 

 
Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He serves as chairman of the board of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Beit Sahour He is author of “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle” and the forthcoming book Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment.

A Bedouin in Cyberspace, a villager at home
http://www.qumsiyeh.org
http://www.pcr.ps

Articles by Dr. Qumsiyeh on RamallahOnline.com.

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Nakba protests: A taste of the future

Jonathan Cook

Israel in strategic dead-end

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

They are extraordinary scenes. Film shot on mobile phones captured the moment on Sunday when at least 1,000 Palestinian refugees marched across no-man’s land to one of the most heavily protected borders in the world, the one separating Syria from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Waving Palestinian flags, the marchers braved a minefield, then tore down a series of fences, allowing more than 100 to run into Israeli-controlled territory. As they embraced Druze villagers on the other side, voices could be heard saying: “This is what liberation looks like.”

Unlike previous years, this Nakba Day was not simply a commemoration of the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians in 1948, when their homeland was forcibly reinvented as the Jewish state. It briefly reminded Palestinians that, despite their long-enforced dispersion, they still have the potential to forge a common struggle against Israel.

As Israel violently cracked down on last Sunday’s protests on many fronts — in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and on the borders with Syria and Lebanon — it looked less like a military superpower and more like the proverbial boy with his finger in the dam.

The Palestinian “Arab Spring” is arriving and Israel has no diplomatic or political strategy to deal with it. Instead on Sunday, Israel used the only weapon in its current arsenal — brute force — against unarmed demonstrators.

Along the northern borders, at least 14 protesters were killed and dozens wounded, both at Majdal Shams in the Golan and near Maroun al-Ras in Lebanon.

In Gaza, a teenager was shot dead and more than 100 other demonstrators wounded as they massed at crossing points. At Qalandiya, the main checkpoint Israel created to bar West Bank Palestinians from reaching Jerusalem, at least 40 protesters were badly injured. There were clashes in major West Bank towns too.

And inside Israel, the country’s Palestinian minority took their own Nakba march for the first time into the heart of Israel, waving Palestinian flags in Jaffa, the once-famous Palestinian city that has been transformed since 1948 into a minor suburb of Tel Aviv.

With characteristic obtuseness, Israel’s leaders identified Iranian “fingerprints” on the day’s events — as though Palestinians lacked enough grievances of their own to initiate protests.

But, in truth, Israeli intelligence has warned for months that mass demonstrations of this kind were inevitable, stoked by the intransigence of Israel’s right-wing government in the face of both Washington’s renewed interest in creating a Palestinian state and of the Arab Spring’s mood of “change is possible”.

Following in the footsteps of Egyptian and Tunisian demonstrators, ordinary Palestinians used the new social media to organise and coordinate their defiance – in their case challenging the walls, fences and checkpoints Israel has erected everywhere to separate them. Twitter, not Tehran, was the guiding hand behind these demonstrations.

Although the protests are not yet a third intifada, they hint at what may be coming. Or, as one senior Israeli commander warned, they looked ominously like a “warm-up” for September, when the newly unified Palestinian leadership is threatening to defy Israel and the United States and seek recognition at the United Nations of Palestinian statehood inside the 1967 borders.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, alluded to similar concerns when he cautioned: “We are just at the start of this matter and it could be that we’ll face far more complex challenges.”

There are several lessons, none of them comfortable, for Israel to draw from the weekend’s clashes.

The first is that the Arab Spring cannot be dealt with simply by battening down the hatches. The upheavals facing Israel’s Arab neighbours mean these regimes no longer have the legitimacy to decide their own Palestinian populations’ fates according to narrow self-interest.

Just as the post-Mubarak government in Egypt is now easing rather than enforcing the blockade on Gaza, the Syrian regime’s precarious position makes it far less able or willing to restrain, let alone shoot at, Palestinian demonstrators massing on Israel’s borders.

The second is that Palestinians have absorbed the meaning of the recent reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. In establishing a unity government, the two rival factions have belatedly realised that they cannot make headway against Israel as long as they are politically and geographically divided.

Ordinary Palestinians are drawing the same conclusion: in the face of tanks and fighter jets, Palestinian strength lies in a unified national liberation movement that refuses to be defined by Israel’s policies of fragmentation.

The third lesson is that Israel has relied on relative quiet on its borders to enforce the occupations of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. The peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, in particular, have allowed the Israeli army to divert its energies into controlling the Palestinians under its rule.

But the question is whether Israel has the manpower to deal with coordinated and sustained Palestinian revolts on multiple fronts. Can it withstand such pressure without the resort to mass slaughter of unarmed Palestinian protesters?

The fourth is that the Palestinian refugees are not likely to remain quiet if their interests are sidelined by Israel or by a Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations in September that fails to address their concerns.

The protesters in Syria and Lebanon showed that they will not be pushed to the margins of the Palestinian Arab Spring. That message will not be lost on either Hamas or Fatah as they begin negotiations to develop a shared strategy over the next few months.

And the fifth lesson is that the scenes of Palestinian defiance on Israel’s borders will fuel the imaginations of Palestinians everywhere to start thinking the impossible – just as the Tahrir Square protests galvanised Egyptians into believing they could remove their dictator.

Israel is in a diplomatic and strategic dead-end. Last weekend it may have got its first taste of the likely future.

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

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Richard Falk: The UN human rights expert on the 63th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba

Richard Falk

Richard Falk, Geneva —  On May 15 2011 the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Mr. Richard Falk, marks the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophic beginning of the Palestinian tragedy of dispossession and occupation, with the following statement.

 

“Since the Nakba on 15 May 1948 Israel has continuously confiscated Palestinian land in order to build illegal settlements and populate them with Israeli citizens. It is astonishing that no one in the international community has stepped forward, after 63 years, to coerce Israel to comply with international law.  Israel’s legacy of ethnic cleansing continues and even accelerated.

 

“The construction of the Wall inside the West Bank results in an additional 12% of land confiscation and demolition of Palestinian homes, in flagrant defiance of the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice.

 

“This past week seven Palestinian families in the West Bank village of al-Walaja received demolition orders. This is a reminder that the Nakba continues. Israel’s pursuit of what it calls ‘facts on the ground’ consistently forces Palestinians to abandon their homes, lands, and lives, creating a reality better understood as virtual annexation.

 

“This is a particularly notable Nakba anniversary, as it coincides with the release of information confirming that Israel secretly revoked as many as 140,000 residency permits of Palestinians between 1967 and 1994. This is not only another violation of Israel’s obligations as the Occupying Power under the Fourth Geneva Convention.  It is also a glaring example of several sinister schemes that Israel has employed over the years to rid historic Palestine of its original inhabitants, in order to make space for Israeli citizens.

 

“The international community needs to take urgent action to compel Israel to end its confiscation and occupation of Palestinian land.”

END

In 2008, the UN Human Rights Council designated Richard Falk (United States of America) as the fifth Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The mandate was originally established in 1993 by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Learn more about the mandate and work of the Special Rapporteur: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/countries/ps/mandate/index.htm

Richard Falk

Richard Falk

 

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Visit his blog at https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/ for more articles. This article was posted with permission from the author.

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Solidarity with Palestine

Stephen Lendman

Stephen Lendman, 16 May 2011

Ahead of May 15 Nakba commemorations, massive crowds assembled in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square in solidarity. They displayed banners, proclaiming, “The People want the Rafah Crossing opened,” and “Palestine is a Arab state.”

They also waved Palestinian flags, chanting “Solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada” and “National Unity” ahead of a planned weekend march to Gaza. More on that below.

Domestic issues were also addressed, including ending recent sectarian violence and concerns about popular unaddressed issues under military junta rule. After Friday prayers, Sheikh Safwat Hegazy addressed the crowd, saying:

“(Appointed prime minister) Essam Sharaf: this is not your government. This is the revolution’s government. You should kick out the six former (NDP ruling party) ministers from the cabinet. We won’t accept (deputy prime minister) Yehia El-Gamal who’s part of the former regime….”

In response, crowds chanted, “Down, down Yehia El-Gamal.” One participant, identified only as Mohammad, spoke for others, saying:

“Sharaf’s government is taking the same path as the former government. They have the same double standards, secrecy and authoritarian policy-making in internal (and) external affairs.”

Though Egypt’s spring hasn’t bloomed, its spirit pervades Tahrir, suggesting perhaps renewed uprisings ahead. For now, however, Egyptians head for Gaza in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, a goal millions around the world support, as well as a Third Intifada to achieve it.

Surprisingly, however, despite MENA region (Middle East/North Africa) Morocco to Oman to Syria uprisings, Palestinians haven’t yet reacted, except for regular small-scale demonstrations far short of large masses throughout Egypt and neighboring countries, posing challenges for ruling authorities.

Yet nowhere is regional abuse more extreme, including occupation, isolation, land theft, mass arrests, torture, targeted assassinations, daily terror, and at times war, causing thousands of casualties and widespread destruction.

Perhaps Egypt’s solidarity march will inspire what hasn’t yet occurred, under the slogan, “Cairo’s liberation will not be complete without the liberation of Al-Quds (Jerusalem).”

According to Justice and Freedom Youth Movement’s Ahmed Doma:

“We are organizing this event as part of the Arab Internet call for a third Palestinian Intifada, and as part of what has been termed ‘the Arab mass march.’ ”

Facebook was used, urging that regional Arabs march en masse to Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian/Israeli borders, demanding what Palestinians have long sought, including liberation, ending occupation, the right of return, and East Jerusalem as its capital.

Participating Egyptians also want:

– Rafah’s border crossing permanently open, permitting free movement of people and goods;

– halting Egypt’s sale of gas to Israel;

– ending all “humiliating agreements with the Zionist state;” and

– immediate release of all Palestinians in Egyptian prisons.

On May 14 at noon Cairo time, marchers headed for Gaza, expecting to arrive that evening ahead of planned May 15 Nakba day rallies. At the same time, protesters demonstrated in front of Israel’s Giza embassy and its ambassador’s Maadi residence.

We are All Resistance member Arwa said “other convoys heading to Palestine are moving from Alexandria, Suez, Damietta and North Sinai. People will also join convoys from Gharbiya, Beni Suef, Assiut, Qena and Sohag” in a mass show of solidarity.

Cairo participating groups include:

– the National Front for Justice and Democracy;

– Cairo University’s Supporters of the Palestinian Revolution;

– the Justice and Freedom Youth Movement,

– Kifaya;

– We are All the Resistance Movement;

– Helwan University’s Resistance Movement;

– Ultras Ahlawy Ahly football club supporters;

– Zamalek club White Knights;

– Activists for Palestine;

– the Palestinian Women’s Coalition;

– the April 6 Movement;

– the Nasserist Party; and

– various independent activists.

In Tel Aviv, Israel’s Zochrot organization also shows support, defying the imposed ban on Nakba commemorations by posting a sign in German saying “we remember.” Other Israelis joined them in solidarity.

On its web site (zochrot.org), it:

“seeks to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel, who bear a special responsibility to remember and amend the legacy of 1948.”

Palestinians were victimized, losing “their entire world. But Jews in Israel also pay a price for their conquest,” living with the criminal legacy Palestinians and global supporters won’t forget. Zochrot’s goal is “recognition for injustice and new paths toward change and repair,” including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, saying:

“Return is fundamental to resolving the conflict and implementation of return need not cause injustice to Jewish people….in Israel.” It doesn’t mean expelling them. In fact, “the very opposite: The mutual existence of Palestinians and Jews in the country,” co-existing together peacefully. Return can thus free two societies from the destructive occupier/occupied relationship, ending a longstanding intolerable blight.

As a result, Zochrot will participate in March of Return activities, its site saying its members will visit Miska village, destroyed and ethnically cleaned by Israelis in 1948. They’ll then join the March of Return in al-Damun and al-Ruways villages, also demolished in 1948.

Ahead of May 15 demonstrations, Haaretz writers Anshel Pfeffer, Jack Khoury and Nir Hasson headlined, “Israeli – Palestinian tensions rise in Jerusalem, West Bank as Nabka Day nears,” explaining that:

Clashes erupted between IDF soldiers and Palestinians throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem Friday morning, including in Silwan, Isawiya and the Old City. Israeli police arrested 11 protesters. IDF soldiers used rubber bullets, tear gas, and heavy-handed thuggishness, assaulting nonviolent demonstrators.

Several injuries were reported, including an American and 17-year old Milad Said Ayyash, shot in the head Friday at close range with a high-velocity tear gas cannister and killed. At his Saturday funeral, two Palestinians were wounded. Others were arrested.

Further, Haaretz said “(t)ens of thousands of Palestinian refugees will converge in Maroun al-Ras, a village in southern Lebanon that was a major point of fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon War. A parallel demonstration will also be held on the Israeli side of the Lebanon border in Avivim….where demonstrations will be staged concurrently with” a planned Maroun al-Ras rally.

The International Middle East Media Center also reported on May 13 IDF – Palestinian clashes, including:

– Israelis blocking roads, impeding weekly Bil’in anti-wall protesters from traveling to established sites;

– arresting 34 West Bank/East Jerusalem protesters; and

– wounding 22 Palestinians in Nabi Saleh near Ramallah, including photo-journalist Hilmi Tamimi.

Moreover, Italian and Malaysian activists arrived in Gaza, including friends of slain activist/journalist Vittorio Arrigoni. They’ll join growing numbers of others in solidarity for Palestinian liberation and justice.

However, according to Press TV on May 14, Egyptian authorities blocked access to Sinai, preventing activists from reaching Rafah. Also, buses to transport other supporters didn’t arrive. Nonetheless, “a convoy left Cairo’s Liberation square on Saturday,” hoping to show Palestinian solidarity on the Gaza/Rafah border.

A Final Comment

On May 12, a Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) report said Israeli soldiers and settlers killed 7,342 Palestinians from September 29, 2000 (start of the second Intifada) through December 31, 2010.

PCBS also said Israeli security forces “kidnapped” nearly 750,000 Palestinians since June 1967, including 12,000 women and many children, targeted for wanting freedom in their own land.

Occupation harshness continues daily throughout the West Bank, East Jerusalem and besieged Gaza. On May 15, regional solidarity will converge in Gaza, along Egyptian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Syrian border areas, and perhaps other locations worldwide, commemorating Nakba day for what Palestinians have long sought – liberation on their own land in their own country. Long overdue, it can’t come a moment too soon.

Stephen Lendman

Stephen Lendman

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

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The Nakba – what does it mean in human terms?

“Dreams and Nightmares” by Nimer Al Azzeh, Lajee Centre, Aida Refugee Camp, 2009
“Dreams and Nightmares” by Nimer Al Azzeh, Lajee Centre, Aida Refugee Camp, 2009

“Dreams and Nightmares” by Nimer Al Azzeh, Lajee Centre, Aida Refugee Camp, 2009

Sonja Karkar, 15 May 2011
The Nakba is the Palestinian catastrophe. It means upheaval, violence and cataclysmic loss; it describes the terror, which drove almost one million people out of their homeland, as well as the perpetual terror in exile –displaced, dispossessed, stateless, lost and forbidden to return; it remains the multiplying injustice of another people’s sin burgeoning in our collective silence.

For 63 years, the situation has dragged on, men and women holding the papers and keys to their former homes, clutching the faded and cracked photos of happier days: everything rendered obsolete by the artificial creation of a state for a foreign people on land that has been home to Palestinians for millennia.

But if that is too distant in time and complex to touch your heart, then imagine for a moment yourself, wrenched from all that is familiar and everything you love, hastily running into the unknown grabbing only what you can carry from all the personal effects and mementos accumulated over years, ever certain you will soon return, even if it is to pick up the pieces shattered by war or disaster to begin again.

Think of yourself going back only to find someone else opening your front door and shamelessly banging it shut on the pleas you should not have to make.

Think of your street and neighbourhood, the same and yet not the same, as everything that once was so familiar is now given over to a people who have never walked before in the footprints of your forefathers.

Think of the sounds and smells that always make your coming home a moment filled with pleasure while now they make you shudder at the thought of others planning around your hearth.

Think of pleading with authorities and institutions which have no interest in your displacement, but would see you gone forever, pretending you never existed at all.

Think of yourself waiting the interminable wait while nation builders and destroyers discuss and negotiate ever-shifting borders and endless conditions in a process called peace, oblivious of your life, dismissed, despised and rejected.

Think of the eyes of your children and children’s children wondering what you have done and what they have done, to be stripped of dignity, honour and the most basic of human rights in a world that presumes to value only the rights of those of their choosing.

Think of what it must be like to be one of the world’s most wretched of surplus humanity for no other reason than that you exist, in spite of what others have done and do for advantage and plunder.

Think of yourself and wonder if life had been different would you treat others the same?

Can you now stand by and watch seven million Palestinian refugees feel and think and act like you and not do anything to stop the 63 years’ worth of injustices?

Eleven million Palestinians today around the world have not forgotten. Their collective memory remains undimmed, as each generation carries the Palestinian loss forward, always in anticipation of resolution.

Eleven million Palestinians stand today as silent testimony to all that matters in who we are and what we do. They have not vanished, but have multiplied and they will keep on multiplying until the last frontier. Perhaps we might yet see that the worth of our being depends on theirs and that the salvation of their condition will be the salvation of our own. In the meantime, their Nakba continues uninterrupted by hollow reconciliations and declarations of statehood – killings, evictions, transfers, imprisonment and the daily humiliations of unfettered power and our miserable silence.

“And who listens to the stories of those men, women and children who are taken by their displacement to that other shore from which no one ever returns? Our dead are scattered in every land.

And if the dead by displacement . . . are martyrs, and if the poems are true and each martyr is a rose, we can claim to have made a garden of the world.” (Mourid Barghouti “I saw Ramallah” p 161)

 

Sonja Karkar is  co-founder of the Melbourne advocacy group Australians for Palestine and editor of its news website www.australiansforpalestine.com