Threat of second Nakba looms larger

The past two weeks show how easily the western world turns its back on Palestinians in times of crisis. While the West has shown solidarity with the Israeli victims, it has remained appallingly silent over – and even encouraged – the crimes being committed against Palestinians in Gaza.

The world is seeing western racism in all its cruelty, as Palestinian lives are deemed inherently less valuable. The worst horror is the silence and complicity of the West in Israel’s unspeakable massacres.

All Palestinians feel they are being held responsible and paying the price for Israel’s failure to maintain security along the Gaza fence. From 1948 communities to Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank are being targeted on the basis of their identity.

All they hear are western countries giving their full support to Israel, which is using this cover to commit crimes, arrest people and violate the human rights of Palestinians anywhere in the country.

Palestinians do not feel they are safe. Tensions hang heavy, even just in the way people look at each other.

When one walks the streets of Jerusalem streets are empty, but police and private security forces are there. 

Increasing numbers of civilians have been carrying guns in the streets, and even in shopping malls, where some Israelis were armed with M16s. This comes after National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir decided to hand out thousands of guns and to ease the conditions for purchasing weapons.

Many from occupied East Jerusalem no longer go to work. Some have been beaten. The army can stop anyone and check mobile phone; if they find a song about Palestine or a post about Gaza, they can confiscate the device, beat and arrest the person.

It feels as though people are living in a military base. In several locations, cement blocks have been placed at the exits of Palestinian neighbourhoods. 

Armed groups of settlers and private militia forces can stop anyone on the streets if the person looks Palestinian.

People don’t feel safe speaking their own language anymore. Palestinian friends in the streets will speak Hebrew or English; they don’t dare to speak Arabic in public. Many people have been fired or suspended from their jobs just for showing solidarity with Gaza.

There are two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. On Tuesday, Israel’s police chief, Kobi Shabtai said, “Anyone who wants to identify with Gaza is welcome – I’ll put them on buses that will send them there.”

People are terrified they could be physically attacked at any time. Extremist Israelis are urging others to kill their Arab neighbours, including women, children and babies. People have found their photos and other details posted on social media groups that have been established to target Palestinians. It is a collective call for revenge.

The speed at which this fascism has spread through the country is stunning. People have always believed there is a common space where Israelis and Palestinians can come together and work towards peace. But the transformation in recent days has been overwhelming. People who once described themselves as Israeli leftists are now calling to wipe out Gaza.

It feels as though the whole state is now baying for genocide. This is the type of language one hear from politicians, celebrities, academics and ordinary people.

Many feel that Israel is working towards a second Nakba – and the world is doing nothing to stop it. Israelis are crossing red lines and using the current situation to promote apartheid, ethnic cleansing and a second Nakba.

Across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, at least 69 Palestinians have been killed in the past 13 days. Palestinians are being attacked by settlers; the police and army do nothing to protect them. Instead, Palestinians face mass arrests if they dare to show support for Gaza.

In Gaza, more than 4,000 people have been killed in Israel’s bombardment – including more than 1,500 children – while thousands more have been injured. Gaza City has been destroyed. People are struggling to meet their basic needs: water, electricity and medical care. Pregnant mothers are in crisis. Children are being left in hospitals with no one to pick them up, because their parents have been killed.

 

What to forget Nakba or antisemitism?

May 15, marks the 73rd anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). During the Nakba between 750,000 and 1,000,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes and ethnically cleansed at the hands of Zionist militia and the Israeli army to force the creation of the state of Israel. 

This year's commemoration took place against the backdrop of renewed Israeli aggression and bloodshed against Palestinians. The Nakba did not end in 1948 and continues to this day with Israel relentlessly pursuing the dispossession of the Palestinian people. 

Here are 10 facts the world needs to know about the Palestinian Nakba: 

1- Between 1947 and 1949 Israel and pre-state Zionist militia forced approximately 750,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians into exile making them refugees. 

2 – At present, there are around 8 million Palestine refugees in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and neighboring Arab countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. They are denied their UN-sanctioned right to return to their homes, lands and other property by Israel.

3 - The Nakba was a deliberate and systematic act carried out in order to create a Jewish majority state in historic Palestine, which was overwhelmingly indigenous Palestinian Arab prior to 1948.

4 - Contrary to Zionist mythology, pre-state Zionist militia begun its ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and villages months before the creation of the State of Israel. The massacre and depopulation of the Palestinian village of Deir Yasin took place in 9th April 1948. 

5 - Approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained inside what became Israel's borders in 1948, many of them internally displaced. They were granted Israeli citizenship but to this day live as second-class citizens in their own homeland, subjected to dozens of laws that discriminate against them because they are not Jewish.

6 - Israeli forces systematically destroyed about 530 Palestinian towns and villages to prevent refugees from returning. Many homes that remained standing were repopulated with its Israeli Jewish population. 

7 - The Jewish National Fund (JNF) acquired approximately 78 percent of its land holdings from the state between 1949 and 1953, much of it the land of Palestinian refugees that the state confiscated as “absentee property.” The JNF holds this land stolen as “the perpetual property of the Jewish People,” which means Palestinians are unable to get it back

8 - The Nakba did not end in 1948 and continues to this day, in the form of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land for settlements and for Jewish communities inside Israel, its destruction of Palestinian homes and agricultural land, revocation of residency rights, deportations, demographic engineering, periodic brutal military assaults, and forced displacement.

9 - Many residents of Sheikh Jarrah were ethnically cleansed from their homes during the Nakba. They currently face becoming refugees for the second or third time. What is happening now in Sheikh Jarrah and Jerusalem is a prime example of the Nakba in action. It repeats itself in the Jordan Valley, in the Naqab and across the territory under Israeli control. Indigenous Palestinians are being forced from their homes by state sponsored violence at the hands of Israeli soldiers, Israeli police, and armed Israeli citizens.

10 - Israel has a law that prohibits Palestinians who are second-class citizens of the state from commemorating the Nakba on May 15. This does not stop Palestinians from remembering. Share the stories of the Nakba from Palestinians and join BDS campaigns, the most effective way to support our struggle to achieve our internationally recognized rights, including the Right of Return for refugees.

Commemorating Nakba Day

Every year on May 15, millions of Palestinians around the world commemorate Nakba Day, or the catastrophe that befell them in 1948. This catastrophe resulted in the dispossession of an estimated 750,000 refugees from historic Palestine, and the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab population and their society in the process of the creation of the State of Israel. 

73 years later, the Nakba remains central to Palestinian national identity and political aspirations, as evidenced by the 2018-19 Gaza March of Return and even the recent protests in Jerusalem. However, despite being a core Palestinian grievance, the Nakba continues to be whitewashed or denied outright by pundits, lobbyists, and even policymakers. 

Commemoration of the day has been taught by Arab citizens of Israel who were internally displaced as a result of the 1948 war has been practiced for decades, but until the early 1990s was relatively weak. Initially, the memory of the catastrophe of 1948 was personal and communal in character and families or members of a given village would use the day to gather at the site of their former villages. Small scale commemorations of the tenth anniversary in the form of silent vigils were held by Arab students at a few schools in Israel in 1958, despite attempts by the Israeli authorities to thwart them. Visits to the sites of former villages became increasingly visible after the events of Land Day in 1976.

As early as 1949, one year after the establishment of the State of Israel, 15 May was marked in several West Bank cities (under Jordanian rule) by demonstrations, strikes, the raising of black flags, and visits to the graves of people killed during the 1948 war. These events were organized by worker and student associations, cultural and sports clubs, scouts clubs, committees of refugees, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The speakers in these gatherings blamed the Arab governments and the Arab League for failing to "save Palestine". By the late 1950s, 15 May would be known in the Arab world as Palestine Day, mentioned by the media in Arab and Muslim countries as a day of international solidarity with Palestine.

In the wake up of the failure of the 1991 Madrid Conference to broach the subject of refugees, the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel was founded to organize a March of Return to the site of a different village every year on 15 May so as to place the issue on the Israeli public agenda.

By the early 1990s, annual commemorations of the day by Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel held a prominent place in the community's public discourse.

It is believed that Israeli Arabs taught the residents of the territories to commemorate Nakba Day. Palestinians in the occupied territories were called upon to commemorate 15 May as a day of national mourning by the Palestine Liberation Organization's United National Command of the Uprising during the First Intifada in 1988. The day was inaugurated by Yasser Arafat in 1998.

The event is often marked by speeches and rallies by Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, in Palestinian refugee camps in Arab states, and in other places around the world. Protests at times develop into clashes between Palestinians and the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2003 and 2004, there were demonstrations in London and New York City. In 2002, Zochrot was established to organize events raising the awareness of the Nakba in Hebrew so as to bring Palestinians and Israelis closer to a true reconciliation. The name is the Hebrew feminine plural form of "remember".

On Nakba Day 2011, Palestinians and other Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria marched towards their respective borders, or ceasefire lines and checkpoints in Israeli-occupied territories, to mark the event. At least twelve Palestinians and supporters were killed and hundreds wounded as a result of shootings by the Israeli Army. The Israeli army opened fire after thousands of Syrian protesters tried to forcibly enter the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights resulting in what AFP described as one of the worst incidents of violence there since the 1974 truce accord.

The IDF said troops "fired selectively" towards "hundreds of Syrian rioters" injuring an unspecified number in response to them crossing onto the Israeli side.

According to the BBC, the 2011 Nakba Day demonstrations were given impetus by the Arab Spring. During the 2012 commemoration, thousands of Palestinian demonstrators protested in cities and towns across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Protesters threw stones at Israeli soldiers guarding checkpoints in East Jerusalem who then fired rubber bullets and tear gas in response.