It was not an eclipse of the sun that turned the sky over Jerusalem black on Thursday… it was an organised protest of both Palestinians and Israelis commemorating the events of May 15th, 1948… the Nakba.

60 Years of Solitude…

Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues

I remember when I was first initiated to the Palestinian cause. I must have been 10 or 11. I vividly remember the setting. It was our living room. I recall seeing sun rays penetrating across onto the Persian carpet. I remember the colors coming alive. I guess it must have been spring or summer. My parents were seated opposite one another. Each was holding a newspaper. They would read, pause, comment, debate and resume their reading… I remember standing at the doorway of the living room and watching them reciprocate… I don’t exactly know how it all came about, but I was suddenly included in the conversation… It’s been a long time, so I can’t recall all the minute details, except maybe for my mother’s printed summer dress. I remember the little flowers adorning it and the sunlight stroking the hem and her legs…She looked so beautiful in it. And I do recall what my father was wearing. Grey pants and a white, short sleeve shirt. I guess it stayed in my memory because someone had told me that in Paradise, people wear white and grey…He too, looked handsome. I remember watching and thinking to myself, what a perfect couple today. I was taken away from my idyllic reverie of a few minutes when father said “Layla, what do you know about Palestine?” Of course I had heard of Palestine at age 10, but am not sure I knew all the details. All I knew is that something bad happened and it had to do with war and occupation. Sensing that I was hesitant to come forward with the little knowledge I had for a 10 year old, he completed my thoughts…” Palestine has been taken away from us by force…Layla, what happened to Palestine will happen to every Arab country unless…” My mother intervened as she usually does and added “Always remember that Palestine is Arab and that you are an Arab whatever happens…” My first formal initiation to the Palestinian cause was also an initiation to the Arab cause…In my mind they remained and are till this very day, intertwined and inseparable. That day I felt I was given a big task, an obligation. I am not sure what it was, I just knew that I was handed something precious. Something that started with Palestine and went beyond… And it went beyond the borders of Palestine. It reached Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and today Iraq…and tomorrow ? My father’s prophecy came true. You need to understand one crucial thing, the crux of the matter, the essence of the matter, once you grasp it you will grasp everything else around it in the Middle East. The occupation of Palestine is at the CORE of all the other occupations. Once the core is liberated, the rest will fall back in place. And please do me a favor, don’t mention this oil business again as being the sole determinant of things past and present. There was no oil in Palestine, unless you consider Olive oil something worth appropriating and killing for. It is all about “promised lands” and it all started with Palestine. Whether God, the early Zionists or the British promised it, does not matter anymore…It was “promised” and illegally delivered. Sixty years have elapsed since the first delivery by the British and in consortium with the other colonial powers. Sixty years of occupation on a land that is on the one hand narrowing and shrinking and on the other expanding even more… Sixty years and millions in Exodus. Moving from tent to tent, slum to slum, camp to camp, sometimes for a second and third time. Carrying the old rusty key to what used to be a home, carrying yellowed papers to what once was a piece of land, carrying an ID card to what once was a citizenship and a sense of belonging. Israel and the safeguarding and expansion of Israel is the root cause of all occupations past and present. You need to understand that once and for all. Sixty years of wars, sixty years of continuous exile, sixty years of death and the tumor is still lodged and metastasizing. 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1991, 2003, 2006, and it goes on… And in between - incursions, bombs, civil strife and silencing by prison chains and death. Israel, the democracy of sham and shame, the Jewish racist entity established on stolen land, on usurped land, built on tears, blood and corpses of Palestinians, of Arabs. Sixty years of wars, sixty years of expansion, sixty years of silence - the silence of mass graves, the solitude of mass graves…the solitude of exile. They still carry the key, the yellowed papers and the ID card…they will keep on carrying them. So will I. I am also holding onto the key, the papers that are turning yellow and the ID card that I am keeping as a memory…I am too, today. So will you, tomorrow… And my father’s voice returns in full force “ What happened to Palestine will happen to every Arab country unless…” Painting: Iraqi artist, Serwan Baran. Source

]]> http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/palestine-remembered-60-years-later-personal-reflections/feed/ desertpeace 1616serwanbaran2.jpg http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/palestinian-americans-remember-the-nakba/ http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/palestinian-americans-remember-the-nakba/#comments Sat, 17 May 2008 07:29:49 +0000 desertpeace http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/?p=2809

Palestinian-Americans mark 60th anniverary of Nakba at UN rally

All photos © by Bud Korotzer

I am somtimes amazed at the lack of wisdom demonstrated by Mr. Anti Semite himself, Abe Foxman. I am convinced that every time he opens his mouth a new anti Semite appears somewhere on the horizon.

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

The Nakba is our Holocaust

By Khalid Amayreh

“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.”

German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke during a visit to Ramallah in March 2007.

Basking in their usual insolence and self-absorbedness, Israeli leaders have been visibly irate over the highlighted commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the destruction and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian community in 1948.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has been quoted as saying that there can be no Palestinian state unless and until the victims learn to forget the word Nakba.

“The Palestinians will celebrate their statehood when they erase the word Nakba from their lexicon,” said Livni, whose father, Eitan, who died in 1991, played an active part in effecting the genocidal campaign of murder and terror that culminated in the establishment of Israel.

Last year, Livni had the temerity to say that the creation of a Palestinian state on parts of the West Bank would have to address Israel’s Arab citizens.

For those unacquainted with Zionist phraseology, the venomous remarks were an obvious allusion to diabolic Zionist designs to ultimately expel more than 1.5 million Israeli Arab citizens whose presence in Palestine predated the establishment of Israel by hundreds if not thousands of years.

Similarly, an Israeli diplomat at the UN reportedly complained on Thursday (15 May) that the mere use and circulation of the word Nakba carried a whiff of anti-Semitism, and that the word itself ought to be banned.

The obscene raving came after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon telephoned Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and expressed empathy with the Palestinian people in honor of the Nakba anniversary.

You see the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality. They want even to ban the use of words that remind humanity of the greatest theft and act of rape in history, carried out by a people who claim to adhere to the Torah, the Holy Scripture that taught humanity, among other things, “thou shall not steal.”

Obviously, Livni, who is now celebrating 60 years of theft and ethnic cleansing, wants her victims, the Palestinians, to forget the Nakba and relate to their own extirpation and deportation from their native homeland, as a rosy event.

The evil-minded lady wants us to hail the massacres, the terror, the ethnic cleansing and all the Nazi acts that led to our own destruction, dispossession and dispersion. In short, she wants us to adopt the Zionist narrative and effectively become bona fide or kosher Zionists in order to be accepted as “true peace partners.”

But that obviously cannot happen and never will. Indeed, asking Palestinians to forget the Nakba is as outrageous as asking Jews to forget the holocaust. The Nakba, after all, was more or less the Palestinian holocaust. And it still is.

How else can the native people of Palestine be expected to relate to the violent seizure of their homeland by brutal East European Zionists, eager to avenge the holocaust?

How else can any Palestinian, indeed, any honest human being, relate to the genocidal destruction of Palestine under the pretext that “Jews have got to live somewhere.”

As far as I know, true Judaism categorically forbids all forms of theft. But Zionism, which often pays lip service to Judaism and the Torah, has stolen an entire country from its indigenous inhabitants.

And the process of stealing and ethnic cleansing is continuing unabated.

It is true that Zionism has not yet used gas chambers to liquidate its victims. But Israel is murdering Palestinians in large numbers each and every day. Does a day pass nowadays without a Palestinian child, man or woman being murdered by these thugs and child-killers who call themselves the “Israeli Defense Forces?”

Just look at how Israel, which the liar of the White House George Bush was audacious enough to call “a light upon the nations,” is reducing Palestinian towns and villages to real concentration camps, very much like Nazis did at the Ghetto Warsaw.

As diabolical as it was, the holocaust lasted only for a few years. Yes, it was a few years of utter hell. We don’t deny this fact despite cynical Zionist efforts to utilize Jewish suffering to inflict comparable suffering on the peoples of the Middle East.

But the Palestinian Nakba, although lesser in scope and slower in motion, is still ongoing sixty years later.

Palestinians are still being killed, maimed, tormented, humiliated and deported. Palestinian homes are still being demolished; Palestinian farms and orchards are still being bulldozed and decimated; Palestinians are still being blockaded and starved in ways reminiscent of the holocaust. And above all, Palestinian land is still being stolen and raped by Zionism.

Today in every junior high school in America, students read Anne Frank, while in every high school Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is requisite reading. This is the man who says brazenly that he readily identifies with Israeli crimes and that he couldn’t bring himself to say bad things about Israel.

The victims of the first Kristallnacht enjoy the world’s approbation and sympathy, while at the same time having succeeded in demonizing an entire people, for whom Kristallnacht still remains a night without end.

Israel, as Spanish Philosopher Santiago Alba-Rico wrote two years ago, may not be the most unjust and criminal State in History, but it is the one that has been at it for a longer period of time and with greater impunity.

And Palestinians may not be the most oppressed people in the history of mankind. But they are undeniably the most uninterruptedly tormented people in modern history.

As a people, Palestinians have more or less survived in spite of history. But their very survival shouldn’t be viewed as irreversible given the specter of genocide and obliteration that is still hovering over their heads every morning and every evening.

Let us not fool ourselves. The nearly daily statements and remarks and warnings that we keep hearing from Israeli rabbis, politicians and generals are a vivid reminder of similar anti-Jewish statements made seven decades ago in Germany by Nazi figures.

In fact, the Holocaust didn’t start with Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 or even with Kristallnacht in 1938. It began much earlier with a venomously racist discourse that is very much similar to the present Israeli approach toward the Palestinians.

Israel, which has been trying to convince the world, particularly the West, that it must be perpetually dominant, hegemonic and imperial in order to survive, is slowly but surely trying to obliterate the Palestinian people in the name of the holocaust and in the name of “Never Again.”

Today, in the name of “Never Again,” Israel is transforming Palestinian towns and villages into concentration camps, where the lives of millions of hopeless and helpless citizens are at the mercy of the moods and whims of Israeli occupation soldiers and officers, very much like the lives of many Jews were once at the mercy of the moods and whims of the Gestapo, SS and the Wehrmacht.

Today, the Palestinians are a people without human rights and dignity, without civil rights, without a known fate, and virtually without a future because Zionist Jews have decided to fulfill Jewish nationalism in way similar to the manner in which German supremacists wanted to exercise their nationalism nearly seven decades ago.

And as Jews, Russians and other Europeans paid a dear price for the Nazi folly, Palestinians and other peoples of the Middle East have paid and continue to pay a dear price for Zionist madness and fascism.

But just as the Germans eventually paid even a dearer price for their own madness, Zionist Jews will undoubtedly will pay a colossal price sooner or later for their wanton criminality and arrogance. This is if they continue to allow themselves to be duped by the big lie called Zionism.

Eventually, the dynamics and forces that caused the downfall of Nazism and Stalinism will also bring about the downfall of Zionism. It may take some time, but it will happen.

The horror has lasted 60 years plus a day so far…. let us bow our heads for 60 seconds to honour the People of Palestine…. May we all see them as a free people soon.

Palestine National Anthem النشيد الوطني
الفلسطيني
ืNOTE : ITS NOT MAWTENE MAWTENE
——————–
الكلمات :
فدائي فدائي فدائي يا أرضي يا أرض الجدود
فدائي فدائي فدائي يا شعبي يا شعب الخلود

بعزمي وناري وبركان ثاري
وأشواق دمي لأرضي وداري
صعدت الجبال وخضت النضال
قهرت المحال حطمت القيود

فدائي فدائي فدائي يا أرضي يا أرض الجدود

بعصف الرياح ونار السلاح
وإصرار شعبي لخوض الكفاح
فلسطين داري فلسطين ناري
فلسطين ثاري وأرض الصمود

فدائي فدائي فدائي يا أرضي يا أرض الجدود

بحق القسم تحت ظل العلم
بأرضي وشعبي ونار الألم
سأحيا فدائي وأمضي فدائي
وأقضي فدائي إلى أن أعود

فدائي فدائي فدائي يا أرضي يا أرض الجدود

My country, my land, land of my ancestors
My country, my country, my country
My people, people of perpetuity
With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my revenge
With the longing in my blood for my land and my home
I have climbed the mountains and fought the wars
I have conquered the impossible, and crossed the frontiers
My country, my country, my country
My people, people of perpetuity
With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the guns
And the determination of my nation in the land of struggle
Palestine is my home, Palestine is my fire, Palestine is my revenge and the land of endurance
My country, my country, my country
My people, people of perpetuity
By the oath under the shade of the flag
By my land and nation, and the fire of pain
I will live as a fida’i*, I will remain a fida’i, I will end as a fida’i - until my country returns
My country, people of perpetuity.

* fida’i = one who risks his life voluntarily; one who sacrifices himself

Special thanks to Paola Pisi, Webmaster at Uruknet, for providing the lyrics and translation.

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)
Israel’s twilight years

As Israel ostentatiously celebrates the passage of 60 years since its creation in Palestine in 1948, more than nine million Palestinians at home and in exile are commemorating the Nakba, the violent seizure of their ancestral homeland by Zionist Jews and the dispossession, expulsion and dispersion of the bulk of Palestinians to the four corners of the globe.

This year, activities are taking place in many parts of the world where Palestinian refugees and expatriates reside, dreaming of and awaiting a return to their homeland that appears nowhere on the horizon of political reality.

Palestinians, irrespective of their political affiliations, are not only reasserting the legal and moral status of their right to return to the homes and villages from which they were expelled at gunpoint, or otherwise made to flee 60 years ago, but are also emphasising to all who will listen, including their own leaders, that the right of return remains — and will always be — the heart, soul and centrepiece of the Palestinian issue.

To the chagrin of most Palestinians, the commemoration of the Nakba this year coincides with the ongoing crisis between Fatah and Hamas, which some Palestinian intellectuals are already referring to as the “second Nakba”. Fortunately, however, and despite all differences, the national rift between Fatah and Hamas has not shaken national consensus on the paramount importance of the right of return.

But while the “second Nakba” looks more or less reversible, ostensibly at least, the first Nakba is something entirely different, given its historical and strategic dimensions and the indelible physical realities it created and keeps creating, even today, 60 years later. Many Israelis and Palestinians believe that the Nakba is still ongoing. The deadly Israeli blockade of Gaza, along with daily killings by the Israeli occupation army of ordinary Palestinians, is déjà-vu for elderly Palestinians who lived the nightmare of mass murder, mass terror and ethnic cleansing in 1948.

With Israel continuing the process of annulling whatever prospects still remaining for a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, many Palestinians are quietly turning to the one-state option. In reality, the one-state solution has been the Palestinians’ unconscious and undeclared baseline for years.

This week, Ahmed Qurei, head of the Palestinian negotiation team, revealed that he told visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently that the Palestinians would “resort to the one-state option if Israel refused to withdraw to the pre-June 1967 borders.”

Qurei said he didn’t know if ongoing talks with Israel would lead to a breakthrough. “The overall situation is very difficult and discouraging. The Israeli position is rapacious, the Palestinian position is weak, the international community is hypocritical, and the Arab world is nearly impotent.”

Al-Ahram Weekly asked Qurei if the occasional evocation of the “one-state solution” was a tactic used by the Palestinians to get Israel to be more forthcoming, or whether it was a serious option. Qurei replied: “It is not a tactic. One doesn’t have to be a great expert in politics to realise that if the two-state solution failed, the only remaining alternative would be the one-state solution. There is no other alternative, apart from the occupation, apartheid and colonisation, which are unsustainable.”

Qurei, who came under a barrage of criticisms lately for engaging in “endless” negotiations without determining how the “endgame” would look, said he didn’t know whether Israel was really interested in peace with the Palestinians. He pointed out that Israel has reached a critical point where it has to choose between being a Jewish state or a bi-national state in which at least half its citizens are non-Jews.

Qurei’s incertitude about negotiations is drawing the ire of a growing sector of Palestinian intellectuals, encompassing elites from across the Palestinian political and ideological spectrum. This week, the Palestine One State Forum formulated a manifesto for the one-state solution, which calls for the creation of a unitary democratic state in all of mandatory Palestine from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan, and where Israelis and Palestinians would live as equal citizens.

The manifesto, published Thursday 15 May, comprises six points:

- Palestine: The historical land of Palestine is the patrimony and motherland of the Palestinian people which in the context of a durable and comprehensive settlement would accept Israelis as equal citizens in a unitary democratic state.

- The right of return: Every Palestinian forced to flee his homeland (Israel proper) has an inalienable right to return as well as receive compensation and reparations for the psychological, economic and social losses he or she incurred.

- Zionism: Zionism is an exclusionary ideology and part of the international colonialist movement, which created and consolidated a racist state for Jews at the expense of the Palestinian people, resulting in the murder and expulsion of over half the Palestinians. Hence, we see that this ideology must be declared illegal and the political infrastructure based on it dismantled.

- One state for all: The creation of one state in historical Palestine is the most just, realistic, moral and humane solution of the Palestinian question which would guarantee peace and stability in the region. The creation of a unitary democratic state encompassing Israelis currently living in Israel and Palestinians, on the basis of equality as citizens and justice for all regardless of religion, race or sex, is the ideal way of resolving this conflict that has been raging since the outset of the 20th century.

- Historical reconciliation: The one-state solution would serve as the beginning of a historical reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians that would erase the destructive effects of decades of occupation and colonisation. However, the process of reconciliation would have to be preceded by genuine acknowledgement of and apology by Israel for the historical injustices and losses inflicted on the Palestinian people. Moreover, Israel along with the international community would have to compensate the Palestinians for their suffering and losses.

- This vision requires the concerted efforts of the Palestinian people everywhere as well as the efforts of peace-loving Israelis and Jews and all men and women of good will around the world.

Such ideas are anathema for Israel, Zionism and the vast bulk of Jews, since they imply the ultimate dismantling of Zionism and the creation of a bi-national state where Palestinians would eventually have a numerical majority. They also represent a jolt to collective Palestinian thinking, long inured in the idea of Palestinian statehood.

But as Qurei pointed out, the one-state solution will become the Palestinian option not as a matter of choice, but rather because all other alternatives have been effaced. Continued Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, coupled with shrinking political prospects for a viable Palestinian state, is already presenting Palestinians with a dilemma, namely to face national dissolution (i.e. the Jordanian option in the West Bank and the Egyptian option in the Gaza Strip), or embark on a lengthy re- evaluation towards adopting the one-state solution.

The Weekly asked two prominent Palestinian intellectuals if they thought the two-state option was still valid. Nasser Al-Qidwa is the former Palestinian representative to the UN. He says that, “time is really running out for the two-state solution” in light of the changing realities on the ground in the occupied territories.

“What the Palestinians ought to do now is to reassert the essence of the conflict, which is the Israeli military occupation of our country. We must also take a decisive stand on the issue of Jewish settlements; we simply can’t negotiate while Israel is stealing more of our land.

“The other thing is that we must stop babbling about creating a state. Instead, we must demand national independence, independence from foreign military occupation.”

When asked how he would imagine the future of the conflict with Israel if the two-state scenario failed, Al-Qidwa said the alternative would not be good for anyone, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the region and the world at large. “There would be a lot of violence, turbulence, and bloodshed the scope of which is difficult to predict now.”

Azzam Tamimi is founder of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London and author of several books on the Palestinian issue. He believes that Israel has already reached its zenith and is beginning a downward slide as a racist entity that would end with its dissolution and disappearance.

“I don’t know for sure how many years Israel will survive. However, Israel will definitely get smaller. The trend since Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 has been the decline of the Zionist project and the shrinkage of its territorial colonialism. It is likely that a few heavily fortified areas will remain under Zionist control, but it is more likely that Israel as a Zionist state will disappear.”

Tamimi, who recently wrote a book on Hamas, said he didn’t think that any conceivable Palestinian state on all or parts of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem would be viable.

“An entity created on any part of the territories, even if called a Palestinian state, will simply be a dependent unviable entity whose purpose is to prolong Israel’s life. There is the possibility that unilateral withdrawals by Israel from here or there will leave the Palestinians with no option but to emulate statehood, but that prospect can never be a viable state.”

Image by David Baldinger

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)
As my gesture of welcome to the President, I present here his greatest words of wisdom for all to see the type of man he really is…

Siege Hits Palestinians Before They Are Born
By Mohammed Omer

It can be a hard life for babies from day one, or even earlier. Credit:Mohammed Omer

GAZA CITY - The Israeli siege of Gaza that has restricted access to food, water and medicine is now beginning to hit unborn children and newborn babies.

“Many babies are born suffering from anaemia that they have inherited from their mothers,” Dr Salah al-Rantisi, head of the women’s health department at the Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza told IPS. And the mothers are becoming anaemic because they do not now get enough nutrition through pregnancy.

That in turn happens because the Israeli blockade has choked the supply of food and medicines.

Dr al-Rantisi also heads the women’s health unit at Nasser hospital, where about 30 to 40 children are born every day. Many suffer from anaemia, he says.

Anwaar Abu Daqqa, 30, has lost three babies prematurely. The foetuses were malformed as a result of lack of nutrition and medicine for the mother, Dr al-Rantisi said. And in the last case she reached hospital late because she could not find transport.

“Premature babies born dangerously underweight is a daily and increasing phenomenon in Gaza’s hospitals,” he says.

The Gaza Strip is poorer and harder hit than the West Bank, but there too there are well documented instances of women having to give birth at checkpoints because of restrictions on movement.

The ministry of health says 9,000 to 10,000 babies are born in the Gaza Strip every month. Of every 1,000 born, 28 die from malnutrition, anaemia and other poverty-related causes. The ministry has no figures for surviving babies suffering from malnutrition.

“There are many cases of pregnant women who need medicines that are not available in Gaza,” al-Rantisi said. Most families could not afford them if they were available, he said.

The World Bank said last month that the poverty rate in Gaza is now close to 67 percent and that economic growth last year was zero.

One consequence of poverty is anaemia. The condition, a direct consequence of poor nutrition, is not new to Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reported in 2002 that 19 percent of Gazans suffer from anaemia. That figure is estimated by UNRWA now to be 77.5 percent. Children receive on average only 61 percent of their daily need of calories from UN supplies.

Many of the newly born have been hit by the political situation before they could open their eyes to the world. Of the many deliveries that take place at al-Shifa hospital, the largest in Gaza, no one can tell how many of these children could grow up to live happy and healthy lives. Through the many dangers has arisen awareness of this new one – that sanctions can hit Gazans quite literally prematurely.

The fear of bombing comes later; the first dangers are the lack of food, water and medicines.

Tahani Safi, 29, lies worrying about the caesarean section scheduled for the next day. She suffers from malnutrition, high blood pressure, diabetes, and a shortage of protective water around the child in the womb.

There are many mothers with such difficulties. Such cases can be found at any hospital, but doctors say the number of cases of conditions a result of poor food and medical care in Gaza is now rising. Health authorities have warned that the life and health of countless unborn babies is in serious danger all across Gaza.

So far 146 Gazans have died directly as a result of the Israeli siege, and the border closures and shortage of medication and health care this has brought, according to the ministry of health.

The U.S. celebrated Mothers Day Sunday May 11. No one in Gaza did.

Source

Nakba at 60
George Bisharat

Palestinian children attend a rally marking the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba in the West Bank city of Tulkarem. (Mouid Ashqar, Maan News)