May 15, Nakba Day, is an important date for the Palestinian people. It’s the day when Palestinians commemorate their history and their culture. While Israeli nationalists and Zionist supporters celebrate the forming in 1948 of the State of Israel, t…
May 15, Nakba Day, is an important date for the Palestinian people. It’s the day when Palestinians commemorate their history and their culture. While Israeli nationalists and Zionist supporters celebrate the forming in 1948 of the State of Israel, the ‘Birth’ of Israel, Palestinians remember the Nakba, the catastrophe, ie, what was done to the indigenous people.
It’s a memory that the Israeli regime has tried to outlaw, to erase. Decades ago Israel deliberately renamed, ie ‘Hebrewized ‘, villages and geographical locations. Some destroyed villages were covered over with pine forests, hiding evidence that people had lived there.
Terrorist Israel has spent the last 75 years intensifying its apartheid rule over Palestinians—and it all began with the Nakba.
What is the Nakba? In 1948, Israeli militias invaded Palestinian towns and cities one by one, bombing community buildings, massacring entire families, and traumatizing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Palestinians call this the Nakba, Arabic for the "catastrophe."
The Nakba is more than a historical event. It is an ongoing process. The Nakba continues today as Israel continues to destroy houses, farmlands, schools ..yes schools too..in the West Bank and East Jerusalem…as Israeli snipers continue to shoot to kill or permanently maim, unarmed Gazan demonstrators, as Israeli forces continue to attack Gazan fishermen and bomb Gaza. The current Israeli government is the most extreme right-wing one ever. Recently, during Ramadan, Israeli forces openly invaded the Al Aqsa Mosque and violently attacked worshipers.
Writer and journalist Ramzy Baroud says about the ‘birth’ of Israel,
“That blood-stained birth callously required the destruction of an entire nation; people with a unique history, language, culture and collective memory. It was thus absolutely necessary for the Palestinians to be wiped out to quell any possible sense of Israeli guilt, shame and legal and moral responsibility for what has befallen millions of dispossessed people.
“The Nakba is not merely a question of history, but an ongoing reality that has affected several generations of Palestinians. It is not a celebration of victimhood, but the impetus for an ongoing resistance. It is not an ‘event’ assigned a specific political context and analysis, but is now a state of mind; the Palestinian people’s strongest rapport between them and their past, present and future.”
#Nakba75 #Nakba
