We have rights not just in this land, but also rights over this land. This is a historic axiom. Even if the generation that experienced the events of Land Day in 1976 does not get to see the desired change, our message will be passed to all future generations as they mark Land Day each year.
Nakba
MK Taleb El-Sana (United Arab List-Ta’al): [The law] “proves the failure of Zionism, which needs to legislate a law in order to force the Zionist narrative and to rewrite history during which the Zionist movement committed crimes against humanity on the Palestinian people.”
Make no mistake, not a single conflict of contemporary times has been resolved, no durable peace achieved, unless and until the voices of the victims of those conflicts were heard, their losses acknowledged and redress found to injustices they experience.
Lifta, a most picturesque Palestinian village, lies on the slopes of West Jerusalem below the highway linking it to Tel-Aviv. It has been abandoned since the invading Hagana underground forces backed by the Stern Gang drove the last of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948 during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine… Now the Jerusalem Municipality has produced plans to turn Lifta into a luxurious and exclusive Jewish development – reinventing its history in the process.
IOA Editor: The Nakba continues: the few recognizable bits of pre-1948 Palestine will be joining their post-1967 counterparts: master-planned for extinction.
Rabin on the killing of 250-400 Lydda residents under his command in 1948: “There was no way to avoid the use of weapons and warning shots in order to force the residents to march 10 to 20 kilometers… The residents of Ramle observed what was happening and learned the lesson. Their leaders agreed to evacuate voluntarily.”
IOA Editor: Not so, for both towns, according to Segev’s coverage. Despite the differing views among Israeli researchers, and the still restricted sources, it is clear that Palestinians did not leave their homes ‘voluntarily.’ Undoubtedly, another reason to award Rabin the N-Prize.
[T]he head of the Civil Administration, Yoav Mordechai, came and proposed to the residents that they move eastward… they were also explicitly told they would not be given building permits… In his letter to Mordechai, [human-rights attorney Michael] Sfard says the proposal to uproot the village is an expression of “the Civil Administration’s ‘transfer’ policy, whose aim is to ‘cleanse’ the seam area of its Palestinian inhabitants … Even if you believe that there is a big difference between forced transfer and so-called ‘voluntary transfer,’ the difference is really minimal.”
IOA Editor: Another example of Israeli takeover of land and property owned by Palestinian individuals or institutions by “legal” or illegal means – based on the winner’s ability to write the law. This convoluted case – based on special Israeli laws written to legalize, and thus legitimize, the takeover of “abandoned properties” left by Palestinians after the Nakba – shows how Israel’s war against Palestine continues, 61 years after 1948.
A current case, different circumstances, different legal basis, but the very same theme: HERE.
The PLO, ever since the armed Palestinian organizations got the upper hand within it after 1967, very quickly came to understand that anti-Semitic discourse is bad in itself and altogether contrary to the interests of the struggle of the Palestinian people. Hence the insistence on the distinction to be made between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was the issue in a political battle within the Palestinian movement.
During the discussion, Tibi added that the proposed law reminded him of the “thought police” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Israel’s Education Ministry has recalled all copies of a history textbook because of a passage alleging “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians during the 1948 war, a newspaper reported on Monday. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said the secondary school textbook was removed from shelves because it sought to present both Israeli and Arab perspectives on the departure of some 750,000 Palestinians during the fighting that erupted after the creation of the Jewish state.
IOA Editor: “Deny, deny, deny…” see No Atonement
Abe Hayeem, an architect and founding member of Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine writes about Tel Aviv and its deeply-rooted colonial history.
The house was built, in great luxury, in the late 1920s by the Christian Palestinian family headed by Elias Mughanam, a lawyer who was the secretary of the Palestinian Congress. The asking price? US$9,000,000. Not a bad return for what was, 61 years ago, a free or nearly-free house for the new “owners.”
The Education Ministry will be reexamining a new Hebrew-language history textbook… [that] gives expression to the Palestinian perspective on the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), which is the Palestinians’ term for what happened to them in the War of Independence.
A ministerial panel approved Sunday a bill to ban funding by the state of groups that mark the Palestinian Nakba, which commemorates Israel’s independence as a day of mourning… The bill is the revised version of a proposed law scrapped two months ago – after opposition from several ministers – that would have forbidden Israeli Arabs from commemorating the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” on Independence Day.
The proposal by Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz to redo all signs so that even names written in Arabic will be transliterations of Hebrew (for example, the city known as Jaffa in English will now be written as Yafo on signs in Arabic, not Yaffa), was received like all other injuries to Arabs: easily – like Arab high-schoolers’ matriculation results or Arab infants’ high mortality rates.
The proposal to legally bar the commemoration of the Nakba on Israel’s Independence Day reflects growing trepidation in Israel about the inevitable encounter with the Palestinian Nakba and the understanding that the Nakba is a foundational part of Israeli identity.
Hadash Chairman MK Mohammed Barakeh: “Passing our heritage from one generation to the next is essential for our steadfastness and survival in our homeland. Our survival is not open to interpretation or negotiation, and is our formative feature as a community that narrowly escaped the threat of expulsion and remained in its country.”
“Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation,” Shapira said.
