In 1948, some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from more than 400 villages as the new state of Israel was declared on a large part of their homeland – an event known to Palestinians as the nakba, or “catastrophe”. The refugees – mostly descendants of those driven from their homes – now number around five million, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
refugees
“The Nakba did not begin in 1948. Its origins lie over two centuries ago….” So begins this four-part Al-Jazeera series on the ‘Nakba’ (the ‘catastrophe’), about the history of the Palestinian exodus that led to the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel.
The number of Palestinians who remained in their towns and village in 1948 after the Nakba was estimated at 154,000. Their number is now estimated as 1.4 million on the 65rd anniversary of the Nakba. In 1948, 1.4 million Palestinians lived in 1,300 Palestinian towns and villages in historic Palestine. The Israelis controlled 774 towns and villages and destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages during the Nakba.
In the shadow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s theatrics at the United Nations last week, armed with his cartoon Iranian bomb, Israeli officials launched a quieter, but equally combative, initiative to extinguish whatever hopes have survived of reviving the peace process. For the first time in its history, Israel is seeking to equate millions of Palestinians in refugee camps across the Middle East with millions of Israeli citizens descended from Jews who, before Israel’s establishment in 1948, lived in Arab countries.
Israel’s anti-refugee policy reached a new peak this week when Ha’aretz reported that a group of 20 asylum seekers was being denied entry and was stuck in the fenced area between the Sinai Desert in Egypt and the Israeli border. The group has been sitting outside the fence since last Thursday, without food. The soldiers in the field were given an order to give the refugees “as little water as possible.” On Tuesday night, Israeli activists decided to deliver food they bought to the refugees themselves.
If anything can be said about the inhabitants of the many refugee camps in Jordan it is that they have shown remarkable resilience in the face of unspeakable injustice. The people at Gaza camp are warm and welcoming, albeit curious. Numbers haunt the life of every refugee; on one hand, there are passport numbers, national identification numbers, and social security numbers that are denied to them. On the other hand, you have the statistics that their lives have been reduced to: 24,000 refugees, 2,000 makeshift shelters, 50% unemployment, 0.75 square kilometers.
WikiLeaks documents now reveal that one of the options secretly discussed was to relocate the residents of Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon to the West Bank, possibly to the newly constructed Rawabi urban complex.
The gradual closure of Gaza began in 1991, when Israel canceled the general exit permit that allowed most Palestinians to move freely through Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since then the closure, which may soon be challenged by the second Freedom Flotilla, has become almost hermetic.
The absence of an effective Palestinian political body that could mobilize and represent refugees as a collective national group, combined with repressive state policies, catapulted UNRWA to center stage. Taking on a unique and visible role, it assumed many of the functions of a welfare government.
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and
Refugee Rights is proud to announce the release of its biennial Survey
of Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons 2008-2009.
“Palestine refugees are unique in the contemporary refugee experience, as they have no state to return to, nor are they allowed to return to their homes… [I]n Gaza an occupied people is under extreme trade and economic sanction as a matter of political choice. And in the West Bank the closure regime – part of the military occupation – is leading to the continuing rise in poverty rates.
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.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Wednesday it was facing an “unprecedented” budget deficit that could force it to cut back on services to more than 4.7 million people.
Arjan El Fassed: “Twitter is a great place to connect people with issues. But it’s also good at bridging cultural gaps. For most people, it’s difficult to identify with life in a refugee camp, but by linking it to a global network that resonates with millions, I was aiming to promote a sense of connectedness.”
Immortalize your name on a street: www.jouwstraatnaam.nl
Arjan El Fassed’s Twitter page: http://twitter.com/arjanelfassed
IOA Twitter page: http://twitter.com/IsOccupation
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.”
