Palestinians mark the ‘Nakba’
15/4/08
Palestinians have held protests across the occupied territories to mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, when they were uprooted from their homes by the establishment of Israel. In the West Bank on Thursday, rallies and sirens commemorated the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, speaking from Ramallah, called for an end to occupation and settlement building.”It’s time for the occupation to leave our land … and for the ‘catastrophe’ to come to an end,” Abbas said in a televised speech. “Our Palestinian people have carried in pain the memory, and hope to return to their homeland.”
See: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CC7C6AF7-D771-4A0F-A85B-4D3EE86FDA0C.htm
Israel won the wars, lost the peace
Mark LeVine;15/5/08
On a flight home from a lecture at the University of Arizona on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Passover, I happened to sit next to an elderly woman whose accent, along with the Hebrew prayer card in her hand, suggested she was Israeli. Our conversation during the flight epitomised the obstacles that continue to block a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The woman was born in Poland and had lived through the Holocaust. “Even 60 years later it’s like a dream you can’t believe,” she explained when I asked her if she had still been in Poland when the war began. “You arrive and they send you immediately to the showers; you never knew which shower it was - to clean you up or gas you.
See: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/176C9C52-4564-4797-B192-6E08F6D8932F.htm
Why Bush must recognise the Nakba
Sandy Tolan; 15/4/08
Air Force One will travel back in time this week, banking low near the southern Mediterranean coast and touching down on contested soil where the past is always present. In the Holy Land, the battles over the historical narrative surrounding the founding of Israel in 1948 are as hard-fought as the contemporary struggles over West Bank settlers, Palestinian refugees, and negotiations for a two-state solution. In a long and bitter dispute, there are profound consequences for the “honest broker” (as the US government has long described itself) in identifying with only one side’s history. Yet when George Bush, the US president, steps off his plane to help Israel mark its 60th birthday, he will stride firmly into the past of one side
See: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1B63B5EF-1708-416C-BCA4-B294A39E3D51.htm
Jordan condemns Israeli crimes against Palestinians; 15/5/08; http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=7886
‘I Come from There, and Remember’ - honouring 60 years of memories; Mohammad Ghazal; 15/5/08; http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=7887
60 years of denial; Ramzy Baroud; 15/5/08; http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=7878
The story has not yet ended’; Michael Jansen; 15/5/08; http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=7877
Reuters demands explanation from Israel for death of cameramen
15/5/08
A month after journalist Fadel Shana was killed by an Israel Defense Forces tank crew in the Gaza Strip, Reuters renewed its demand on Thursday for a prompt explanation from the Israeli army of why it fired on its cameraman. Shana, a 24-year-old Palestinian, was killed on April 16 along with eight mostly teenage bystanders by darts known as flechettes that burst out of a tank shell in mid-air. Shana had been filming about 1.5 km (a mile) from two Israeli tanks. The IDF army said it had completed an initial field investigation that had determined the soldiers had followed orders and acted appropriately. But military lawyers still had to study the case before the army could give a full account.
See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/983952.html
Israel’s checkpoints sleight of hand
Mel Fryberg; 14/5/08
At the beginning of last month Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel had removed 61 of the more than 500 roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank “to make life easier for the Palestinians.” At the Annapolis peace talks last year Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also promised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen as he is better known, that the number of roadblocks in the West Bank would be significantly reduced. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) decided to carefully examine the Israeli claim and came up with some surprising findings. It found that only 44 roadblocks had been removed, well short of the claimed 61. Six more of the roadblocks on Barak’s list have been left in place. And the remaining 11 simply never existed. A close examination of the 44 roadblocks that existed and were removed reveals that most of them had no implications whatsoever for Palestinians’ freedom of movem
See: http://www.metimes.com/International/2008/05/14/israels_checkpoints _sleight_of_hand/7205/
1948 War: Facts and Myths
Uri Avnery; 15/5/08
One day, I hope, a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, on the South African model, will be set up here in Israel. It should be composed of Israeli, Palestinian and international historians, whose job will be to establish what really happened in this country in 1948. In the 60 years that have passed since then, the events of the war have been buried under layer upon layer of Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab propaganda. A quasi-archaeological excavation is needed in order to expose the bottom layer. Even the eyewitnesses who are still alive sometimes have problems distinguishing between what they actually saw and the myths that have twisted and falsified the events almost beyond recognition.
See: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=109903&d=15&m=5&y=2008
Should Palestinians Forgive Israel?
Samir El-Youssef; 15/5/08
In the first chapter of Amos Oz’s novel My Michael, the protagonist Hannah recalls her childhood friends, Khalil and Aziz, two Palestinians who in 1948 disappeared along with 800,000 of their people. In the last chapter she imagines her two friends coming back to blow everything up. By then Hannah has descended into madness.Hannah, like Oz and his generation of Israelis, knows that before the war of 1948 there was another, older and larger society than her own, and that that society was destroyed and its traces erased; the population was forced to leave, villages were razed to the ground and cities, neighborhoods and streets were renamed.
See: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=109905&d=15&m=5&y=2008
Strong yearning for statehood
Daoud Kuttab;15/5/08
In the spring of 1948, my father, George Kuttab, and his brother Qostandi fled Musrara, a Jerusalem neighbourhood just outside the walled city, after their sister Hoda’s husband was killed in front of her and their children. When Dad used to tell us about the Nakba, the catastrophe that befell Palestinians in 1948, he never talked politics or hatred. He would laugh as he told us how his brother secured their home near Damascus Gate. To assure his mother and brother that the house (in what is now Israeli west Jerusalem) would be safe, my uncle joked that he had double-locked the door, turning the heavy metal key twice. He took that key with him to Zarqa, Jordan, expecting to be able to use it again one day.
See: http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/region/10213231.html
How Checkpoints Make Palestinian Lives Worse
Ben White,
As Bush arrives in Israel, I remember a moment when the gulf between the language of the official “peace process” and the reality on the ground hit me. It was the summer of 2004, and before leaving my house in the morning, I watched then secretary of state, Colin Powell, make all the familiar noises about Israel, the Palestinians and peacemaking. I then walked to work through the Bethlehem checkpoint while over to my left, Har Homa settlement was growing unchecked. Fast forward to May 2008. Har Homa is even bigger, and the disparity between the language and approach of the international community’s peace process and the situation in the occupied territories is even starker.
See: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=109908&d=15&m=5&y=2008
Tags: 1948 Myths, Checkpoints, Forgiveness, Israel, Palestinian People, Reuter's Death, Terrorism, USA