Sixty years on, Palestinians mourn loss of homeland
Friday, May 9th, 2008Alistair Lyon; 8/5/08
While Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinian refugees mourn the 1948 Nakbeh (catastrophe) when they lost their homeland. Often ignored in Middle East peace talks, they cling to a “right of return”. Alia Shabati was 12 when she fled Jewish attacks on her village of Kabri, occupied a few days after Israel’s creation. Now a matron of 72, wearing a flowery blue dress and white headscarf, her memories of Kabri in today’s northern Israel are vividly intact, unlike the village, which was wiped off the map. “We had houses and land,” Shabati said in the living room of her modest dwelling in the alleys of Beirut’s Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. “We had olives, grapes, prickly pears and dates. We had orchards and fields. Now what do we have? Nothing.”
