Tag: 1948 Palestine

Counterpunch: Paramilitary police attack Al-Nakba march

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

To view original article, published in Counterpunch on the 16th May 2008, click here

It has been a week of adulation from world leaders, ostentatious displays of military prowess, and street parties. Heads of state have rubbed shoulders with celebrities to pay homage to the Jewish state on its 60th birthday, while a million Israelis reportedly headed off to the country’s forests to enjoy the national pastime: a barbecue.

But this year’s Independence Day festivities have concealed as much as they have revealed. The images of joy and celebration seen by the world have failed to acknowledge the reality of a deeply divided Israel, shared by two peoples with conflicting memories and claims to the land.

They have also served to shield from view the fact that the Palestinians’ dispossession is continuing in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. Far from being a historical event, Israel’s “independence” — and the ever greater toll it is inflicting on the Palestinian people — is very much a live issue.

Away from the cameras, a fifth of the Israeli population — more than one million Palestinian citizens — remembered al-Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948 that befell the Palestinian people as the Jewish state was built on the ruins of their society.

As it has been doing for the past decade, Israel’s Palestinian minority staged an alternative act of commemoration: a procession of families, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. The villages were destroyed to ensure that the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from the state under the cover of war never return.

But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year’s march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children.

Although most of the refugees from the 1948 war — numbering in their millions — ended up in camps in neighbouring Arab states, a few remained inside Israel. Today one in four Palestinian citizens of Israel is either a refugee or descended from one. Not only have they been denied the right ever to return to their homes, like the other refugees, but many live tantalisingly close to their former communities.

The destroyed Palestinian villages have either been reinvented as exclusive Jewish communities or buried under the foliage of national forestation programmes overseen by the Jewish National Fund and paid for with charitable donations from American and European Jews.

There have been many Nakba processions held over the past week but the march across fields close by the city of Nazareth was the only one whose destination was a former Palestinian village now occupied by Jews.

The village of Saffuriya was bombed from the air for two hours in July 1948, in one of the first uses of air power by the new Jewish state. Most of Saffuriya’s 5,000 inhabitants fled northwards towards Lebanon, where they have spent six decades waiting for justice. But a small number went south towards Nazareth, where they sought sanctuary and eventually became Israeli citizens.

Today they live in a neighbourhood of Nazareth called Safafra, after their destroyed village. They look down into the valley where a Jewish farming community known as Zippori has been established on the ruins of their homes.

This year’s Nakba procession to Saffuriya was a small act of defiance by Palestinian citizens in returning to the village, even if only symbolically and for a few hours. The threat this posed to Israeli Jews’ enduring sense of their own exclusive victimhood was revealed in the unprovoked violence unleashed against the defenceless marchers, many of them children.

Like many others, I was there with a child — my five-month-old daughter. Fortunately, for her and my sake, we left after she grew tired from being in the heat for so long, moments before the trouble started.

When we left, things were entirely peaceful. Nonetheless, as we drove away, I saw members of a special paramilitary police unit known as the Yassam appearing on their motorbikes. The Yassam are effectively a hit squad, known for striking out first and asking questions later. Trouble invariably follows in their wake.

The events that unfolded that afternoon have been captured on mostly home-made videos that can be viewed on the internet, including here. The context for understanding these images is provided below in accounts from witnesses to the police attack:

Several thousand Palestinians, waving flags and chanting Palestinian songs, marched towards a forest planted on Saffuriya’s lands. Old people, some of whom remembered fleeing their villages in 1948, were joined by young families and several dozen sympathetic Israeli Jews. As the marchers headed towards Saffuriya’s spring, sealed off by the authorities with a metal fence a few years ago to stop the villagers collecting water, they were greeted with a small counter-demonstration by right-wing Israeli Jews.

They had taken over the fields on the other side of the main road at the entrance to what is now the Jewish community of Zippori. They waved Israeli flags and sang nationalist Hebrew songs, as armed riot police lined the edge of the road that separated the two demonstrations.

Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Culture and Tourism Association whose parents were expelled from Saffuriya, said: “There were some 50 Jewish demonstrators who had been allowed to take over the planned destination of our march. Their rights automatically trumped ours, even though there were thousands of us there and only a handful of them.”

The police had their backs to the Jewish demonstrators while they faced off with the Palestinian procession. “It was as if they were telling us: we are here only for the benefit of Jews, not for you,” said Shehadeh. “It was a reminder, if we needed it, that this is a Jewish state and we are even less welcome than usual when we meet as Palestinians.”

The marchers turned away and headed uphill into the woods, to a clearing where Palestinian refugees recounted their memories.

When the event ended in late afternoon, the marchers headed back to the main road and their cars. In the police version, Palestinian youths blocked the road and threw stones at passing cars, forcing the police to use force to restore order.

Dozens of marchers were injured, including women and children, and two Arab Knesset members, Mohammed Barakeh and Wassel Taha, were bloodied by police batons. Mounted police charged into the crowds, while stun grenades and tear gas were liberally fired into fields being crossed by families. Eight youths were arrested.

Shehadeh, who was close to the police when the trouble began, and many other marchers say they saw the Jewish rightwingers throwing stones at them from behind the police. A handful of Palestinian youngsters responded in kind. Others add that the police were provoked by a young woman waving a Palestinian flag.

“None of the police were interested in stopping the Jews throwing stones. And even if a few Palestinian youths were reacting, you chase after them and arrest them, you don’t send police on mounted horseback charging into a crowd of families and fire tear gas and stun grenades at them. It was totally indiscriminate and reckless.”

Clouds of gas enveloped the slowest families as they struggled with their children to take cover in the forest.

Therese Zbeidat, a Dutch national who was there with her Palestinian husband Ali and their two teenage daughters, Dina and Awda, called the experiences of her family and others at the hands of the police “horrifying”.

“Until then it really was a family occasion. When the police fired the tear gas, there were a couple near us pushing a stroller down the stony track towards the road. A thick cloud of gas was coming towards us. I told the man to leave the stroller and run uphill as fast as he could with the baby.

“Later I found them with the baby retching, its eyes streaming and choking. It broke my heart. There were so many families with young children, and the police charge was just so unprovoked. It started from nothing.”

The 17-year-old boyfriend of Therese Zbeidat’s daughter, Awda, was among those arrested. “It was his first time at any kind of nationalist event,” she said. “He was with his mother, and when we started running up the hill away from the police on horseback, she stumbled and fell.

“He went to help her and the next thing a group of about 10 police were firing tear gas cannisters directly at him. Then they grabbed him by the keffiyah [scarf] around his neck and pulled him away. All he was doing was helping his mother!”

Later, Therese and her daughters thought they had made it to safety only to find themselves in the midst of another charge from a different direction, this time by police on foot. Awda was knocked to the ground and kicked in her leg, while Dina was threatened by a policeman who told her: “I will break your head.”

“I’ve been on several demonstrations before when the police have turned nasty,” said Therese, “but this was unlike anything I’ve seen. Those young children, some barely toddlers, amidst all that chaos crying for their parents – what a way to mark Independence Day!”

Jafar Farah, head of the political lobbying group Mossawa, who was there with his two young sons, found them a safe spot in the forest and rushed downhill to help ferry other children to safety.

The next day he attended a court hearing at which the police demanded that the eight arrested men be detained for a further seven days. Three, including a local journalist who had been beaten and had his camera stolen by police, were freed after the judge watched video footage of the confrontation taken by marchers.

Farah said of the Independence Day events: “For decades our community was banned from remembering publicly what happened to us as a people during the Nakba. Our teachers were sacked for mentioning it. We were not even supposed to know that we are Palestinians.

“And in addition, the police have regularly used violence against us to teach us our place. In October 2000, at the start of the intifada, 13 of our unarmed young men were shot dead for demonstrating. No one has ever been held accountable.

“Despite all that we started to believe that Israel was finally mature enough to let us remember our own national tragedy. Families came to show their children the ruins of the villages so they had an idea of where they came from. The procession was becoming a large and prominent event. People felt safe attending.

“But we were wrong, it seems. It looked to me very much like this attack by the police was planned. I think the authorities were unhappy about the success of the processions, and wanted them stopped.

“They may yet win. What parent will bring their children to the march next year knowing that they will be attacked by armed police?”

Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in Nazareth (www.jkcook.net).

Al-Haq report: 60 years of Nakba – Israel’s continuing policy of forcible displacement

Al-Haq: 15 May 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian “Nakba,” the “catastrophe” that led to the forcible displacement of more than half of the population of Historic Palestine. For 60 years, the Palestinian refugees have been denied their internationally guaranteed right to return to their homes. While the State of Israel is celebrating its independence, the fate of the Palestinian refugees and those subsequently expelled over the course of Israel’s 40 years of occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, remains unresolved.

Please click here to download/open Al-Haq´s position paper examining the rights of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons under international law, and the legal responsibilities of Israel, the United Nations and third states in regard to those rights.

PCHR: Narratives Under Siege: Remembering the Nakba

In order to highlight the impact of the siege and closure of the Gaza Strip on the civilian population, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) is publishing a series of “Narratives Under Siege” on their website. These short articles are based on personal testimonies and experiences of life in the Gaza Strip, highlighting the restrictions, and violations, being imposed on the civilians of Gaza. To view all the narratives on the website, click here

Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah spends as much time as she can in her garden in Gaza, maintaining her “intimate love of the land.” (Photo from PCHR)

“I am not sure what year I was born. But it was around 78 years ago, in Palestine.” Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah sits on the patio overlooking her large garden, recalling the turbulent story of her long life. “I am a Palestinian from the village of Beit Affa” she says, tucking her long white scarf under her chin. “It was a beautiful village and we had a good life there. There was a small Jewish settlement nearby, called Negba, and we had a good relationship with the Jews. Whenever we had weddings, we would invite them to come and celebrate, and we women all used to dance dabka (Palestinian (traditional dance) together. The muktar (or chief) of the settlement, was called Michael. He used to arrive at the weddings with a gift, like a goat, and we would cook it and share the meat between us.”

Beit Affa was a village of around 500 people, in southern Palestine, 29 kilometers north east of the Gaza Strip. Most of the villagers were farmers, but even those who did not solely earn their living from farming had, says Handuma, “an intimate relationship with the land.” Like many of the local women, Handuma married young and stayed in her village. But in 1948, after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and the declaration of the new State of Israel on Palestinian land, mass violence erupted. “The Zionists refused the division of the land into two states, and the massacres started” she says. “The first massacre was in Deir Yasin, where they slaughtered more than a hundred people.” The Deir Yasin villagers were killed by the notorious Zionist Lehi and Etsel gangs, which had originally been part of the 50,000 strong Haganah militia (which later became the core of the Israeli Defence Force, or IDF). These heavily armed gangs of Zionists were intent on driving Palestinians from their homes en masse. After the Deir Yasin massacre, they targeted villages across Palestine, threatening the Palestinians that if they did not leave their homes immediately they would be killed like the people of Deir Yasin.

“It was a terrible time. The Zionists killed women and children, young and old. The Haganah would slit women’s throats. We were all terrified.” Handuma and her family, which included her eighteen month old son, Ibrahim, stayed at home, waiting. She recalls the Jordanian and Egyptian armies arriving at the border of nearby Ashdod city, and asking local Palestinians to volunteer to leave their homes, reassuring them they would be able to return within the week. “My family refused to leave our village. It was the wheat harvest and we had just stored our wheat. With the Egyptian and Jordanian troops nearby we hoped we would be safe.”

The Haganah militia entered Beit Affa in the summer of 1948. “They arrived at 1am” Handuma recalls, “and started to kill our people. I saw my husband’s cousin axed to death, and an elderly woman being murdered. We hid in our homes, and the killing continued until 7am. Then the Haganah broke down the front doors of our houses and told us all to get out. They separated us, women from men, and then they took the men and blindfolded them, tied their hands together, and forced outside into the hot sun.” The surviving villagers’ lives were saved when Egyptian troops arrived and drove the Haganah out of Beit Affa. “But we had to leave our village,” says Handuma. “We were still afraid for our lives – and for the honour of our girls. The land would have to wait for us. I took nothing from my home, and left the front door open.” She says all of the Beit Affa villagers left together en masse.

Handuma, her husband Motlaq and young Ibrahim, traveled with many of the villagers for approximately the next six months. She easily recalls the names of villages where they stayed for a month at a time before moving on. “We were in Karateya, then in Al-Falluja (now known as the Israeli town of Kiriat Gat). Then we moved onto Herbya. We kept moving. People from the villages all traveled in large groups. We heard some small news from Beit Affa – we knew it was under Egyptian control for six months, and then the Israelis occupied it.” According to the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, “There are [now] no traces of villages houses; only sycamore and carob trees and cactuses mark the site [of Beit Affa].” Like thousands of other Palestinians, Handuma Wishah still carries the key to the front door of her home in Beit Affa.

When Handuma, Motlaq and Ibrahim arrived in Gaza in December 1948, they were, according to UN figures, just three of the approximately 914,000 Palestinians who had been forced out of Palestine as refugees during the Nakhba, or Catastrophe. Around two hundred thousand of the refugees arrived in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming the local Palestinian population of eighty thousand. “We spent our first week in Gaza city” says Handuma. “Then we moved on to Nuseirat (in the middle area of the Gaza Strip) and stayed there. We had nothing. We slept on the land, uncovered, until UNRWA arrived and gave us tents.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was established in 1949 to assist the Palestinian refugees, and it remains by far the largest UN operation in the Middle East. In Gaza, UNRWA started to count the refugees, who were allocated tents according to the size of each family. Handuma and her small family were issued with a tent and UNRWA blankets, but had no beds. “The thing we needed the most was medicine” she says. “There was no medicine. My son, Ibrahim was dying in front of me, and there was nothing I could do.” Ibrahim died in Nuseirat, aged two years and two months.

Slowly the refugees divided themselves into camps; there are now eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, and they are some of the densely populated places on earth. Handuma and Motlaq eventually moved from their tent into a small house in the Bureij refugee camp, where she has lived since 1953. “The first years were very difficult” she says. “After the death of my first son I gave birth to another boy, and called him Ibrahim too. But he died 45 days later. If I had known how much suffering it was going to cause my children, I would never have left my village.” She starts to cry silently, and excuses herself for a few minutes. This elderly woman has just recalled the hardest and most bitter battles of her life: the pain of losing her land, and the struggle to save her children.

Handuma’s third son, Jaber survived, and she went on to have another three sons and four daughters. Um Jaber (Mother of Jaber) as she has been known for years in the Gaza Strip and beyond, has also been a staunch political activist more than five decades. She remains grateful to UNRWA for their assistance, but is fiercely critical of both the United Nations, and especially Britain, for their roles in the Nakhba. “We Palestinians are not terrorists” she says. “We are living under occupation and siege from the Israelis, and we will continue to resist until we can return to our homes. We are patient people.”

In 1995, when she was 65 years old, Um Jaber started a major political campaign to support Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israeli jails. “All of my four sons were jailed” she says, “and through them I met other Palestinians who also needed support. I used to visit the jails in Israel daily.” The mothers of Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails have been denied all visitation rights by the Israeli authorities since June 2007, and Um Jaber still joins the weekly Gaza vigil that demands the right for Palestinian mothers to visit their sons, husband and daughters who are imprisoned in Israel. These days, however, Um Jaber spends as much time as possible in her large garden tending her flowers and herbs and her flocks of hens and pigeons. “I have never lost my intimate love for the land” she says. “I have fed this love to my children and grandchildren, and I practice my traditional village life here as much as I can.”

As she remembers her own Nakhba, Um Jaber says she has never lost the hope of returning to the site of her village. “The Nakhba day will be a difficult and sad day” she says. “I will remember my village, and our lives there. I will also remember the respect between us and the Jews. But we are not the problem, we are the occupied people. The problem is the Israeli occupation of our Palestinian land.”

“Their independence is our Nakba”

An Nakba (the catastrophe) commemorations continued in Nablus on Thursday 15th May, with approximately 500 people gathering in the main square of the city to demand their right to return home. Organised by the National Committee to Commemorate the Nakba at 60, in conjunction with many Nablus organisations, the official statement of the demonstration was “There can be no alternative to our return to our homes and properties.”

Commemoration of the Nakba – the catastrophe whereby approximately 700 000 Palestinians were forced to flee their lands in what is now Israel due to the onslaught of Zionist armies – fall on the day after the anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel; thus emphasizing the suffering that took place to enable the creation of a Jewish state – suffering that is still without relief. However, the mood of demonstration was defiant, rather than mournful. “Today we do not commemorate so that we can weep over what was lost; we come together to march forward; to march home.”

Children held up giant keys, the symbol of the Palestinian struggle for the right of return; as well as antique keys that have been carried by their families for the past sixty years. Children from Zawata held up a model of Israeli tanks and jeeps resting on a 200 year-old grain-sifter. They explained: “Before 200 years my grandfather used this for corn and wheat. With tanks and jeeps soldiers come everyday and damage the houses and the streets. It means we will come back; we must come back with these traditional tools, even though there are soldiers, jeeps and Armoured Personnel Carriers.”

Speakers emphasized the refugees’ connection to the land, with statements such as: “I am Palestine; I am Jaffa; I am Haifa; I am Lid,” and reaffirmed their determination to continue to fight for their rights. As the Nablus coordinator for the Nakba Committee reiterated: “Ay adoun, ay adoun, ay adoun” – We will return; we will return; we will return.”

Report and photos by Mustafa Qadri

500 children, from Tulkarem refugee camp, attempt to march to their families homes

On Wednesday 14th May approximately 500 refugee school children from the city of Tulkarem, in the north-west of the West Bank, attempted to march back to their families’ homes in Jaffa, near Tel-Aviv, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Al-Nakba (the catastrophe).

Waving United Nations flags and many wearing black t-shirts with 1948 blazoned across the back, the children drew attention to the fact that 60 years after the declaration of the state of Israel, which was enabled by the mass killings and forced evictions of up to 700 000 refugees from approximately 418 villages, Palestinians have still been denied their right to return home – as declared by the United Nations Resolution 194 article 11. Marching from the Tulkarem refugee camps through the city streets, the children chanted “We will not sell” – referring to the popular refusal to sell the right to return home.

The demonstration gathered at Al Khadouri university, before attempting to march west towards Jaffa, where the children were quickly stopped by Israeli soldiers positioned at the illegal Israeli apartheid wall that runs through the edge of Tulkarem city. The soldiers pointed their guns at the children and threatened to shoot, forcing the children to turn back.

Organised by the National Nakba Committee; Committees of Tulkarem refugee camps; and the national political parties, the demonstration in Tulkarem is part of the ongoing commemorations and protests against the Israeli 60th anniversary celebrations, in light of the continued refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return home. Currently there are approximately 4.5 million Palestinian refugees listed with the United Nations; including 56 000 in the city of Tulkarem alone.

Demonstrations will continue on 15th May, with protests planned in cities throughout the West Bank, with Palestinians mourning the loss of their lands and demanding their rights to return home.