17th May 2014 | International Solidarity Movement | Ofer, Occupied Palestine
On the 16th May, Palestinians protest on the road to Ofer prison, following the murder of two Palestinian youths on the same road on the previous day during the Nakba Day protest. The youths, 22-year-old Muhammad Audah Abu al-Thahir and 17-year-old Nadim Siyam Nuwarah, were both shot with live ammunition.
Photo by ISM
The Israeli army launch another round of tear gas. Several protesters were carried from the scene by medical staff with breathing problems due to the amount of tear gas used.
Photo by ISM
Some protesters came prepared with gas masks.
Photo by ISM
A protester is treated for tear gas inhalation.
Photo by ISM
Another protester is treated for tear gas inhalation.
Photo by ISM
The tear gas canisters are hot. When they land on something flammable it will ignite. Here, the fire brigade try to extinguish a fire that had taken hold in a grassy field next to the protesters.
Photo by ISM
To protect themselves from being shot, the protesters use a metal skip. Israeli soldiers and border police were using live ammunition and rubber-coated steel bullets throughout the protest.
Photo by ISM
As the Israeli army use more tear gas canisters, another protester is carried away for treatment.
Photo by ISM
Protesters retreat following yet another round of tear gas.
Photo by ISM
A photojournalist makes his way back through the tear gas.
Photo by ISM
Protesters take cover as the Israeli army fires more rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition.
Photo by ISM
Photo by ISMPhoto by ISM
A protester fixes flags to a scaffold. The black flag represents the Palestinian refugees’ right to return following their expulsion in the Nakba of 1948.
Photo by ISM
Israeli soldiers take position on a nearby hill. The soldier in the middle is lining up to shoot rubber-coated steel bullets at the protesters.
Photo by ISM
A protester is shot in the leg with a rubber-coated steel bullet. Wounds from these bullets, if taken to the head or from shorter range to other parts of the body can be fatal.
Photo by ISM
Another protester is taken away for treatment after being shot in the foot with a rubber-coated steel bullet.
In all, four protesters were shot yesterday with rubber-coated steel bullets, one protester was hit with a tear gas canister in the face, another protester was shot in the face at close range with a foam-tipped projectile and one 16-year-old boy was shot in the leg with live ammunition.
16th May 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Al Walaja, Occupied Palestine
Photo by ISM
Yesterday 15th May, villages from Al Walaja marched for their right of return, on a day marking the 66th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic). The demonstration was met with violent repression from Israeli forces with many tear gas canisters fired at the protesters.
In 1948, 70% of the population of Al Walaja was displaced and forced away from their land, as a result of the ethnic cleansing carried out by Israeli forces. After the six day war in 1967, half of the remaining land was occupied by the illegal settlements of Har Gilo and Gilo, leaving the village with only 15% of its original land.
66 years since the Nakba and the land in Al Walaja is in the so called “seam zone”. The seam zone is a term used to describe the land between the Green Line and the Apartheid wall. The seam zone is a closed area for Palestinians and is regulated by a permit system. Palestinians who live, work, and visit the area are forced to apply for a permit to enter the zone, controlled by Israeli authorities. The permit system in the seam zone consists of 12 different types of permits which, need to be renewed frequently and can easily be denied by the Israeli authorities. The apartheid wall (declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004) is also planned to surround the entire village, which will leave the residents with one entry and exit point.
For the Nakba day this year, over 64 associations called for a demonstration in Al Walaja, calling for the right of the Palestinians to reclaim and return to their own land.
“Al Walaja is one of the symbols of the past and present displacement,” said one of the speakers at the demonstration.
Many protesters arrived from different areas in the West Bank, including children the nearby Aida refugee camp
The demonstrators gathered in a large tent at the end of the village, speeches were made, and then the head of the demonstration went downhill to where a metal fence separated an area of the village from the main road.
When the people attempted to pass over this “border”, approximately 20 Israeli Border police officers arrived and tried to stop this action, proceeding to throw stun grenades and fire tear gas canisters at the protesters. Palestinian youths then began to throw stones as several military jeeps arrived, along with approximately 100 Israeli soldiers and border police officers
The Israeli forces climbed up the hill, firing tear gas inside the tent, which was mainly filled with children and elderly men and women. The military forced the occupants out and proceeded to destroy the tent.
Fortunately there were no serious injuries, two journalists and two Palestinian youths were shot with tear gas canisters and received treatment from Red Crescent medics in from Al Walaja, and many demonstrators suffered from tear gas inhalation.
In commemoration of the 66th annual Nakba day, hundreds of Palestinian youth from the Ramallah district moved against Israeli soldiers outside of Ofer prison in Beitunya. Soldiers retaliated with tear gas, live ammunition and rubber coated steel bullets. During the clashes, soldiers killed two demonstraters, aged seventeen and twenty two.
The first, who was shot in the chest, died in hospital, while the second, who was shot in the abdomen, died in the ambulance. An additional twenty four Palestinian protesters were shot with live ammunition and rubber bullets during the confrontation, and two victims are currently hospitalized in the Intensive Care Unit at Ramallah Public Hospital. Over ten youth have also recieved medical attention for excessive tear gas inhalation.
Nakba day is the annual commemoration of the eight hundred thousand Palestinians who were forced out of their homes in Historic Palestine during the War of 1948. Nakba, which is the arabic word for catastrophe, is also used to describe the situation of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli occupiers. At the heart of the catastrophe are the five million Palestinians currently living as refugees, the largest refugee population in the world.
Demonstrators chose Ofer prison as the site of their demonstration today, because five hundred Palestinian political prisoners are currently jailed there. Forty detainees in Ofer are currently on hunger strike to protest the Israeli practice of administrative detention, or imprisonment without formal charges.
Medics evacuate a young boy who passed out from tear gas inhalation (photo by IWPS).
Recording the testimony of Nakba survivors is essential for educating future generations of Palestinians, say oral historians. (APA images)
Tucked into a quiet basement suite in the main building of the immaculate Islamic University of Gaza campus, the Oral History Center could at first be mistaken for a bursar or registrar’s office.
But its stacks of metal filing cabinets may contain more memories per square meter than any other place in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Researcher Nermin Habib said that the center conducted interviews with those who had witnessed the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing ahead of Israel’s foundation in 1948, as well as the Naksa (setback), Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai in 1967.
“We have already conducted 1,500 oral interviews and archived audio files from them,” Habib added. “A meeting can last anywhere from half an hour, to two or three hours. We can also have follow-up meetings.
“We have also published 120 [interviews] in written form. In the future, we plan video interviews. We hope to use them to produce a documentary film about the history of Palestine.”
Launched as part of the university’s faculty of arts in 1998, the Oral History Center has a staff of experienced field researchers and recent graduates from the university’s departments of history, press and media, and social studies.
“It is by experience, by relationships,” said Habib. “We built the archive from scratch. There is no systematic reference center for such information in Gaza.”
The Oral History Center researches a number of fields. Beyond displacement and refugee life, it has programs on Palestinian regions, folklore, politics and culture, as well as Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.
“We are trying our best to maintain our Palestinian identity and Palestinian heritage, customs and traditions, like food and dress, after the Nakba,” said Habib. “Oral history has links with all fields of knowledge, like folk medicine. It’s part of our work as historical researchers to convey this information.
“We seek to document the history of the Palestinian people and the main events that have shaped the Palestinian cause.”
The Gaza Strip has the highest proportion of refugees of any territory in the world. Few aspects of life, from the economy and politics, to the broad range of local foods and dialects from elsewhere in Palestine, are unaffected by the Nakba, during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by Zionist forces and hundreds of villages and cities depopulated.
The Israeli army expelled 400,000 to 450,000 more Palestinians during the Naksa in 1967, according to the Palestinian refugee advocacy group BADIL.
By the end of 2011, at least 7.4 million Palestinians had been displaced, 66 percent of a global Palestinian population of 11.2 million, making them the world’s largest and longest-standing group of refugees, according to a recent survey by BADIL.
But with the 1948 ethnic cleansing more than 65 years in the past, the ranks of those who witnessed it firsthand, in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere, are quickly declining.
“We started thinking about how the generation that survived the Nakba are leaving us,” said Haidar Eid of the Oral History Project, another effort to collect accounts of 1948.
The project team has recorded 64 hours of interviews, Eid said. Time to complete the rest is running out.
“Most of these people are dying. For the project, they are supposed to have been at least ten when the Nakba happened. So we are talking about people in their seventies and eighties.”
“One of the major demands of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the implementation of United Nations Resolution 194, which clearly calls for the return of all Palestinian refugees to the lands, villages and towns from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and their compensation,” Eid said. “With the Oral History Project, we are supporting this demand and making it real. We move from ethnic cleansing as an abstract term into the practicality, the life itself.
“An interesting question we sometimes ask is whether they would accept any solution that would compromise their right of return. There is a consensus among all the refugees we’ve interviewed that no compromise on the right of return would be accepted. For them, that is not a solution.”
Gaza’s Oral History Project works in cooperation with Palestine Remembered, an online archive of information on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli organization Zochrot, which advocates the return of Palestinian refugees. Eid called this “a form of co-resistance” as opposed to projects which normalize Israel’s ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine.
“The onslaught of normalization projects has taken place at the expense of two-thirds of the Palestinian people who are refugees,” he added, drawing a distinction with other kinds of cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. “1948 is the original sin, rather than 1967, on which these projects are all based.”
Young volunteers conduct most of the Oral History Project’s interviews. Many belong to the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel, PACBI’s youth affiliate.
“Revisiting the trauma”
“It’s tiring, I must tell you,” Eid said. “I have been avoiding recording with people myself, because it’s extremely difficult. Revisiting the trauma is not easy. But they would be very happy to talk about everything before 1948.”
Oral History Project interviews consist of three sections: Palestine before 1948, its ethnic cleansing and refugee life.
“We ask about mundane things, the daily life of people in the village or city, weddings, funerals and coffee shops,” Eid said. “We ask if the people still have a thobe [a traditional garment] or anything from the village. They usually love it.
“When they come closer to the moment of truth, when the person was forced from their village, it’s heartbreaking. Many start crying. They can give you minute details about the strangest things.”
Accounts can be not only emotional, but brutal as well. “Those Palestinians who refused to leave Palestine were basically massacred,” Eid said.
“This is the embodiment of the Zionist dream of creating a state with a Jewish majority. To guarantee that, you need to have a process of either ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
A refugee himself, Eid cited his own background to illustrate the importance of oral history to the Palestinian narrative.
“I’m from a village called Zarnuga, which is on the outskirts of Ramle [in present-day Israel],” he said. “I found only three pictures of Zarnuga. Only three.”
“The history of the Tantura massacre relies heavily on oral history. Now people know that a massacre took place in the Tantura village, about 30 meters south of Haifa, based on recorded oral history,” Eid added.
Oral history also has an important role in the continuity of Palestinian culture. “This work has a lot of benefit for new Palestinian generations,” said Nermid Habib. “It allows them to know that what their grandparents were doing,”
Israel “trying to whitewash”
On 12 August, a number of Palestine solidarity groups issued an open letter protesting an international conference on oral history planned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for June 2014, calling for oral historians to boycott it.
PACBI endorsed the letter, and Eid and more than 350 others working in the field of oral history have signed it.
“Israel is trying to whitewash and beautify its image,” Eid said. “One of the questions that we want to raise here in Palestine, as academics and also as refugees, is whether the Nakba will be part of the conference, whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 will be addressed. I think this is a rhetorical question, the answer to which we know.”
Participation in the conference by oral historians from the Gaza Strip is out of the question. Most Palestinians are banned from entering present-day Israel. The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law even criminalizes the presence of Palestinian refugees in Israel.
But through these longstanding exclusions, Israel may inadvertently highlight the relevance of the work on refugees, as well as the darker elements of its history and society.
“The Zionist narrative has been the recognized narrative in the West,” Eid said. “Before 1948, there was nothing. There was a gap between 1948 and 2,000 years before that.
“We are helping to provide an alternative to it. It’s part of what we call the counter-narrative.”
“The stories of the old are more confident than the history books,” Habib said. “They witnessed the events themselves. There are written histories as well. It’s essential to add a new kind of reference.”
17th May 2013 | International Solidarity Movement | Asira Al-Qibliyyah, Occupied Palestine
Team Nablus
The event ended in a Palestinian dabkah performance by a local girls dabkah group, celebrating culture and proving that Palestinian history has not been forgotten.
A new women’s center in Asira Al-Qibliyyah hosted an event for women and children in commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
Local women and children watched a short video of a Palestinian woman from Al-Kahlil (Hebron) speaking about defending her home and remaining on her land despite threats and great incentives to leave. She lives in Tel Rumeida, an area that has been densely populated with illegal Israeli settlements, but has held onto her land for her right to be there.
A Palestinian artist also spoke to the women and children, speaking about the Nabka and leading a discussion with the women on how they believed the story was remembered today. He also spoke about and showed some of his work as part of a group that paints symbols of resistance and remembrance on walls around Palestine, including the apartheid wall.
The founder of the women’s center says that about eighty percent of the people living in Asira are refugees from 1948 Palestine. The women recalled memories of their families’ displacements and each woman named her village of origin (prior to the Nakba).
“There were women there that I felt were so strong because of the stories they had and remembered,” the artist leading the discussion said. He heard from widows and encouraged that some of the strength in the past of women was in knowledge of the displacement and the Nakba, and the strength of their children by their mother teaching about those topics.
Many local children attended and solidarity activists joined them to create homemade kites inspired by the quote that “Do you know children in Palestine fly kites to prove that they are still free?” by Andrea Gibson.
A local young girls’ dabkah group closed the event with a Palestinian dabkah step-dance performance. The women center aims to host future programs designed specifically for children in addition to their programs for local women.
