Two days ago, we visited Deir Yassin, or to be more specific, what remains of Deir Yassin, with Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to educating the Israeli public about the nakba. The tour was organized in commemoration of the Deir Yassin massacre.
We walked along the main street of the village (now Kanfey Nesharim Street), and passed the few homes still standing, where many people were massacred.
The girls school, built in 1941, still stands. What used to be the city center is now a bus station. As for the homes, they are surrounded by a fence and have been incorporated into the Kfar Shaul mental hospital. After passing the homes (hospital), we walked by the remains of the Palestinian cemetery and ended the tour in the grove behind the hospital.
In April 1948, the town was attacked despite its peace treaty with the Jewish community. The killings at Deir Yassin are regarded as one of two pivotal events that led to the exodus of around 700,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages in 1948, along with the defeat of the Palestinians in Haifa. News of the killings, amplified by Arab media broadcasts of atrocity, triggered fear and panic among Palestinians, who in turn increasingly evacuated their homes.
55 young children were orphaned as a result of the massacre. 31-year-old Hind al-Husseini found them near the Holy Sepulchre church in Jerusalem’s Old City. On 25 April, two weeks after the massacre, Hind founded Dar Al-Tifl Al-Arabi at her family’s mansion which catered to Deir Yassin orphans, and later to orphans from all over Palestine.
18 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
Last month we celebrated the 36th annual African American History Month. The origins of this month come from the need to study the major contributions that Black people brought to America.
“The fact is that the so-called history teaching in our schools and colleges is downright propaganda, an effort to praise one race and to decry the other to justify social repression and exploitation”. Sadly, this quote from 1927 is still relevant today.
Carter G. Woodson strived for an accurate representation of Black people in history studies, and Palestinians are fighting for the same rights as well.
The history of Israel is taught in schools, but the events leading up to its creation are missing in most. Palestinian Schools in East Jerusalem have been pressured to change their curriculum to be more Israeli friendly.
“The changes are not random…Israel plans to reeducate our students in Palestinian Jerusalem in a way that Palestinian nationalism is no longer on the agenda”, as explained by Joharah Baker for MITFAH.
Any public institution under Israeli governance that teaches Palestinian Heritage is vulnerable to be attacked by the government. A year ago this month a law (Budget Foundations Law – Amendment 40), was passed to ban commemorating the Nakba Day. Any mention of this day by a public sector would risk losing state funding, which means Palestinian schools that fall under Israeli control must abide by this law. In other words, Palestinian schools will be penalized for instructing students on their history.
Although Israeli Independence day is inseparable to Nakba Day, laws are being created to alter history. The truth is one cannot be taught without the other. The day of catastrophe for the Palestinians marks the day that their land was stolen and the day Israel declared its independence.
Just as May 15th (Nakba Day), the disconnection of American history and African American history implies that both accounts are independent. There cannot be two different accounts of the same day and place.
In memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | Click here for more photos
Here is one of Michael Coard’s many examples of the inseparable American history. “Twelve of this country’s presidents enslaved black men, women and children—eight of them while in office. That’s American history, not black history! Enslaved black human beings dug the foundation for the White House”.
Just like Woodson explained about the American colonizers, the Israeli government uses the same tactics to enforce its beliefs on the public. Besides other tactics of ethnic cleansing, the Israeli government has targeted schools to eliminate Palestinian history.
Palestinians will definitely continue to educate their children on their backgrounds, especially through the traditional method of storytelling. But, it will take more than that to combat the obstruction of Palestinian history studies.
Sa’id Barghouthi explains the importance of classroom learning. “History classes and history textbooks therefore remain the central and strongest element in the fashioning of identity, and play a crucial role in building collective memory, or, as in our case, erasing it”.
Acknowledgment of Palestinian history will obviously not end the occupation. This is evident in the fact that the acknowledgement of slavery did not end oppression of Black Americans. But, knowledge of the past is essential in understanding today, and hopefully creating a different tomorrow.
Lina is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement.
The Jewish National Fund has designated Sunday 5th February as ‘Green Sunday’, when it encourages people to donate money to ‘plant trees in Israel’. The JNF claims to have environmental objectives. Don’t be taken in. The JNF’s tree planting is a cover for ethnic cleansing.
The JNF exists to acquire land in Israel/Palestine for the sole use of Jewish people. For more than 100 years, the JNF has been complicit in expulsions of Palestinians from their homes, the destruction of their villages and prevention of the return of refugees – by planting trees over the remnants of the destroyed homes.
Environmentalists are asked to use the opportunity of the JNF’s ‘Green Sunday’ to take a stand against this greenwash, when ethnic cleansing masquerades as environmental action. Don’t support the JNF’s ‘Green Sunday’, but publicly denounce the JNF.
Environmental groups throughout the world are adding their support to the international call from Palestinian civil society to Stop the JNF.
Don’t support the JNF’s ‘Green Sunday’. Instead, use the opportunity to:
19 July 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
The Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, happened sixty three years ago. The theft of Palestinian land continues even today. Every Tuesday, for the last three years, the people of Beit Hanoun have protested both the occupation and Israel’s three hundred meter “buffer zone” which Israel has declared on Palestinian land near the border of Gaza. We gathered today, like we do every Tuesday near the agricultural college in Beit Hanoun. Local farmers warned us that for the last couple of days Israeli forces had been camped out in the abandoned houses near the border. Just as their grandfathers were driven from their homes by Zionist violence, so these farmers were driven out of their homes by Zionist violence. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Over the weekend six were injured in Beit Hanoun when Israel bombed a well in the middle of a residential district.
At eleven A.M. we set off toward the wall, toward the land that their grandfathers were expelled from. A drone buzzes overhead. We can see the clouds of dust raised by the movement of Israeli tanks on the other side of the wall. The farmland in the “buffer zone” has been newly desecrated, bulldozed again, an area that used to be fields and orchards that had been reduced to a few hardy weeds, now devoid of even weeds. The Palestinian flags that we had planted there during previous demonstrations buried under the earth. Given the warnings of Israeli soldiers in the abandoned houses and the bombing over the weekend, we were all more nervous than usual. Bella Ciao boomed out over the megaphone, but few sang along, most of us thinking our own thoughts, worrying alone.
We walked past the last tree still standing, a beautiful tree covered in fragrant pink flowers. We entered the newly destroyed “buffer zone”, stopped, planted new flags, dreamed of planting new trees, of seeing a dead zone brought back to life. People looked into the distance, dreaming of their grandfathers trees, trees that many of them have never been allowed to see, their fruit stolen by the grandchildren of the same people who drove their grandfathers from their land. We chanted for a free Palestine. Dust rose from the movement of an Israeli tank. We returned to Beit Hanoun, but at least we had left a flag behind to commemorate that we were there, that the grandchildren of the cleansed still live.
I gasped as the first bullet struck a young man standing a few paces ahead of me. Watching him crumple to the ground, I struggled for breath and fought my natural urge to run. “Allahu Akbar!”, the crowd roared around me. “Yalla, Shebab!” A half-dozen other men – none of whom could have been older than twenty, and most of whom looked much younger – rushed forward, retrieving their fallen compatriot and carrying him quickly to a waiting ambulance. A thin trail of blood marked their path, ending in a small, dark puddle where the first of the day’s many gunshot victims had fallen.
Gaza May 15th - Photo by Nils AnderssonThousands of refugees and other Palestinians had gathered at the Erez Crossing in the northern Gaza Strip. An imposing military structure of massive concrete barriers and machine gunners’ towers, the border wall separates Gaza Strip residents from the 78% of Palestine seized by the State of Israel in 1948. For the two-thirds of residents who are refugees, it also prevents their return to the homes from which they and their families were forcibly expelled that year. Palestinians throughout the world remember this Nakba, or catastrophe, every May 15 with gatherings, demonstrations, and resolutions to someday return.
But this year would be different. Inspired by the popular uprisings against dictatorships across the Arab region, Palestinians were resolved to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of 711,000 people from their country by making history, rather than remembering it.
On the morning of May 15, Nakba Day, tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered around the borders of Israel and its occupied territories, determined to march to the homes and homeland denied to them for generations. In Beit Hanoun, they walked from buses forced to stop kilometers from the crossing by the sheer numbers of the crowd. Many remained at checkpoints preceding the crossing. Others pressed forward, their eyes fixed on the distant gate.
The Israeli response came quickly. Bullet after bullet penetrated the crowd of unarmed demonstrators, each one finding its target. Artillery shells pounded the sandy dunes around us, and after several hours, tear gas canisters hissed through the air. Over a hundred people were hospitalized with serious injuries, while elsewhere on the border, a 17-year old boy was killed by artillery fire. The rest of us escaped with tear gas inhalation, cuts from exploding concrete and shrapnel, and bloodstains from the limbs, torsos, and faces shattering around us.
Yet the demonstrators kept coming. After every retreat from gas, gunfire, or the thunderous boom of artillery, there was another surge. Only when the sheer brutality of the Israeli forces had sufficiently depleted the number of those capable of pressing forward did the strength of the crowd begin to wane.
Gaza May 15th - Photo by Nils AnderssonAnd somehow, the overall mood remained one of measured, but tangible joy. The victory sign was everywhere, and smiles were common not only on the runners ferrying injured marchers to medical attention, but also on the young men and women they carried. Everyone seemed to intuitively sense that they were doing something historic, closing one chapter in the long, painful struggle for Palestinian freedom and opening another one that offered more hope for a happy ending.
Elsewhere, the state violence inflicted upon peaceful marchers was even worse. At the border between Syria and the occupied Golan Heights, Israeli gunfire killed four of them, while in Lebanon, ten suffered the same fate. Hundreds, if not thousands, were seriously injured.
But like the returnees in Beit Hanoun, those from Lebanon and Syria refused to be dissuaded by military repression. Dozens of the latter poured through Israeli barriers, spending hours in the welcoming villages of the occupied Golan Heights before leaving under the protection of their Syrian hosts. One, Hassan Hijazi, made it all the way to the Jaffa home from which his family was exiled in 1948. Before surrendering to Israeli police, the 28-year old told journalists, “I wasn’t afraid and I’m not afraid. On the bus to Jaffa, I sat next to Israeli soldiers. I realized that they were more afraid than I was.”
Hijazi’s seven million fellow Palestinian refugees aren’t afraid either. On Sunday, June 6, they will return to the borders created to exclude them, and perhaps beyond. Like the 63rd Nakba Day, this 44th anniversary of the Naksa, or setback – Israel’s 1967 occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and subsequent expulsion of 300,000 additional refugees – promises a commemoration like none before it.
June 5 will not determine the outcome of the Palestinian movement for return. That outcome was already determined by the decades of grassroots organizing and popular struggle that culminated in the historic mobilization of May 15.
Its finality can be glimpsed in grievances by Western media like Reuters that “[t]he Palestinians who forced their way across Israel’s border on Sunday turned back the clock on the Middle East conflict, putting centre stage the refugee question that many believed would be negotiated away,” and confirmed by the sweaty, stammered insistence of Zionists like Benjamin Netanyahu that “it’s not going to happen. Everybody knows it’s not going to happen.”
Gaza May 15th - Photo by Nils AnderssonThose suddenly forced to defend not only the brutal excesses of their system, but the very racism of ethnic cleansing, exclusion, and apartheid upon which its existence relies, find themselves in a situation both uncomfortable and unprecedented. They have no reason to expect it to become easier in the coming months, as further waves of returning refugees push their fight for justice closer to the center of the world’s attention.
But June 5 will shape the outline of this next chapter in the Palestinian saga: its intensity, its length, and what follows it. Was May 15 a singular moment, or perhaps one suited for occasional repetition? Or was it the harbinger of a sustained, consistent struggle to come, a Third Intifada simultaneously challenging Israel from within, on every border, and across the globe?
Palestinians have amply demonstrated their ability to resist occupation over the long haul, while the global solidarity network supporting them has reacted capably to atrocities like the slaughters of 1,400 Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead and nine passengers on the first Freedom Flotilla. If these two movements can organize and mobilize as effectively now, seizing a unique opportunity to take the offensive and keep it, the Palestinian freedom struggle could prove a quicker and more decisive one than many of us had dared to hope.
