On the 22nd of May, the newly founded Israeli army descended upon the village of Al-Tantura (near Haifa) and brutally massacred 230 of its residents. For more information, visit palestine remembered.


the Nakba continues...

الطنطورة .. أبشع المجازر الصهيونية في فلسطين

Well, i told you previously about the bullshit israeli attempts to 'remove' checkpoints. blair then proudly declared victory in this regard.



and guess what? it turned out to be just that- bullshit.


despite all this, the UN has come out and said that roadblocks have actually increased in the west bank.


i would like to see blair try to pass this one off as 'marked progress.'


am i surprised? no. because remember, the rules don't apply in israel .


who are they kidding, really?

for those of you who have not yet seen Palestine Street be sure to watch it- its realllllly good. I've posted the 2nd part of the program here. for part one, check out aljazeera english on youtube.

So lately i've made it my mission in life to find every single nakba at 60 protest/rally/event video posted in recent days. You can find them in the sidebar to the right. ( if you find that i've missed an event, feel free to email me)


I just wanted to say that I was extremely touched by what I saw. From Chile to Romania, San Francisco to Berlin, the Palestinian flag was raised. Palestinians (and their friends) in exile have not forgotten...i mean look at the dabkeh performances for one. I am hopeful that one day justice will indeed prevail, and that we will return to our homeland.


in the meantime i would like to one particular video from Romania that I found soooo cute.


...little kids singing Fairuz's famous "Ya Zahrat il Madaen" :






ps. make sure to vote on the poll to right!

children kidnapped in the west bank.

children held in detention centers in Iraq.


when does it end?

Some professional Arabists speak a little disdainfully of Ms. Novak's blog and seem to consider her an amateur with a jingoistic American attitude and no real knowledge of the Arab world.

what exactly is a 'professional arabist' ? what do they look like? anyone?

not that i don't find it offensive- i do. i just wish we would see the same sort of of fuss over say, an innocent iraqi shot dead by the US army?

Palestinians march towards the Lebanese-Israeli border...

By Mohammed Omer

Yousef al-Hums still holds the key to what was once his house. Credit:Mohammed Omer

RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza, May 19 (IPS) - Holding up an old copper key, Yousef al-Hums settles down to retell the story of his eviction from what was once his home, and now is Israel. Because only the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel is over, the occupation of home of which al-Hums still keeps a key is not.

What was to Israel the creation of their nation is to Palestinians al-Nakba, meaning the catastrophe, of eviction from their homes and homeland. From that event now, it's 60 years, and counting.

Palestinian children do not learn of that event from history books, but from people like al-Hums. "We cannot return to our homes today," he tells his sons and about 50 of his grandchildren gathered around him, with the key raised. "But you are going to return to your grandfather's home in Yebna village."

That the home or the village does not exist any more only adds to the emotion around the upheld key. "Every day I pray that when I die I am buried on my land in Yebna," he says. "Those were the most beautiful days of my life. Everyone in our village supported every other."

Al-Hums got married in 1947 at age 15. And then in May 1948 it all changed.

"It was about 2am. We all had to run after we heard that the Haganah (a Jewish force at the time) had invaded our village." Like others, he fled with his wife to Gaza, the only exit route left. He barely survived, he said, and showed scars on his hand he said came from an attack by a British helicopter backing the Jewish forces.

Today, home is the Yebna refugee camp in Gaza, where he lives with his two wives, seven sons and the many grandchildren.

He has been back to the real Yebna twice, the first time in 1976 and the second in 2000. By the second visit, he said, nothing was left of the farm as he had known it. "They took away everything and all is destroyed," he said.

But still, he keeps the key. It gave his story an anchor. And it appeared before the children as a command to action to reclaim their home and heritage.

There is almost nothing by way of a single history of the events 60 years back; only stories of very different kinds told on both sides. As al-Hums told it, Yebna was one of 675 towns and villages Jewish forces destroyed. They were later built over as Israeli towns or covered over with tree plantations.

The build-up to the eviction had begun earlier, al-Hums told the children gathered around him. "At first Jewish groups arrived as guests in our homes," he said. "Some slept in our big two-storey house." Then came offers to buy Palestinian land at prices well below the market price. Some sold, others who stayed on were eventually forced off their land and out of their homes. Overnight, prosperous families became refugees.

What is not in doubt is the very large number of Palestinians who had to flee their homes; by Palestinian estimates about 750,000. Many of them are now seeing a fourth generation grow up in refugee camps.

Palestinians who stayed behind found themselves facing discrimination, humiliation and poverty. Much of that continues today.

As does the inability of Arab countries to fight for the Palestinians, diplomatically or otherwise. Back in 1948 an Arab force drawn from Egypt, Jordan and Syria was no match for the Jewish forces, who had strong British and U.S. backing, as they do today.

The story from al-Hums, and the stories like this told and retold in family after family of Palestinian refugees carry force because Palestinians see more of the same forces against them day after day. The stories all tell of a happy and proud life destroyed by force and deceit.

The copper key does its bit to make sure that the young do not at least lose their anger.

I want an explanation for this.

From today's New York Times, a great article by the great Elias Khoury....

Op-Ed Contributor

For Israelis, an Anniversary. For Palestinians, a Nakba.

By ELIAS KHOURY

IN 1948, during the war known to the Israelis as the war of independence, the historian Constantine K. Zurayk wrote the book “Ma’na al-Nakba,” later translated as “The Meaning of the Disaster.” The title struck a resounding chord, and nakba (catastrophe) became the term Palestinians used for the cataclysm that befell them that year.

I always considered the word “catastrophe” inappropriate. It rendered the perpetrator anonymous, and it exempted the vanquished from bearing any responsibility for their defeat. Like many members of my generation, born around the time of the war, I tended to place the blame for our defeat on the traditional Palestinian leadership under the sway of the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Arab regimes of the day.

But Zurayk was neither guileless nor naïve, as we had believed. He coined the term nakba deliberately to convey the impossibility of blocking the project for the Jewish state after the Holocaust.

I didn’t grasp the true meaning of the word until I worked in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In the alleys and passages of the Shatila camp, I discovered the truth of the catastrophe. Villagers expelled from the Galilee had suddenly found themselves living in huts set up hastily to provide temporary shelter. But the temporary became permanent, and the people were forced to construct a nation for themselves out of words and memories. They gave the various sections of their camps the names of the villages they had fled, and they lived, as they said, “waiting” in a suspended time. Even when the waiting went on too long and became “exile,” they still refused to believe that no one would recognize and authenticate their tragedy.

These peasant farmers, who made up the majority of the Arab population of Palestine in 1948, did not discover that they had had a “nation” of their own until they lost it. They had been living in a historical continuity for hundreds of years, as a succession of invaders of different nationalities and ethnicities took control of their lands and communities. But they were astonished to discover that these new invaders did not wish to control the land in the manner of the former invaders; instead they wanted it emptied of its inhabitants.

The consternation of the Palestinians who told me the stories of their destroyed villages derives, essentially, from the absence of the world’s acknowledgment of them, the lack of credence given to what happened to them. After the Holocaust, it became virtually impossible to condemn any action of the Israeli state. In establishing the state of Israel, the West had found a solution to its moral obligations and a release from the disastrous burden of Nazism.

No one wishes to hear the Palestinian story. Their history has been written by the victors: Israel has thus succeeded in blotting out its “original sin,” as the French author Dominique Vidal referred to the situation. Were it not for the courageous voices of Israeli “new historians” like Ilan Pappé, the world would not have come to admit that a people had been expelled from their land in a comprehensive ethnic cleansing operation, given the name “Plan D” by Israelis.

As Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its independence, it is pointedly ignoring two truths: First, that there is another people, composed of the previous inhabitants of the country, who consider that anniversary to be a day of national disaster, and consider the nation of Jewish immigrants to have been built on the rubble of another nation, Palestine.

Second, that Israel’s continued occupation of the remaining portions of Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza, has transformed the nakba from a historic incident to a daily reality, experienced by Palestinians through the invasive settlements, the wall of separation and the checkpoints that disconnect their lands and sever the links between them, making their lives a hell on earth.

The peace process has failed, Yasir Arafat has died and the iron fist policy put in place by Ariel Sharon has led to the nearly total defeat of the Palestinian national movement. That defeat is also a product of the short-sightedness of the architects of the Oslo Accords, a framework for future relations between Israel and the anticipated state of Palestine, and the failure of the Palestinian leadership to find new methods of confronting the occupation in keeping with this two-state solution.

The defeat of the secular leaders of the Palestinian national movement has not given Israel the “peace of strength” it has sought since its foundation. Rather, it has brought the region to the brink of the abyss of fundamentalist tendencies.

What successive Israeli governments pretend to forget is that pushing the Palestinians to this destructive brink is not without a cost. Indeed, the Palestinians could drag Israel to the brink along with them. This would mean an open-ended state of war. Unfortunately, this is the direction in which rapidly unfolding developments are now propelling us, as witnessed in Gaza and now in Beirut, with Iran through its allies edging closer to a direct confrontation with Israel.

Israel has depicted the problem as rooted in the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But even after the majority of Arab states demonstrated their recognition of this right by supporting the Saudi peace initiative of 2002, nothing changed; in fact, things became worse. To Palestinians, the true problem lies in Israel’s rejection of the Palestinian right to an independent state, and in the prevailing Israeli culture’s refusal to recognize that Palestinians were themselves victims of forced expulsion from their lands.

Recognizing the sufferings of the victim, even if they are of the victim of a victim, is the necessary condition for an exit from this long and tragic tunnel. However, as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci suggests, it is difficult to maintain the optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect.

Pessimism of the will is what we are living today in the Middle East. It is a pessimism that warns not only of the danger of recurring episodes of catastrophe as Arab societies break apart, but of the dismal prospect of an endless war that will provoke future tragedies in the 21st century.

Elias Khoury, the editor of the literary supplement of the Beirut daily An Nahar and a professor at New York University, is the author of the novels “Gate of the Sun” and “Yalo.” This essay was translated from Arabic by Michael Scott.

Palestinian blogger Za3ter organized "Blog About Palestine Day" to commemorate the Nakba. needless to say its been a great sucsess. It should be mentioned that Za3ter did this in the midst of finals- which is really commendable. I myself handed in my final paper yesterday- and though at the outset I thought I would not have time to post about the Nakba because of papers and exams, I found myself posting quite a lot. In order to keep up, I slept no more than 3 to 5 hours a night, if that. Now that I am done with finals, and the official "Nakba Day" over, I still find myself unable to sleep.

Speaking of Nakba Day, I urge all those who took part in Blog about Palestine Day yesterday to continue to blog about Palestine. As I've said all along, the Nakba didnt happen one day 60 years ago. That said, we are need of more people to raise their voices on the issue of Palestine.

Many people are already engaged in such activism. if you look to the sidebar to your left -->

you'll see that i've been posting Nakba related links, posts, photos, and videos from around the world. make sure to check them out, as i am constantly updating. (thank God for youtube- seeing the protests worldwide is really uplifting)

Finally, I leave you with this thought:

Ben Gurion said that the old will die, and the young will forget. Clearly we have not forgotten.