Palestinians March To Destroyed Village In Haifa To Mark Nakba Day

[Purveyor]

Hundreds of Palestinians commemorated the anniversary of the Nakba -- or “catastrophe” -- on Saturday with a “March of Return” in Haifa to the site of a Palestinian village destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948.

The march was held in order to highlight the internationally-recognized right of Palestinians who remain refugees or internally displaced to return to their homes and villages in Israel, a right which has been enshrined in international law following the adoption of United Nations Resolution 194.

This year the crowd of Knesset members, activists, and local Palestinians made their way to the destroyed village of al-Tira in Haifa where dozens of Palestinians were massacred by Israeli forces during the mass expulsion of several hundred Palestinians from the village 68 years ago. The village was almost completely destroyed with the exception of a few buildings which today remain either vacant or occupied by Jewish Israelis.

Member of Knesset and head of the Arab Joint List, Ayman Odeh, addressed the crowd during the march: “The large number of participants [in the march] confirms that the Nakba is a story of the past that also lives on as a story of the future, until a Palestinian state is established and we have achieved the rights of Palestinian refugees.”

Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands in 1948 and were scattered across refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Today, there are over five million Palestinian refugees who remain displaced from their original homes and villages following the mass expulsion that occurred almost 70 years ago.

http://www.albawaba.com/news/palestinians-march-destroyed-village-haifa-mark-nakba-day-840382

[libodem]

1. .

[Israeli]

2. Recognizing the pain and grief of the Nakba

In appointing itself the gatekeeper of historical memory, Israel has shackled the promotion of its own narrative to the suppression of the Palestinian narrative.

Without drawing parallels between the nature of the two events, there is a meaningful comparison to be made regarding their position as defining national traumas. Additionally, as Fishman wrote, “it can be argued that Israel has adopted Turkey’s stance of denial as a model toward the Palestinian Nakba.”

Such denial does more than add insult to injury — it also houses the even more profound issue of the delegitimization of grief. Israel, like Turkey, has taken legislative steps against the mention or memorializing of the historical injustices it is responsible for. In appointing itself the gatekeeper of historical memory here, Israel has shackled the promotion of its own narrative to the suppression of that of Palestinians.

This is a hefty toll to exact on a population. As painful as grief is, having that grief unacknowledged, rejected or undermined cuts even deeper. Grief is an urgent and unwieldy human emotion, and we need its active expression, mourning, as a platform on which to shoulder the unbearable heaviness of loss.

When that platform is denied us, we can make no sense nor structure of our grief. It just remains there: thick, amorphous, and impossible to outrun. And just as grief that isn’t acknowledged or accommodated cannot dissipate, so an injustice that is not accounted for remains an open wound for those who have borne it. As a Palestinian friend told me recently, the length of time that has passed has done nothing to make the sense of loss any less acute.

Yet for the last 68 years, Israel has placed this burden on Palestinians, as well as continuing to extract the price of ongoing displacement and dispossession. Moreover, Palestinians are not only ridiculed, harassed and have their public institutions threatened for mourning what was lost when the State of Israel was founded, they are demanded to actively forget what once was, and dismantle the hope that any of it may be recovered.

So all those abandoned Palestinian homes, and piles of rubble, and fruit trees and cactuses, must be seen through the lens of Zionism — with their recent history scraped away, and with it the memories and stories attached to them. Yet that was always both the luxury and quest of a colonizing power: to pick and choose narratives and work to instill them, both retroactively and in the present, in order to determine the future.

But what kind of future can there be when it is based on a foundation as brittle and unjust as denial and obstruction of the truth? As Ayman Odeh said at the March of Return in the Negev on Thursday, without recognition of the Nakba there can be no reconciliation. And indeed, it is difficult to see how there can be meaningful change here until Israel acknowledges the loss that forms the cornerstone of the state.

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Source: http://972mag.com/recognizing-the-pain-and-grief-of-the-nakba/119346/