May 2005

http://alawda.newjerseysolidarity.org

Remembering al-Nakba
1948-2005: 57 Years of Occupation, 57 Years of Struggle

In 1948, al-Nakba (the Catastrophe in Arabic) befell the people of Palestine. The Zionist project of colonizing Palestine, seeking to create an exclusionary, European colonialist "Jewish state" - at the cost of the lives and independence of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs, Muslim, Christian and Jewish - reached its culmination as British colonial control of Palestine passed into Zionist colonial hands. The United Nations passed Resolution 181, without consultation with the Palestinian people - a resolution that divided their land and required they forsake their right to 55 percent of their nation. Promised self-determination and independence by the British and the Western powers represented in the UN since the dawn of the British colonial mandate (under its predecessor, the League of Nations) following World War I, the Palestinian Arab people instead were officially made victim to a racist ideology, Zionism, that sought to control the entire land of Palestine through the expulsion and oppression of its indigenous people.

Zionist forces used this resolution to intensify their ongoing assaults upon the people of Palestine. In the colonial war waged against the people of Palestine, 800,000 Palestinians were made refugees, forced to flee their homes and lands. Over 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed and depopulated entirely by Zionist forces, while Palestine's major cities were attacked and huge numbers of their Palestinian citizens driven out.

Since that time, the colonial assault upon the Palestinian people has only continued. Those 800,000 Palestinian refugees have become five million, the world's largest refugee population. In defiance of all human rights and international law, these refugees are forbidden from returning to their homes and lands to which many still hold the keys and deeds - simply because they are Palestinian. The racist ideology of Zionism considers them a "demographic threat" to the state of Israel, founded as it was upon the dispossession and exclusion of the people of Palestine. In 1967, the Zionist state extended its military occupation to the rest of historic Palestine - the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where millions more Palestinians live under brutal military occupation. Those Palestinians still living in the lands occupied in 1948 live under a discriminatory regime similar to that of apartheid South Africa. A wall that further divides Palestinians from each other and their land is imprisoning Palestinian cities and towns as if inside giant prisons, while thousands of Palestinian political prisoners are held in Zionist jails, held captive for demanding freedom for their land and their people. Palestinian homes are demolished daily, often by Caterpillar bulldozers made in the United States - just as the fighter jets, helicopters, rifles and other weaponry used by the Zionist military machine were all too often made and financed by the United States government and corporations. All of this is made possible by $15 million daily in U.S. tax dollars expended for the maintenance of an apartheid colonial settler state in Palestine.

On this, the fifty-seventh anniversary of Al-Nakba, as on many previous anniversaries, the Zionist regime holds up a façade of a "peace process," of "disengagement," at the same time that it continues to murder and oppress Palestinian Arabs in their own land. The continuing Nakba - the continuing existential assault upon Palestinian existence, Palestinian identity, Palestinian culture and Palestinian people - puts the lie to the deception of "disengagement." It is hidden, and attempts are made to silence its memory even as its reality continues on a daily basis, because the Nakba is the reality of the Zionist state - an illegitimate, colonial-settler state that has always been built upon the dispossession of the Palestinian Arab people and the denial of Palestinian existence.

Despite the frightening and abhorrent realities of an ongoing assault by the fourth-most-powerful military machine in the world, backed up by the first-most-powerful military machine in the world, for over fifty-seven years, the people of Palestine have continued to struggle and continued to resist. With sumoud, steadfastness, with unbending resolve, the people of Palestine have continued to stay, to remain in the land, and to struggle for return and liberation. The continuing resistance of the Palestinian people in all facets of life, from the fields of battle to the demonstrations in the street, to the farmers who tend their crops despite the encroaching wall or the students who brave checkpoints and closures to seek education, to the mothers who daily give birth to and raise the future generations of Palestine, has been undefeatable and indestructible, despite the daily brutality and the military, political and economic power of the enemy.

Indeed, that resistance has inspired millions around the world in their own struggles for liberation who today stand side by side with the people of Palestine in mourning al-Nakba and pledging continued struggle for liberation and return. Millions of Palestinians in exile, from the camps of Lebanon and Syria to the cities and towns of North America, have continued to struggle for the right to return, against all pressures and attempts to undermine the fundamental individual and collective right of every Palestinian refugee to return to his or her original homes, lands, and properties. There can be no discussion of justice or peace in Palestine that leaves aside the right to return; on this day of remembering Al-Nakba, the fundamental injustice of 1948 stands in clear relief, and only the fundamental resolution of the crimes of 1948, embodied in the full right and power of every Palestinian refugee to return home, can begin to address justice and liberation in Palestine.

Despite facing vast military and political power, for 57 years, Palestinians - in Palestine, in the refugee camps, and around the world - have continued to resist Zionist colonization and occupation and to struggle for the day when the refugees will return and all of PALESTINE WILL BE FREE, from the river to the sea.