A man pleads with an Israeli soldier detaining a child during an Israeli military operation into the West Bank city of Qalqiliya, May 2008. (Khaleel Reash/MaanImages)Portion below; whole thing here:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9575.shtml
Commemorating the Nakba means recognizing that 60 years of Israeli independence also marks 60 years of Palestinian dispossession; that 60 years of Israeli statehood also marks 60 years of Palestinian statelessness; and that 60 years of Jewish freedom in Israel also marks 60 years of unfreedom for Palestinians.
It was not always clear that Palestinians would remember themselves. One of the most widely repeated quotes attributed to David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, captures his dismissal of Palestinian pre-existence in what became Israel. "The old will die and the young will forget," he reputedly said. This was only half right: four generations of refugees later, we have not forgotten.
From Beit Lahiya to Beirut, from Nablus to New York, and from Lydd to London, we still remember. We remember how our homeland was partitioned against the will of the majority. We remember how our families fled in fear of massacre and rape, with thousands forced out by Zionist militias. And we remember that while the 1948 War for Palestine wiped our country off the map, it failed to erase our peoplehood.
The act of remembering is in this sense also an act of resistance. We refuse to submit; we decline to disappear; we reject the whiting out of our indigeneity. Through small acts of cultural resistance at home and in exile, we are reclaiming our history.
The establishment of the Nakba Archive, by Palestinians in Lebanon, is a case in point. The Archive, a fraction of which was screened in London's Palestine Film Festival, collates video testimonies from survivors of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees in the 1948 War. Currently, it boasts approximately 1,000 hours of interviews conducted with some 500 refugees from over 130 villages. It also maintains an excellent website at www.nakba-archive.org.
A similar project has been initiated in Israel itself, where filmmaker Raneen Geries has recorded testimonies of Palestinian women who were internally displaced in the 1948 War. Just as the fact that Israeli forces destroyed and depopulated over 500 Palestinian villages in the war is little known outside the Arab world, so the history of the internal displacement of approximately 40,000 Palestinians within Israel has been largely silenced. Projects like these are of vital importance because they genuinely give a voice to the voiceless.
But these projects also remind us of a disquieting truth: the Nakba is not over. There are echoes of 1948 among the recent waves of forced migration from conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon, where Palestinian families became refugees for a second, third or even fourth time.
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