Global Arab Network | As pope departs, Gaza remembers the Nakba

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As pope departs, Gaza remembers the Nakba

Thousands of Palestinians have gathered in the Gaza Strip to mark the 61st anniversary of the "Nakba", or "catastrophe", which describes the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of refugees following the creation of Israel.

Pope Benedict visited Palestinian refugees this week in the West Bank, voicing sympathy for their frustration over six decades since they lost their homes in what is now Israel. He urged to break the cycle of violence that has seen Israel in recent years seal Palestinians behind walls and fences. When he left today, he repeated the message.

In the Jabaliya refugee camp, thousands of people waved Palestinian flags and Hamas banners, while others held placards with the names of villages destroyed by Israeli forces during the 1948 war.

Supporters gathered after Friday prayers, with several hundred people later walking to within 2km of the Israeli border.

"We will return to Jaffa and to all our lands," cried some, referring to an Arab town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, some 60 kilometres (35 miles) north of Gaza.

"We will not recognise Israel," others shouted, as one banner proclaimed: "Israel is a cancerous entity which owes its creation to terrorism and injustice."

The Gaza demonstrations on Friday came a day after similar ceremonies were held in cities across the West Bank, a sign of the continuing divisions between the two main Palestinian factions.

Meanwhile, Ahmed Bahar, a senior Hamas leader and deputy speaker of parliament (PLC) dominated by Hamas told the crowds of demonstrators in northern Gaza that "the right of return is an individual and massive legitimate right."

"Anyone who makes a concession on this holy and legitimate right will be committing the crime of high treason," Bahar told the crowds after Friday prayers north of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza Strip.

He added that all the Palestinian people "reject replacement or compensation. The only thing our people would accept is to get their right of return to historic Palestine by legal armed resistance allowed by the international laws."

Hamas, which seized power in Gaza more than two years ago, reportedly prevented the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from holding Nakba events in the territory on Thursday.

The two factions have been in dispute since June 2007, when Hamas forced PLO supporters out of Gaza.

On Thursday, demonstrators marched through cities across the West Bank, holding Palestinian flags and images of Arab villages razed by Israeli forces.

In Ramallah, demonstrators waved banners reading, "The right of return is sacred," and "Return, Jerusalem And Self-Determination: Our Struggle Will Continue" as they gathered at the tomb of Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader.

The Palestinian refugees said that in the summer of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (around 700,000) fled their homes after armed Jewish guerrillas stormed their villages and forced them to leave after hundreds of them were slaughtered.

The refugees fled to neighboring countries like Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where many of them went to the West Bank, which was under Jordan's rule and to Gaza which was under Egypt's rule. The United Nations helped the refugees and lodged them in refugee camps.

Nakba Witness

Looking for some thoughts on the Nakba from someone who was actually there, when half the Arab population of Palestine was driven from homes or fled Jewish forces, Mohammed Assadi (from Reuters Blogs) met Amna Harb, now 91, at the Qalandiya refugee camp near Ramallah in the West Bank.

She said that she just wished she had died 61 years ago when Jewish forces opened fire at her village. It would have spared her, she said, a life of hardship and dislocation.

Harb’s family narrowly escaped death in 1948, she said. But she wishes she hadn’t.

She, her husband and four children hid in a basement in Sarris village near Jerusalem when Jewish forces opened fire on houses including Harb’s.

The family, like 700,000 other Palestinians, moved four times, before they finally settled in Qalandia, between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

“Had I died then, I would have been spared all this suffering. It would have been easier,” said Harb as she sat on a mattress in her small, poorly ventilated house, holding the rusty metal key of the house that once stood in Sarris.

“I spent the past 61 years in agony, misery and poverty,” she said, lamenting the passing of an easier life and the loss of her olive grove in Sarris.

Among the Arabs who remain inside Israel, now some 20 percent of its population, most boycotted Israeli festivities last month and many also marked the event on May 15 with rallies and visits to destroyed villages.

According to UN Relief and Works Agency official figures, there are 5 million Palestinian refugees living in the Palestinian territories, in Arab countries and other parts of the world.

Israel rejects the idea of right of return to Israel, saying that in any future peace solution, the Palestinian refugees can only return to their independent state, which will be established in the West Bank and Gaza.

Last December, Israel began a devastating 22-day offensive against Gaza that ended in January and during which 1,400 Palestinians -- most of them civilians according to Palestinian medics -- were killed and thousands of homes destroyed. (AFP, Xinhua, Reuters, AP)

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