Day after Israeli army kills 59 in Gaza, Palestinians mark Nakba Day across the country
Palestinians are commemorating today, Tuesday, 15 May 2018, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, which means a “massive catastrophe” in Arabic. This year the annual commemorations are taking place amid the Israeli military’s slaughter of over 100 Palestinians in Gaza to date including an eight-month-old infant – as they demonstrate in the Great March of Return from 30 March 2018.
The Gaza protestors are demanding that the Palestinian refugees and their descendants living in Gaza and elsewhere be allowed to return to their towns and villages of origin in present-day Israel, as well as the lifting of Israel’s closure and blockade of Gaza.
Since the Great Return March protests began in Gaza on 30 March, the Israeli military has also wounded 11,000 of Palestinians.
WHAT IS THE NAKBA?
The Nakba refers to the events during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes and land to areas outside the newly-established State of Israel, including the Gaza Strip, during the 1948 Israeli-Arab war. For Palestinians, the Nakba signifies the loss of their homeland, the destruction of hundreds of Arab villages, the loss of life, and the creation one of the world’s most intractable refugee problem. The Nakba is an essential part of Palestinian history, culture, and identity.
The Nakba is not merely an historical event, but an ongoing process of dispossession, oppression and discrimination that continues to this day, against those Palestinians who remained in the homeland and became a national minority – Palestinian citizens of Israel – residents of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), and the Palestinian refugees.
The Nakba is an integral part of the constitutional definition of Israel as a Jewish state and has been built into the legal structure of the state since the Declaration of Independence of 1948 and the Law of Return of 1950. It continues to shape Israeli law today, including the Nakba Law of 2011, which curtails the freedom of Palestinian citizens of Israel to commemorate the Nakba, and the pending Jewish Nation State Bill, which threatens to constitutionally enshrine – for the first time – the identity of the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people alone.
SNAPSHOT: NAKBA TODAY
- Israel is currently holding 6,050 Palestinians classified by Israel as security prisoners, including: 356 children, 62 women, 427 in administrative detention, and seven members of the Palestinian parliament.
- Palestinians face one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world: one in five Palestinians has been imprisoned at some point in his or her life, including 40 percent of the Palestinian male population. Since 1967, Israel has imprisoned approximately 800,000 Palestinian political prisoners. [source]
- Israeli law bans family unification in Israel between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the OPT. The law, which has now been in effect for 15 years, affects at least 12,500 Palestinians. On 12 February 2018, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked stated that "There is place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the expense of the violation of human rights."
- Israel confiscated Palestinian-owned lands, allocating them to Jewish towns and national parks reducing the Palestinians ownership over land to less than five percent.
- Israel confiscated all the properties of Palestinian refugees and internally-displaces persons, and many were transferred to Zionist organizations for the benefits of the Jews only.
- Israel refuses to recognize more than 40 Bedouin villages in the Naqab (Negev) desert, leaving tens of thousands without any infrastructures and under the threat of home demolition and forced eviction.
