NAZARETH, Wednesday, April 26, 2023 (WAFA) – While Israel today celebrated 75 years of its creation, Palestinians in Israel commemorated 75 years of their dispossession and what is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Thousands of Palestinians in Israel took part today in what they called the March of Return which took them to villages they were forced out from in 1948 when Israel was created on their land and in their homes.

One of these villages was Lajjun, in northern Palestine, which was ethnically cleansed by the Jewish Haganah gangs in May 1948 and today Kibbutz Megiddo sits on the village’s land.

Marchers carried the Palestinian flags and brandished names of the villages they were forced to leave and became abandoned since then as they were banned by the Israeli authorities from returning to their villages.

Usually, the Palestinians commemorate the Nakba on May 15, when hundreds of thousands of the indigenous Arab population were forced out of their villages, towns and cities at gunpoint when Britain ended its mandate over Palestine and turned over the Arab land to the Jewish emigrants leaving its poorly-armed native Palestinian citizens an easy prey to the well-armed Jewish settlers and gangs.

However, since Israel marks its creation according to the Hebrew calendar, which coincided today, the Palestinians also decided to mark their dispersion at the same time the Israelis celebrate the creation of their state to remind them that Israel was created at the expense of Palestine’s indigenous Arab population.

M.K.