RAMALLAH, May 13, 2015 (WAFA) – In a massive
protest march, thousands of Palestinians
marched Wednesday to late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s square
in Ramallah to commemorate the 67th anniversary of the Nakba that
befell the Palestinian people in 1948.
The Nakba, an Arabic word for ‘catastrophe’, is
the term given to the forced displacement or expulsion of some 800,000
Palestinian refugees before, during and since the creation of the state of
Israel.
Marked by Palestinians throughout the world every
May 15th, the Nakba represents a historic injustice, where approximately
800,000 Palestinians or 67% of the Palestinian people by 1948, became refugees
and approximately 418 Palestinian villages were depopulated and/or destroyed,
said PLO Negotiations Affairs Department.
The events featured speeches delivered by key
Palestinian officials, in addition to national musical performances by
Palestinian traditional troupes. Protestors with Palestinian Keffiyeh draped around
their shoulders hung up big banners stressing the Palestinian refugees’
internationally-recognized right to return to their homes they were expelled
from and condemning the Nakba. Similar events were organized across the West
Bank districts.
These events came a week after Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed his coalition government which includes
ministers who are honest about their racist and genocidal tendencies against
the Palestinian people.
The newly-nominated Israeli Justice
Minister Ayelet Shaked has called for murdering Palestinian mothers so that
they do not bring out more ‘snakes’. Similarly, the Head of the Israeli ‘Civil
Administration’ Ben Dahan has openly supported ethnic cleansing and genocide.
In a press release, the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) affirmed that having this new racist right-wing
Israeli government formed, any call for the resumption of negotiations would be
meaningless unless a deadline is set not for completing the negotiations, but
for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories that started in
1967.
The PLO slammed the Nakba as ‘the most
heinous modern crime against humanity’ that the Zionist gangs perpetrated in an
attempt to obliterate the existence of the Palestinian people and establish
their entity by means of murder and intimidation.
“Over the last 67 years, Israel has
been inflicting a Nakba ‘catastrophe’ upon the Palestinian people utilizing the
same terrorist mentality that paved the way to its creation at the expense of
the political rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to
self-determination on the land of our forefathers,” the PLO said in the press
release.
Meanwhile, Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights said,
“The Nakba fundamentally altered Palestine. However the idea of forcible
displacement of the indigenous Palestinian people did not end with the
establishment of Israel in 1948, it rather started that year.”
“Since the Nakba almost every passing
year has witnessed a wave of forcible displacement, whereby in some years the
wave is higher than in others. So for instance during the year 1967, another
400,000 Palestinian became refugees,” added the center.
It stressed that, “Forced population
transfer is illegal and has constituted an international crime since the Allied
Resolution on German War Crimes, adopted in 1942. The strongest and most recent
codification of the crime is found in the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court, which clearly defines forcible transfer of population and
implantation of settlers as war crimes.”
K.F./T.R.
