64th Anniv. of Nakba Commemorated in Dublin 15-5-2012

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64th Anniv. of Nakba Commemorated in Dublin 15-5-2012

May 16th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

64th Anniv. of Nakba Commemorated in Dublin 15-5-2012

May 16, 2012 by planxtysumoud

Yesterday in Dublin, Palestinians, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists and people of conscience marked 64 years since predominantly European colonizers wiped their country off the map, cleansing the land of their villages to brutally install the state of Israel. Nakba Day — meaning “catastrophe” — commemorates the 750,000 to 800,000 native Palestinians that were either driven from their lands by force or fled as Jewish colonizers with British backing violently swept the territory to proclaim a state of their own. Around 160,000 Palestinians stayed behind, and now number about 1.3 million people, or some 20 percent of the population. This does not include the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank or besieged Gaza Strip.

Yesterday also, Hundreds of right-wing Israelis poured onto Tel Aviv University’s campus yesterday to protest a student-run Nakba commemoration. Extremist members of Knesset joined their ranks, providing them with official encouragement. However, the site of Tel Aviv University tells another story as it was built over the ruins of a Palestinian village that was destroyed during Nakba, Sheikh Muwannis. The current faculty lounge is located in the home of the village’s mukhtar [head of the village] and it is the last original building still standing. About a decade ago a few faculty members and the Israeli organization Zochrot urged the university to place a plaque on the wall of the lounge, recognizing the history of Sheikh Muwannis. To date the administration has rebuffed their request. The turnout the university memorial was one of the largest for the Palestinian catastrophe on an Israeli campus, yet an Israeli counter-demonstration exceeded the size of the original event. Self-identified Kahanists and other right-wing supporters sealed off the commemoration with a blue and white banner. Behind the Israeli flag motif, one man burned a paper version of the Palestinian flag and some held signs calling Nakba a “lie.” Others held entire pamphlets calling Nakba a lie, toting copies of rightist group Im Tirzu’s Nakba Harta, or “Nakba Bullshit.” The booklet, published last year, is a “land without a people, people without a land” polemical account of early Zionism. At the time of release,+972 Magazine’s Yossi Gurvitz wrote: Im Tirzu tries to convince us that there were no Palestinians prior to the Zionist arrival, and that they showed up only following Jewish immigration in the early 20th century, tempted by the so-called prosperity brought by the Zionists. That is, the 700,000 Palestinians expelled by Israel weren’t refugees at all, since they didn’t live in Palestine all that long, or something of the sort.

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/the-nakba-is-bs.html