Atef Abu Saif - Palestinians do not want to negate Israel. We just want a future
On the first Friday of
the Great
March of Return I went to the border between Gaza and Israel with my
two youngest children, Yasser and Jaffa. Yes, I named my only daughter after
the city I was meant to be born in. This is a bit of a tradition among
Palestinians, especially if the place name is a particularly graceful-sounding
one. The two of them waved Palestinian flags in their little fists as they
walked. Looking directly at the perimeter fence, Yasser asked: “Dad, is Jaffa
behind that fence?”
My daughter was unfazed by this ambiguity. As I gazed at one of the Israeli snipers, crouched by his gun on the man-made dune that acts as a border, I imagined we were both locked in a staring competition. My kids pose no threat to you, I tried to say with my eyes. We’re more than 300 metres away. My kids have no weapons, no stones; they’re not here to fight. It’s a fantasy, of course. Later that day, and in the weeks that followed, Israeli soldiers used extreme force to clear the area: teargas dropped by drones, mortars, live ammunition.
The Great March of
Return, the peaceful show of resistance by Gazans at this border over the last
seven weeks, will culminate on Tuesday on the 70th anniversary of what
Palestinians call the Nakba
and
Israelis mark as the birth of the state of Israel. The border protests have
attracted a lot of attention. Dozens have been killed – including kids barely
into their teens, and journalists – and thousands more injured; any
international concern presumably is out of fear of military escalation in the
wider region. While this fear is legitimate, it also exposes a profound
misunderstanding of the protest.
The word nakba,
meaning “catastrophe”, refers to the moment in 1948 when more than 700,000
Palestinians were driven out of their towns and villages – the majority of
which were destroyed – in what became the declaration of the Israeli state. For
us, 1948 was year zero in the collective, inescapable nightmare that all
Palestinians have lived through ever since. All that followed – the
displacement, the poverty, the wars, the curfews, the interrogations, the incarcerations,
the intifadas,
the hunger, the lack of basic provisions (medicines, electricity, clean water,
drainage), the restrictions on travel ... every horror that has befallen
Palestinians – began in that moment... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/14/palestinians-israel-nakba-day-gazans
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