What is this Nakba?

The news this morning of Israelis having killed many Palestinians, and others, at various borders and in Gaza and the West Bank, highlights the cause for the deaths was the attempt of Palestinians to remember or highlight what Palestinians refer to as the Nabka. But what is this Nabka?

Australians for Palestine has a sober and reflective explanation on its web site:

"The Nakba is the Palestinian catastrophe. It means upheaval, violence and cataclysmic loss; it describes the terror, which drove almost one million people out of their homeland, as well as the perpetual terror in exile –displaced, dispossessed, stateless, lost and forbidden to return; it remains the multiplying injustice of another people’s sin burgeoning in our collective silence.

For 63 years, the situation has dragged on, men and women holding the papers and keys to their former homes, clutching the faded and cracked photos of happier days: everything rendered obsolete by the artificial creation of a state for a foreign people on land that has been home to Palestinians for millennia."

Continue reading here.

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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