Sunday, May 21, 2023. New York City – On Monday, May 15, 2023, Palestinians, Anti-zionist Jews, and others commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba.
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The Palestinian American Community Center said before the event, “Help us commemorate the Nakba with @wolpalestine and @alawdany on Monday May 15th at 10am at the United Nations. We will be rallying in support of the United Nation’s Historic Decision to acknowledge and commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nakba.” Watch videos bellow.
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Nakba Rally Sponsors: The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC), North Hudson Islamic Center (NHIEC), Islamic Center of Union City (ICUC), Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, Within Our Lifetime NY, Al-Awda NY.
Anti-Zionist Jews support Palestine.
Anti-Zionist orthodox Jews of the organization Neturei Karta (www.nkusa.org) participated in the rally and march in support of Palestine.
Anti-Zionist Jews say on their website nkusa.org, “Neturei Karta oppose the so-called “State of Israel” not because it operates secularly, but because the entire concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law.
All the great rabbis who in accordance with Jewish Law opposed Zionism at its inception did not do so merely due to consideration of the secular lifestyles of the then Zionist leaders or even for their opposition to Torah heritage and rejection of its values and practices, but due to the fact that the entire concept of a Jewish state is in direct conflict with a number of Judaism’s fundamentals.”
Commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba at UN Headquarters in New York
The United Nations says on UN.org, 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the mass displacement of Palestinians known as “the Nakba” or “the Catastrophe”. The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Nakba at UN Headquarters in New York.
For the first time in the history of the UN, this anniversary was commemorated pursuant to the mandate by the General Assembly (A/RES/77/23 of 30 November 2022).
The CEIRPP organized a High-Level Special Meeting on 15 May 2023, in Conference Room 4. The High-Level event will be conducted in the six official languages. The High-Level event was presided over by the Chair of the Committee, Ambassador Cheikh Niang. It included a keynote address by the President of the State of Palestine, H.E. Mahmoud Abbas, and statements by Rosemary A. DiCarlo, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, UNRWA’s Commissioner-General, representatives of Regional Groups and civil society. The High-Level event was conducted in the six official languages.
A Special Commemorative Event was held in the General Assembly Hall in the evening. The event brought to life the Palestinian journey and aimed at creating an immersive experience of the Nakba through live music, photos, videos, and personal testimonies. This was an occasion to highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace, require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people’s plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights.
The Commemoration featured a performance by Palestinian singer Sanaa Moussa, an “Ambassador of Palestinian heritage.”
A musical composition around the Nakba entitled “Bright Colors on a Dark Canvas” by Naseem Alatrash, Grammy Award-nominee cellist and composer, accompanied by the New York Arabic Orchestra was directed by Eugene Friesen, four-time Grammy Award Winner.
These performances were accompanied by audio-visual material (Click here to watch videos).”
Ten Facts You Need To Know About The Palestinian Nakba
The BDS Movement says on its website www.bdsmovement.net, “Today, on May 15th, we mark the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). During the Nakba, between 750,000 and 1,000,000 Indigenous Palestinians were driven out of their homes and ethnically cleansed at the hands of Zionist militias and, later, the Israeli army to establish the state of Israel as a Jewish supremacist settler-colony.
Apartheid Israel’s colonial violence and naked aggression have never stopped. But neither has Palestinian resilience, popular resistance and sumud (steadfastness). In Gaza, Jenin, Beita, Masafer Yatta, the Jordan Valley, Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and Al-Naqab, across historic Palestine and in exile, Palestinians stand united against Israel’s regime of settler colonialism and apartheid.
With the rise of the most openly racist far-right government in Israel, Palestinians have been subjected to renewed and intensified campaigns of ethnic cleansing and settlement construction, land and water theft, repeated massacres in besieged Gaza, mass arrests, and restriction of movement. This year Israel’s occupation forces and illegal settlers have murdered over 150 Palestinians, including 26 children, and it is only May.
And still we rise! We shall continue the struggle for our liberation, for our inalienable rights, including our right to self-determination and the right of refugees to return home. Onward we march for freedom, justice, equality and dignity!
Here are 10 facts you need to know about the Palestinian Nakba:
1- Between 1947 and 1949, Israel and pre-state Zionist militias forced between 750,000 and 1,000,000 Indigenous Palestinian Arabs into exile, making them refugees.
2 – Today, there are around 8 million Palestinian refugees in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and neighbouring Arab countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Apartheid Israel has persistently denied their UN-sanctioned right to return to their homes, lands and other property simply because they are not Jewish.
3 – The ethnic cleansing during the Nakba was a deliberate, planned and systematic campaign carried out in order to create what human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq and B’Tselem call “a Jewish supremacy” in historic Palestine, which was overwhelmingly populated by Palestinian Arabs prior to 1948.
4 – Contrary to Zionist mythology, pre-state Zionist militias began their ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and villages months before the establishment of the State of Israel. The massacre and depopulation of the Palestinian village of Deir Yasin, for instance, took place on 9 April 1948.
5 – Approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained inside what became Israel’s borders in 1948, many of them internally displaced. They were eventually granted Israeli citizenship but lived for years under military rule. To this day, Palestinian citizens of Israel live as second-class citizens in their own homeland, subjected to a system of apartheid enshrined in dozens of racist laws that discriminate against them.
6 – During the Nakba, Zionist militias and, later, Israeli forces systematically destroyed about 530 Palestinian towns and villages to prevent exiled Palestinian refugees from returning. Many homes that remained standing were repopulated with Jewish-Israeli colonial settlers.
7 – The Jewish National Fund (JNF), an openly racist pillar of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine, acquired approximately 78 percent of its land holdings from the Israeli state between 1949 and 1953, much of it agricultural land of ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees that the state had confiscated and designated as “absentee property.” The JNF holds this stolen Palestinian land as “the perpetual property of the Jewish People.”
8 – The Nakba did not end in 1948 but continues to this day in the form of apartheid Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities; theft of Palestinian land for Jewish-Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory as well as inside present-day Israel; destruction of Palestinian homes and agricultural land; revocation of residency rights; expulsions; demographic engineering; and periodic massacres.
9 – Israel is currently attempting to implement the largest mass ethnic cleansing since 1968, targeting some 1,300 Palestinians living in eight villages in the area of Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron. Many of the Palestinians in Masafer Yatta have already fled Israeli massacres in Al-Naqab, committed by Israeli forces during and in the aftermath of the Nakba. What is happening now in Masafer Yatta is a prime example of the ongoing Nakba. It repeats itself still today in Al-Naqab, Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and across the territory under Israeli control. Indigenous Palestinians are being forced from their homes by state-sponsored violence at the hands of Israeli soldiers, Israeli police, and armed, fascist Israeli settlers.
10 – Israel has a law that prohibits Palestinians–second-class–citizens of the state from commemorating the Nakba. This does not stop Palestinians from remembering and insisting on our right to return to our ancestral lands.
Commemorate the Nakba wherever you are, share the stories of the Nakba from Palestinians, and join BDS campaigns, the most effective way to support our struggle to achieve our internationally recognized rights, including the right of return for refugees.”
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