On May 14, 1948, as Zionist leader David Ben Gurion was proclaiming a Jewish state in Palestine, his heavily armed troops seized the ancient Palestinian Arab town of al-Zeeb and drove out most of the inhabitants.
18-year-old Mariam Fathallah was one of them. She and her young husband Mohammed Atayah and their families were forced to flee to Lebanon, along with most of the town. By the end of the year, the 4,000 year old community had been leveled to the ground. More than half the Arab Palestinians in Palestine were killed or expelled and more than half of the cities, towns and villages of Palestine were made to disappear, a crime that Palestinians call al-Nakba (the Catastrophe).
Mariam, now 86 years old and respectfully known as Umm Akram (mother of Akram), has spent the last 68 years in crowded, makeshift refugee camps in Lebanon.
She has raised three generations in the same camps, all waiting to return to their home in Palestine. She has lived through five Israeli invasions of Lebanon, as well as the 1976 Tel al-Zaatar camp massacre that killed more than 2000 of the refugees there.
Please listen to what she has to say.
Umm Akram wants meet you and tell her story in person. So does Amena Ashkar, the granddaughter and great granddaughter of other Nakba survivors, who has known no other home than refugee camps.
Umm Akram and Amena have a different message from other Palestinians.
They are among six million Palestinians not living in Palestine – more than those who are.
They are citizens of no government at all, not even the Palestinian Authority.
They are not living under Israeli occupation.
Israel does not allow them to visit their homes, much less live there.
Amena has never met an Israeli, and Umm Akram not since 1948. As exiles, they have a different perspective from Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the part of Palestine that became Israel.
This talk took place on May 20, 2016 in Denver, Colorado.
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“Everyone has the right to leave any country,
including his own, and to return to his country.”
including his own, and to return to his country.”
— Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“On October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population…There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion [the first Prime Minister of Israel]”
— Israeli Historian Benny Morris, in Ha’aretz
Nakba – Not A Dirty Word
Amaya Galili, YNet, Translation from Hebrew: Charles Kamen, JVoices.com –“Where will you be for the holiday? Are you going to the celebrations in town? To a picnic in the Carmel Forest? It’s really beautiful there! Won’t you come? Everyone’s going.” A few years ago I would have joined them; a picnic out in the country – what could be wrong with that? But something changed. People around me are celebrating, but I’m not. more |
Sderot Built On Ashes Of Ethnically Cleansed And Defaced Najd
Um Khalil Blog – We often hear about Palestinian rockets hitting the Israeli town of Sderot. What is often left out of these reports is that these rockets almost never kill or injure anyone, and only rarely cause damage. In addition, as this article describes, Sderot was built on the remains of a Palestinian town that had been ethnically cleansed by Israel’s founders in 1948. more |
Forgotten Christians
Anders Strindberg, The American Conservative – At the time of the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, it is estimated that the Christians of Palestine numbered some 350,000. Almost 20 percent of the total population at the time, they constituted a vibrant and ancient community; their forbears had listened to St. Peter in Jerusalem as he preached at the first Pentecost. Yet Zionist doctrine held that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Of the 750,000 Palestinians that were forced from their homes in 1948, some 50,000 were Christians—7 percent of the total number of refugees and 35 percent of the total number of Christians living in Palestine at the time. more |
Ethnic Cleansing: How Palestine Became Israel
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Commentary: Embarrassing History
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Hitching A Ride On The Magic Carpet
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Fortress Israel
Ilan Pappe in the London Review of Books – The right of the Palestinian refugees expelled in the 1948 war to return home was acknowledged by the UN General Assembly in December 1948. It is a right anchored in international law and in accordance with notions of universal justice. More surprisingly perhaps, it also makes sense in terms of realpolitik: unless Israel agrees to repatriate the refugees, all attempts to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict are bound to fail. more |
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Response To Benny Morris’ “Politics By Other Means” In The New Republic
Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé in the Electronic Intifada – In a 17 March 2004 article, “Politics by Other Means”, Benny Morris offered a “review” of Ilan Pappé’s new book, “A History of Modern Palestine; one land, two peoples” (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which tells the history of Palestine from the point of view of its workers, peasants, children, women and all the subaltern groups that make the society and not its political elite. Morris’ “review” consisted of a series of ad hominem attacks and outright factual distortions. Ilan Pappé sent the following reply to the New Republic, who refused to publish it. more |
Israel Bars Rabin From Relating ’48 Eviction Of Arabs
David K. Shipler in the New York Times – A censorship board composed of five Cabinet members prohibited former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from including in his memoirs a first-person account of the expulsion of 50,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes near Tel Aviv during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In it, Mr. Rabin attributes the final decision on expulsion to David Ben-Gurion, one of Israel’s founders and its first Prime Minister, who died in 1973. Mr. Rabin says that some Israeli soldiers refused to participate in driving out the Arabs and that afterward, propaganda sessions were required to soothe the consciences of embittered troops.more |
“Diagnosing Benny Morris: The Mind Of A European Settler”
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Right Of Return: Two-State Solution Again Sells Palestinians Short
Professor George Bisharat in the Los Angeles Times – It is a tragic irony that, more than 55 years ago, one desperate people seeking sanctuary from murderous racism decimated another — and continue to oppress its scattered survivors to this day. In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their land and possessions taken by the new Jewish state of Israel. This included the Jerusalem home of my grandparents, Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat, which was expropriated through a process tantamount to state-sanctioned theft. more |
Palestinian Refugees Return And Repatriation
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD in Sharing the Land of Canaan – Israel’s military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) is the most persistent military occupation on earth. But this 35-year-old occupation is only the second stage in the colonization of the land of Canaan. The first stage, between 1947-1949, generated the largest population of refugees still unsettled since World War Two, with the longest displacement in modern history. Until recently, two competing accounts of this catastrophic event existed. Recently, Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris, Zeev Sternhall, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and Tom Segev, have validated the accounts of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and debunked the established Israeli myths of Israel’s creation. Using Israeli archives and declassified material, they were able to discover much of the hidden history of Zionism and they reveal a factual account of the establishment of Israel.more |
The Jews Of Iraq
Naeim Giladi in The Link – I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called “cruel Zionism.” I write about it because I was part of it. more |
Life In A Palestinian Refugee Camp
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River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
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