This week: Remembering Nakba Day on both sides of the Green Line, demonstrations against the occupation, settlements and the separation wall, social justice protests in Israel, Women of the Wall, solidarity with asylum seekers after police raids and a wall comes down in Lod.                      

As Noam Sheizaf's recent headline states, "the Nakba's memory is more present than ever in Israel."  The Nakba, literally, "the catastrophe," is the name given to the massive deportation of more then 700,000 Palestinians from what became the State of Israel in 1948. Sheizaf goes on to point out how efforts, such as the "Nakba law," which authorizes the finance minister to withdraw funds from organizations commemorating the day, have backfired and effectively injected Nakba consciousness into the global discourse. From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank and Gaza, activists marched to assert a history which is no longer…

By Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel A new Adalah report documents the parallels between two Palestinian villages, Al-Araqib in Israel and Susiya in the West Bank, which share a single story of struggle against home demolitions and forced displacement. The report sets out the methods of displacement used by Israel to expel Palestinian communities from their land on both sides of the Green Line, and examines the legal context in which it takes place. Read more: PHOTOS: Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day with rallies and protests Remembering the Nakba, understanding this is a shared land…

What's the importance of acknowledging the Nakba? Remembering it is the only way for both Jews and Palestinians to understand that this land is shared. It’s the only way of preventing the system from duplicating the same injustices over and over again. By Muhammad Jabali A friend and I visited Ramallah last Saturday. It was a sunny afternoon; we took a friend’s car and hit the road so we could arrive in time for last minute preparations for the first screening of the Tunisian Documentary Film Month at Ramallah’s Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center. We are helping to organize the screenings as…

Israelis are more willing to discuss and accept their country's role in the Palestinian Nakba - until the historical events are portrayed as the story of the founding of a rival nation, and acknowledging those facts means legitimizing the other side's fundamental beliefs. In 2008, a fascinating, little-known study asked 500 Israeli Jews about Israel's behavior throughout the history of the conflict.  The study was conducted by Rafi Nets-Zehngut, at the Teachers College of Columbia University and Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University's School of Education. Bar-Tal is an internationally regarded expert in political psychology. Some of the findings were…

For Israelis wishing to participate in a common struggle, relieving ourselves of our ignorance and arrogance should be the top priority. Not for the sake of Palestinians – for our own sake, to restore our own humanity. By Tom Pessah About a decade ago, when I was studying for my first degree at Tel Aviv University, I went to a weekend retreat organized by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam to meet Palestinian students from the West Bank. The retreat took place at a location near Bethlehem that was relatively accessible for the Palestinians, but they still had to pass through checkpoints, some…

The Israeli Right has been waging a war on history in recent years, using extreme measures to remove evidence of the Nakba from the national discourse. It failed. Yedioth Hakibbutz is the weekly magazine of the United Kibbutz Movement. It is delivered every week to hundreds of Kibbutzim as part of the weekend edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, the best selling paper in Israel. Even at a time of diminishing political influence – there is not a single representative of the United Kibbutz Movement in the current Knesset – the Kibbutzim remain both a symbol and a stronghold of conservative Zionism, and the…

When Israeli politicians talk about land swaps, they rarely consider the rights of those affected – or at least the Palestinian ones. As personal as it is political, the entire situation shows the lack of civil discourse in so-called peace negotiations. By Muhammad Jabali I will never forget that night at a birthday party in Jaffa when a drunken friend began approaching guests with the question: “What’s your address as registered at the Interior Ministry?” He then joked that everyone should change their residency to Tel Aviv as soon as possible before they find themselves on the other side of the separation…

On the night of April 9, 1948, over 100 men, women, children and elderly Palestinians were killed in Deir Yassin during an operation by Israeli underground militias. In contrast to the Palestinian narrative, which claims that the massacre was motivated by hatred and vengeance, the Isralei narrative describes another of the necessary battles of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. But recent, other voices in Israel are coming out -- voices that raise many questions about the historical truth behind the story of Deir Yassin. Recently, 'Zochrot' organized a tour to the village that included meetings with village residents and relatives of…

The annual March of Return brought approximately 7,000 people to the destroyed village of Khubeizy on Israel's Independence Day. The march, which went through village lands and debris, now a national park, ended with a rally in which speakers called for the implementation of UN Resolution 194, recognizing the Palestinian refugees' right of return, and for the release of political prisoners. The march was organized by the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Displaced People (ADRID), and was attended mostly by Palestinians with Israeli citizenship (dubbed "'48 Palestinians") and a few Jewish Israeli activists. Aside from the…

This week: commemorations of Land Day across Israel and the West Bank, solidarity marches in the South Hebron Hills, clashes ensue after a prisoner's death, an Israeli draft refuser, and South Africans march for justice.                    

Palestinian citizens of Israel return to the village of Al-Ruways, which was destroyed by Zionist military forces during the Nakba.  Photos by: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org The Israeli group Zochrot organizes many tours of Palestinian villages depopulated during the Nakba of 1948. What made this Saturday's tour of Al-Ruways particularly remarkable was the large number of displaced Palestinians and their descendants who made the event more of a return than a simple tour. Zochrot, whose name means "remembering" in Hebrew, aims to educate Israeli Jews about the history of the Nakba and the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees. Typically, they will…

In response to Olga Gershenon's critique of one-sided programs that bring American academics to discover Israel, one writer counters that those very programs are actually a step in the right direction, both due to the openness by which they are run and by the people they attract.  By Brent E. Sasley Olga Gershenson wrote a strong critique in these pages of three programs that aim to bring academics from around the world to Israel. Her criticism centers on the accusation that these programs, all funded by Jews, Israeli, or right-leaning individuals and organizations, present a sanitized version of Israel that highlights the…