Ghada Karmi has a wonderful piece on the Nakba in the LA Times, and reflects on her lost neighborhood of Katamon in West Jerusalem:
Terrible as this was when I look back, at least our street and our house still stand today. They were taken over by Jewish settlers and underwent various changes, but they largely remain. Yet I do not know which is worse: the hundreds of Palestinian villages Israel wiped out after 1948 and whose previous inhabitants can only hope to find through faded memories; the dozen villages left such as Lifta, still standing but ruined and depopulated; or, as in my case, my house being in the possession of strangers (New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner lives in an upper story added on later), who do not recognize my history or my right to my family home.
