Israel has never understood Palestinian resilience. We survived the Gaza Genocide, like catastrophes before it, through the call to Return home, the fuel for Palestinian survival. For Palestinians, the Right of Return is and will always be the Issue.
I am a survivor of the 1948 Nakba who lived to witness the 2024 genocide. I may not live to see justice be made, but I am certain our long struggle will be rewarded. Our grandchildren will live at home once again.
76 years later, Palestinian return to the homes and lands we were expelled from in 1948 is feasible and, of course, legal. To Palestinians, it is also sacred and inevitable.
Nothing can hide the determination and courage of those young people who returned to their land on October 7. I could have been one of them had I been much younger and still living in the concentration camp called Gaza.
Almost one thousand years ago, Pope Urban II exhorted European kings to wage a Crusaders war on the Holy Land. This past week has shown evidence that the Crusader’s war is still very much alive.
In “Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab Jew,” Avi Shlaim declares his identity clearly as an Arab Jew — an Arab by culture, history, and geography and a Jew by faith. His identity was destroyed by Zionism and by the Ashkenazi European Jews.
On November 8, 2022 Dr. Salman Abu Sitta spoke at the University of Edinburgh to commemorate the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine. In his speech he addresses the disgraced British colonial servant Lord Arthur Balfour, and issues a call for repair and justice to the British government today.
Burayr is the site of a terrible massacre, in which about 125 farmers and their families were killed by hand grenades thrown at them in their homes by the Zionist militia (the Haganah). The village was torched and went up in flames. Burnt bodies were strewn in the streets.
In November 2021, Salman Abu Sitta returned to the Gaza Strip after five decades of forced absence. What he found surprised and inspired him.
From April 1st to May 14, 1948 — before Israel was declared, before the British left, and before any Arab soldier entered Palestine to save it — Zionist militias essentially conquered Palestine. Salman Abu Sitta says this critical period leading to Al Nakba has rarely been looked upon in this light, and shows how massacres that took place during this period were pivotal in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.