Farrah Akbik learned the story of Palestine from a friend’s family who lived it firsthand when they were forced out of Safed in 1948, and still had the key to their house hanging on the wall of their small apartment in Damascus. “There is an ongoing system of Apartheid designed specifically to push more and more Palestinians out of their rightful homes and ancestral lands, and to populate them with settlers. More injustice, more people on the roads of exodus carrying yet more keys. The apathy I read, see and hear around me is baffling, but maybe if they had sat in that kitchen with Abu Khaldoon and heard him retell his journey I would like to think that even the most indifferent of hearts would have been stirred.”

As a married Jewish couple living in South Bend, Indiana, we try to ground our lives in the best values of our tradition. That’s why we chose, on this year’s Nakba Day, which fell not just on Shabbat but also several days into Israel’s latest war on the people of Gaza, to pray for Palestine outside the gates of our local Jewish Federation. We recited a prayer for peace and added a new line: “May Palestinian-led struggle, including BDS, swiftly and peacefully replace Israeli apartheid with full equality and make the Right of Return a reality.”

It is not a coincidence that Israel decided to remind us of its original sin, namely, the Nakba, by celebrating its “independence” in Sheikh Jarrah and Gaza. By committing the Wehda Street massacre, it has taken the so-called “conflict” to its origin.

The killing and destruction will end only when the root of the problem is addressed: a colonialist regime that continually dispossesses the Palestinians.

The news invariably invokes “Hamas” and “rockets” to explain the Israeli siege and massacres. No: Although Israel heightened its blockade after the rise of Hamas, the siege began in 1948 and has continued unabated since. Many of the people Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948 ended up in Gaza, facing starvation, cold, and disease in the suddenly overpopulated land.

Our current living conditions under the siege are an affront to human dignity. Concrete political action is needed NOW to end not only the current deathly bombing raids, but also this illegal occupation and siege of Gaza by Israel, immediately.

Palestinian civil society calls on supporters throughout the world to take to the streets on Saturday May 15th with a unified demand for sanctions on Israel.

For decades Israelis have basked in the light of success. Israelis lived under – or upon – a volcano, believing themselves to be immune from standard legal and societal norms. Their control of over six million Palestinians seems to be safe from intervention, criticism or challenge. May 2021 has shattered such bizarre illusions.

This month we’re excited to share Mahmoud Shukair’s “Praise for the Women of the Family,” a delightful novel set in the tumultuous time after the Nakba (the Palestinian exodus from what is now Israel), portraying the rapid advance of modernity and the growing conflict in 1950s Palestine.

Emad Moussa recalls his first trip out of Gaza, with his grandfather, as the pair rode by their original village of Al-Sawafir Al-Gharbiyya, now ruins sheltered by cactuses and trees. “He was, like every other Palestinian, a nomad traveling across a landscape of memory,” Moussa writes. “Like all others, his memory was premised on three main motifs: the praise of a long-gone paradise lost; the lamentation of a present defined by military occupation; and, the hopeful visualization of a return to Palestine, where justice will finally be served.”