Thousands rally calling for return of Palestinian refugees

Waving Palestinian flags and wearing T-shirts proclaiming (occupied) Jerusalem to be “the eternal capital of Palestine,” thousands of Israel’s Arab minority turned out on Thursday for a rally to commemorate a war lost 70 years ago.

One of the main issues promoted by the organisers is the longstanding demand for the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a demand that has been revised in recent weeks in an ongoing protest by Palestinians at the Gaza-israel border.

Successive Israeli governments have ruled out any right of return.

But the refugees have not given up hope, even amid the stench of the sewers in a Lebanese camp.

“I won’t live to see it but my children might,” said Abdel Majid Al Shura, 42. “Seventy years is nothing in the history of the world.”

In a field south of Haifa, near an Arab village that was depopulated and abandoned in 1948, children read the lyrics of nationalist anthems from their iphones, while their elders sat beneath awnings, listening to dignitarites and musicians.

Palestinians lament the Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” when they lost their homeland.

This year the gathering was near Atlit, a small coastal village south of Haifa from which, the rally organisers said, 170 people were driven out in 1948, and fled to other towns or into neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, where they and their descendants remain refugees today.

“I never miss any event related to the Nakba,” said Sami Salman, 83, a carpenter originally from Nazareth who attended the rally.

“Many people left for Lebanon back then, but fortunately for us we did not have enough money to go. I am very glad about that now.”

Unable to attend, but watching the event on televison was Khaled Ali Hassan, a Palestinian refugee who lives in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, 130km up the coast of the Mediterranean in Lebanon.

His father came from the village of Ijzim, near Atlit, but was never able to go back after he fled the conflict in 1948.

“When he used to speak of Palestine, he would stop when the tears came to his eyes,” said Hassan, 53.

He noted the irony that the Israeli celebrations and Palestinian mourning are intertwined.