Posts Tagged ‘Land Day’
A letter from a Palestinian refugee to the new Syrian refugee
The tent will be hugely uncomfortable the first night. And still uncomfortable the next year.
As the years go by, your tent will become very familiar and part of you.
Beware not to fall in love with your tent, as we Palestinians got accustomed to.
Beware: Don’t feel happy as a makeshift school or dispensary are erected in the camp. These are not a funny and good omen events: plans are made to keep you where you are settled.
And stop demanding the building of small houses instead of temporary looking tents: You are sending the strong message that you are getting to like your precarious conditions. You are already doomed as you start increasing these stupid demands. And here is where you’ll eventually be buried.
Never train your kids to be patient: Patience is the worst of tactics adopted by the impotent. You’ll soon discover that you are being sold as chattel.
Selling you out is the favorite hobby of politicians.
And people all over the world will empathize with your situation and verbally support you. Supporting the refugees is one of the best slogans used by politicians at election periods. And you’ll be their highway to heaven and God.
During Ramadan, Christmas… people will remember your condition and come to your rescue for the “Holy” holidays and a reminder to charity.
Your famished kids in tattered cloths will be the target to heart-wrenching photo shoots. And the journalists attempt to vying for recognition, acknowledgment and prizes.
Refrain from taking pictures with the appointed good-will personalities.
You don’t have to complain of pebbles in your bread, the suffocating heat, the freezing cold nights…
Never reclaim a better and newer accommodating tent.
No tent is better than the homeland tent.
Never holler for the “Arab” leaders to come to the rescue: Dead people are totally helpless in your case.
Note: One fourth of Lebanon’s population is constituted of Syrian refugees.
More than 3 million Syrian refugees have flocked to Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. And the Western nations barely welcomed 20,000 Syrians on temporary basis.
Over 5 million Syrians have fled their home towns and transferred to other parts of Syria.
a must read Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan story!
“To be or not to be”
Naqab desert, transfer of Palestinian Bedouins… And the “Prawer plan law”?
Israel’s Prawer plan, which passed a first reading in parliament in June, aims to expropriate over 800,000 dunams of land in the Naqab desert (a dunam is the equivalent of 1,000 square meters) and expel about 50,000 Palestinian Bedouins.
35 unrecognized villages would also be demolished, culminating in unnervingly a blatant ethnic cleansing campaign that will occur under the nose of the international community. These Palestinian Bedouins will be expelled to one percent of the land.
Linah Alsaafin posted This July 15, 2013 on The Electronic Intifada: “Palestinian national strike to stop Israel’s “Prawer plan” ethnic cleansing”
blog-BDS-WISSAM-NASSAR-MaanImages.jpg posted:
Prawer plan”? Ethnic cleansing plan of Palestinians?
On Twitter and Facebook, the hashtags #StopPrawerPlan and #برافر_لن_يمر have been used to mobilize and create awareness.
Monday, July 15, 2013 has been designated as a national day of rage and “Anger Strike” by Palestinians from the river to the sea. Gaza and the West Bank have also planned for protests to take place on Monday.
Unsurprisingly, the PLO has denied (Arabic) issuing a statement that supported the Anger Strike.
The main protest took off from Ben Gurion University in Bir al-Saba at 10am on Monday and marched to the building of the Bedouins Settlement Authority. So far, 14 Palestinians have been arrested, including two minors.
Cities, towns, and villages inside the 1948 occupied territories including the Galilee in the north, the Triangle in the center, and the coast have organized their protests at busy street junctions, squares and roundabouts.
Abir Kopty has put together a schedule of the protests that will happen today throughout Palestine.
Why now?
Why carry out the largest demolition, land confiscation and forced displacement campaign now?
Anas Abu Daabas, president of the Academics Association in Rahat, explained at a 20 April seminar held by the al-Bireh Municipality I attended.
In recent years the largest economic hardship Israel has faced is the housing crisis, he said. Israel seeks to take advantage of the vast lands of the Naqab by building towns and cities for soldiers who will be closer to the military training camps, which Israel has transferred to the south of the country. This plan comes at the expense of the indigenous, who they mis-characterize as “invaders” and “nomads.”
“The embodiment of racial discrimination”
Amir Qweider, a student at Ben Gurion University who lives in the unrecognized village of Zarnouq, spoke at the same seminar about the reality of Bedouin villages in the Naqab. They are forbidden to house any permanent structures and risk immediate demolition if they do so.
“There are no paved roads, no schools, no electricity or water grids, no telephone lines, and no sewage system,” he said. “The difference between the Jewish settlements and Arab villages is the embodiment of racial discrimination, even though we both are Israeli citizens.”
“Using the term ‘nomads’ to classify us is a way for Israel to justify the colonizing and settling of the Naqab, saying that since we roam the lands we do not own them,” Abu Daabas said, “but that is an outright lie. Our forefathers and tribes lived in villages, and [the Israeli lie] doesn’t explain why we still have structures of buildings like schools and homes dating to before the Nakba.”
On 30 March 1976, thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel protested at the state’s announcement it would confiscate 60,000 dunums of Palestinian land. A general strike was organized from the Naqab desert to the Galilee, and the Israeli army killed six Palestinians as protests ensued. This became known as Land Day and is commemorated every year.
Palestinians should all take to the streets today and protest Israel’s land grab of 800,000dunams in the Naqab. Just as Land Day, in the words of Arjan El Fassed, “reaffirmed the Palestinian minority in Israel as an inseparable part of the Palestinian and Arab nation,” the Anger Strike of 15 July asserts that despite political division, non-representative and collaborative leadership, Palestine remains from the river to the sea, with the Bedouins in the Naqab an integral component of the Palestinian population.
Jerusalem, Sakhnin, Yafa, Umm al-Fahem, Shifa Amro, Gaza, Nablus, Hebron, Jenin, Upper Galilee, Ramallah, Kufr Kanna, Nazareth, Haifa. Israel can’t win on this.
History of Israeli land grab
The Naqab desert, historically neglected in Palestinian discourse, makes up 60 percent of Palestine, and its importance was not lost on David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. In a letter to his son Amos written in 1937, Ben Gurion emphasized how total colonization of the Naqab is essential for Israel’s settler colonial concept:
We must expel Arabs and take their place … and if we have to use force, we have force at our disposal not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev, and transfer them, but in order to guarantee our own right to settle in those places.
The ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948 affected 90 percent of the Naqab’s population, who were forcibly displaced to Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai desert.
About 11,000 Bedouins remained in the desert, and between the years 1948-1965 were forced to live under an Israeli military regime. Internal displacement forced many of these Bedouins around the Bir al-Saba–Jaffa road to an area called Siyaj, on the border close to Hebron.
Under the occupation policy of confining the biggest number of Palestinians on the smallest percentage of land, Israel used a number of laws like the Land Ordinance Law, the Land Acquisition Law, and the Absentee Property Law to consolidate their land grabbing of the Naqab and legalizing the dispossession of the indigenous population. In 2004, the Expulsion of Invaders law was put into effect, demonizing Bedouins as trespassing attackers in their own land.
Between the years of 1993-2007, Israel increased demolitions of Bedouin homes, buildings, and other structures. On 11 September 2011, the Netanyahu government approved the Prawer plan, named after Ehud Prawer, the former deputy chair of national security. In that year alone, 1,000 houses were demolished and 2012 continued in the same vein.
In 1969 and throughout the 1970s, Israel planned seven townships to push the Bedouins in, as part of its grandiose scheme of settling one million Jews in the desert. The largest of these townships today is called Rahat, ranked two out of ten on the Israeli socio-economic ladder, and has 60,000 Palestinian Bedouins living there.
There are 46 Bedouin villages (which have existed since before 1948), with 35 of them unrecognized by the Israeli state. The remaining ten are supposedly recognized but they are not offered even the most basic of government services.
A few of the “45 Most powerful pictures” in BuzzFeed for 2012
1. A boy in Nepal being evicted from his home
A boy cries as he holds his sister in his lap after a confrontation with squatters and police personnel in Kathmandu, Nepal.
2. A couple discovering their family records survived Hurricane Sandy
Rosemary McDermott and her husband opened a safe containing a family genealogy in the Breezy Point section of Queens.
They salvaged the safe from the basement of Rosemary’s mother’s home after Superstorm Sandy.
3. Mars
Thanks to Curiosity, this is one of the clearest images of Mars ever taken.
4. Felix Baumgartner’s 24-mile free-fall from space
5. A man being pepper-sprayed directly in the face
Israeli border police officers use pepper spray as they detain an injured Palestinian protester during clashes on Land Day in March.
Security forces fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades to break up groups of Palestinian stone-throwers as annual Land Day rallies turned violent.
A Tibetan exile runs through a street during a protest against the upcoming visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao.
7. A Bolivian woman taking on a group of riot police
Thousands of people with crutches and in wheelchairs protested against the government of Bolivia in February. They were protesting what they believe to be an inadequate welfare system.
8. The Waldo Canyon fire
The Waldo Canyon fire burns an entire neighborhood near the foothills of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
In June, Colorado endured nearly a week of 100-plus-degree days and low humidity, creating a devastating formula for volatile wildfires across the state.
9. Outside the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado
Storm clouds gather above a memorial for the victims in the shooting across the street from the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July.
10. Anti-gay hate crimes in Ukraine
Unidentified people beat Svyatoslav Sheremet, head of Gay-Forum of Ukraine, in May.
Sheremet was attacked after meeting with members of the media to inform them that a scheduled gay parade was canceled due to threats of violence from neo-Nazis and other hate groups.
The attackers ran off when they realized members of the media were documenting the attack.
11. People who lost family members during the uprising in Egypt react to Hosni Mubarak’s prison sentence
Relatives of people who died during Egypt’s revolution react after a court sentenced President Hosni Mubarak to life in prison in June.
12. Kicking riot police in Greece
A man in Greece kicks riot police back.
13. Family being forced to go back to Myanmar
Mohammad Rafique, a Rohingya Muslim from Myanmar, begs a Bangladeshi coast guard official not to send his family back to Myanmar.
14. Nik Wallenda tightroping over Niagara Falls
Nik Wallenda tightroped over Niagara Falls on a 2-inch-wide wire. He’s the first person to ever cross directly over the falls from the U.S. into Canada.
15. The father saving his daughter’s life in Syria
A Syrian man carries his wounded daughter outside a hospital in the northern city of Aleppo in September. Syrian troops shelled several districts in Aleppo and clashed with rebels.
16. Manhattan without lights
Before and after shots of Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy. Nearly 200,000 people lost power in downtown Manhattan for about a week.
17. A little Palestinian girl vs. an Israeli soldier
A Palestinian girl tries to punch an Israeli soldier during a protest against the expansion of the nearby Jewish settlement of Halamish.
18. The Space Shuttle Enterprise flying above New York City
19. The wedding held during a monsoon in Manila
Ramoncito Campo kisses his wife Hernelie Ruazol Campo on a flooded street during a southwest monsoon that battered Manila, Philippines, in August.
The newlywed couple pushed through with their scheduled wedding despite severe flooding that inundated wide areas of the capital and nine nearby provinces.
Adonis Diaries 
