PLO: NAKBA A SHAME ON THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
Palestine, 7 Rajab 1434/17 Mei 20013 (MINA) – A member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, said on Wednesday (15/5) that the persistent tragedy of the Palestinian people [the Nakba] for 65 years is a shame on the international community.
The Nakba has continued through the on-going Israeli occupation which began in 1967 and continued violations and settlement construction, particularly in occupied East Jerusalem and its environs.
This statement was made during a separate meeting between Erekat and the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Representative, Robert Serry, the French Consul General, Frederic Desagneaux and Japan’s representative to the State of Palestine, Junien Matsuura. MEMO reported as monitored by Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
Erekat stressed that the Israeli government’s decision to continue with settlement activities, the latest of which is the proposed construction of 296 units in the settlement of Beit El, confirms that this Israeli government has chosen settlements and impositions rather than peace and negotiations.
Erekat called on the international community to continue to make every possible effort toward the release of Palestinian prisoners, especially those who were arrested before the end of 1994.
Nakba Day means “a Day of the Catastrophe” is generally commemorated on 15 May, the day after the Gregorian calendar date for Israeli Independence Day. For the Palestinians it is an annual day of commemoration of the displacement that preceded and followed the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.
During the 1948 Palestine War, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, and hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed.
These refugees and their descendants number several million people today, divided between Jordan (2 million),Lebanon (427,057), Syria (477,700), the West Bank (788,108) and the Gaza Strip (1.1 million), with at least another quarter of a million internally displaced Palestinians in Israel. The displacement, dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people is known to them as an-Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” or “disaster”.
Prior to its adoption by the Palestinian nationalist movement, the “Year of the Catastrophe” among Arabs referred to 1920, when European colonial powers partitioned the Ottoman Empire into a series of separate states along lines of their own choosing. The term was first used to reference the events of 1948 in the summer of that same year by the Syrian writer Constantine Zureiq in his work “The Meaning of the Nakba“, published in 1956. (T/P08/P04)
Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
