While most Israeli Jews are enjoying a festive barbecue today in honor of the Jewish state’s Jewish-calendar birthday, a minority is marking the flip side of what happened fifty-six years ago.
Known as the Nakba, or disaster, in Arabic, thousands of Arab Palestinians were displaced in a war initiated by five Arab states, after they refused to accept a U.N. proposal for a two-state solution. Israel declared its independence at the end of the British Mandate, on May 15, 1948, in what was then known as Palestine.
The Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced is planning a protest walk through an abandoned Palestinian village in the Galilee. The seventh annual “Walk of Return” aims to remember the hundreds of settlements abandoned after Arab residents fled or were forcibly displaced by Israeli forces in 1948 and thereafter.
Other Israeli associations organized lectures, exhibits and memorial services in recent days to commemorate displaced people as well as the continuing violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
On Sunday evening and Monday, Remembrance Day, when Israel remembers its fallen soldiers and civilians killed in terror attacks, several traditional candle-lighting ceremonies acknowledged the Palestinian and Arab victims of the last 56 years of violence.
Further commemorations will take place on May 15, the Gregorian anniversary of the establishment of Israel.