By The Daily Star and Agence France Presse (AFP)
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(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: Thousands of Israel’s Arab citizens marked the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” that accompanied Israel’s creation, when some 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Protesters carrying Palestinian flags and signs with the names of destroyed Arab villages marched to the site of the village of Maskah, emptied in 1948, to demand the “right of return” for those exiled following Israel’s birth. Other demonstrations took place across Israel and the occupied territories.
“People live just a few hundred meters away from the home they were uprooted from, and the pain has not eased up to this day,” said chairman of the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee, Mohammad Zeidan.
Zeidan noted that the number of people taking part in the Nakba Day march increases from year to year. “All the racist laws against the Arab public in Israel just strengthen and unify it,” he said.
Today more than 4.7 million UN-registered refugees live in camps in the Occupied Territories, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and their fate is one of the thorniest issues in the decades-old Middle East conflict.
Meanwhile, Israelis fired up barbecues in packed campgrounds and beaches across the country on Tuesday as they marked the 62nd anniversary of the state’s creation. The air force and navy held displays, and leaders including the president, prime minister, defense minister and military chief of staff staged a singalong at the presidential residence in occupied Jerusalem.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told diplomats foreign pressure would aggravate the Middle East crisis – a jab at the US administration that has pressed Israel to make concessions in a bid to revive peace talks with the Palestinians.
“Peace cannot be enforced, it must be built,” the right-wing minister said.
“Today I stand before you in Jerusalem, as Israel’s foreign minister, and reaffirm late Prime Minister [Menachem] Begin’s statement: Jerusalem is our undivided, eternal capital.”
International law deems all settlements built on land occupied since the 1967 Middle East war as illegal, including all settlements in East Jerusalem.
The occupied West Bank was sealed off from Israel and Arab East Jerusalem for the duration of Israel’s only secular public holiday.
President Barack Obama affirmed in a statement the US’ “unbreakable bond” with Israel.
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, one of just two Arab states to have signed peace treaties with Israel, also called for renewed peace efforts. “I would like to take this opportunity to call on you once again to redouble your efforts to get the Middle East peace process back on track in order to the cycle of violence and bloodshed,” he said in a letter to Israeli President Shimon Peres. – AFP, with The Daily Star
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(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
