Free Republic

RAMALLAH, West Bank - With sirens and rallies, Palestinians on Sunday mournfully commemorated the anniversary of what they call "Al Nakba," or "the catastrophe" — the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of their people with the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. While Israelis held barbecues, concerts and launched fireworks to celebrate the 57th anniversary of their independence Thursday — according to the date on the Hebrew calendar — Palestinians see the day very differently. "Our people will never forget and the generations will never forget," Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech aired on Palestine TV. "On...

Palestinian Authority Arabs are commemorating Catastrophe Day today: the establishment of the State of Israel. They vow not to forget their "national identity," which many experts say never existed. The Arabs commemorate Catastrophe Day, known in Arabic as the Nakba, on the anniversary of the event that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. The British mandate ended on Saturday, May 15, 1948, and in order not to clash with the Sabbath, David Ben-Gurion convened the Jewish provisional government the day before to declare the new state. The Nakba commemorations began at noon today with a minute-long siren...

Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 Filmmakers in Person North American Premiere After the Screening: Audience Questions & Answers Israel/Netherlands, video, 60 min., English, Hebrew & Arabic w/English voice-over. Directors: Benny Brunner & Alexandra Jansse Palestinian refugees 1967 (above and below). Al-Nakba takes the most hotly contested and misunderstood moment of Israeli-Palestinian history and makes it come alive with intellectual clarity and emotional impact. Based on the book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem by noted historian Benny Morris, Al-Nakba is the first documentary to examine the tragedy that accompanied the birth of the state of Israel in 1948 -...