70 years after exodus, Palestinians dream of return
Palestinian children play in the Amari refugee camp near the city of Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on May 8, 2018
Amari Refugee Camp (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – Thaer Sharkawi, 31, has never visited the place he calls home.
The Palestinian was born and raised in the Amari refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, but for him his house is 50 kilometres (30 miles) away in the town of Kafr Ana inside what is now Israel.
Kafr Ana hasn’t actually existed for decades — demolished in the weeks after Sharkawi’s grandfather fled in 1948 — yet he knows there was a boys’ and girls’ school and can vividly picture the orange groves his great-grandfather tended.
“I haven’t been there but I have heard about it,” he told AFP. “I studied about it and read about it on the internet.”
Sharkawi is one of around five million Palestinian refugees spread across Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank.
The majority of them are descendants of those who left during the 1948 “Nakba” — or catastrophe — when more than 700,000 were expelled or fled their homes in the war surrounding Israel’s creation.
Like Sharkawi, most have never seen their historic homes, many of which were destroyed by Israel.
Yet, as they mark seven decades since that mass displacement on May 15, Palestinian refugees are determined to maintain connections to the land they still want to return to.
Sharkawi sits with his father Nabil and grandmother Khadija, who at 85 remembers fleeing her home as Israeli fighters approached.
– ‘Google helps them’ –
Nabil contrasts the open fields of his father’s former home to the cramped conditions they have lived in for 70 years in the Amari camp, but said he wasn’t worried the new generation would lose the link to their historical homelands.
“There are (technological) developments now — there is Sheikh Google. They can open it and see ‘here was Kufr Ana’,” he said. “Google helps them to see the land that is theirs.”
But Ali, a 19-year-old also in Amari but whose grandparents came from Al-Na’ani, said he knew “nothing” about the village, also destroyed in 1948.
“My grandparents died when I was young and no one really talked about it.”
The so-called right of return for Palestinian refugees is one of the most difficult issues in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Israel flat out rejects it, saying allowing even a fraction of them to return would mean the end of it as a Jewish state.
Chuck Carlson’s comment on Yahoo News:
Chuck, A Christ Follower in Gaza, 2002
OF THOSE WHO SAY THEY ARE JEWS AND ARE NOT
Surely we know
— That individuals possessing more than a trace amount of ancient Jewish blood in the modern world are to be sought for only among the Palestinians (and compare Zechariah 13:7-9 with Matthew 26:31 and Mark 14:27, and Isaiah 65:1-16 with Romans 10:20-21); but that the Judaic group of today does not descend from the Jews of the Bible, but rather from various early Medieval convert groups, chiefly Khazar (a Ukrainian tribe situated across the Black Sea from the ancient province of Asia converted en masse in 740 A.D. and
exiled beginning c. 965 to Poland) and pre-Islamic Arab, that sprouted up in those days each one in its region and so came to form collectively — this being, of course, an ideologically rather than ethnically determined category — “the Synagogue of Satan, those who say they are Jews and are not, but are lying” (Revelation 3:9), prophesied to arise.
— That indeed there is not so much as one real Jew, descendant of the ancient Jews, in the whole world, and so there is no teaching regarding preeminence on the basis of ethnic derivation in the Gospel message for these last days at all, because the Lord in Luke 13:1-9, Peter in Acts 3:23, and Paul in Acts 13:40-41 and Romans 9:22, all prophesied clearly the utter extermination of the unbelievers of the Jews; and we find a date for the completion of that process given in Revelation chapter 12, where we are taught that Israel, driven “into the wilderness, into her place” (as in Ezekiel 20:33-38 and Zechariah 5:9-11), would survive only for 1260 years, that is past the year 98 A.D. when the book of Revelation was given, or until 1358, after which the only remnant of her seed would be “those who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus,” those being Israelites according to the spirit but not according to the flesh; and the children of the ancient converts won ages past through pressure of one type or another exerted upon them once “The full count of the Gentiles” to whom Paul wrote that “through your mercy they also may obtain mercy” needed for this purpose had come in (Romans 11:25, 31) have, of course, long since intermarried and so no longer exist as a distinct ethnic entity.
— That the belief of the overwhelming majority of those who say about themselves that they are Jewish is no longer any orientation within Judaism whatsoever, but is militant atheism, that most developed and consistent form of “the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are the Synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9).
— That the Judaic settler element in Palestine has without right or justification expelled the Palestinian people from its homeland and is not in truth entitled to so much as one square inch of Palestinian land.
— That the American segment is a full partner with the settler group in all the crimes of the latter against the Palestinians.
— That the ultimate aims of the historic Western support for Zionism have ever been four in number, being: 1) to dry up the wellsprings in the Judaic that gave birth to Marxism and could yet produce who knows what; 2) to relocate the Judaic outside of Europe where he would perforce fritter his abilities and energy away relating to Third Worlders; 3) ultimately, to present an image to the West and indeed the entire world of the Judaic
grossly incompatible with his liberator guise; 4) at which point the Judaic and his unique “endowment” could be eliminated with impunity out of all lands. — That in approximate accord with the foregoing the function of the Zionist settler state in the thinking of
the generality of the American elite has always been as an internal American control factor intended to neutralize the at one time imminent threat of a Judaic-dominated Marxist dictatorship by diverting the attention of the Judaics to a distant colony whose survival would remain forever dubious and which could only be maintained through prodigious American governmental expenditures; until with the passage of sufficient time a new generation of Judaics would arise in America in whose days the very word Jew would be synonymous with
mass expulsions, militarism and the entire apparatus of repression of the racist settler state, no longer possessing so much as a shadow of the credibility requisite for any attempt on the part of their group to install itself in power — at which point foreign policy and indeed budgetary considerations would dictate the jettisoning of this abhorrent afterbirth of the Synagogue of Satan.
One’s enemy will speak hypocritically and store guile up inside him. When he speaks pleasantly do not
believe him, for there are seven abominations in his heart.
— Proverbs 26:24-25
—Barry I. Hyman
CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD