destroyed villages

Israeli police block Palestinian ‘March of Return’

The annual "March of Return" by Palestinians in Israel, commemorating the Nakba - the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 - has been blocked by the Israeli police for the first time in its history. The police have denied the organisers a permit, saying there is a shortage of officers to oversee the march. But Palestinian leaders in Israel accuse the government of Benjamin Netanyahu of being behind the decision.

An unlikely dramatic hero, poet Taha Muhammad Ali, takes center stage

The one-man show “Taha” receives its English-language premiere this week in the United States. It offers not only a rare chance to learn about Taha Muhammad Ali, one of Palestine’s finest poets, but provides a visceral account of what it was like to live through the Nakba – the Catastrophe that befell hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled from their homeland in 1948.

The fantasy at the centre of Israel’s ‘muezzin bill’

The forest fires that ravaged Israel over the weekend inadvertently drew attention to the deeper goal of Netanyahu's "muezzin bill". For many Israelis, the call to prayer threatens the contrived "European idyll" created after 1948 by a programme of planting thick pine forests – creating a fire hazard – over hundreds of Palestinian villages Israel destroyed after it had expelled their inhabitants.

Ex-ambassador: Israel used my father to cover up ethnic cleansing

A former Dutch ambassador planted 1,100 olive trees in the West Bank on Sunday to make amends, he said, for the fact that Israel had exploited his family’s name to “cover up an act of ethnic cleansing”. Erik Ader said the trees were his way of apologising for a similar number of pine trees planted in Israel in the 1960s to honour his father by the Jewish National Fund.

Nakba survivors share their stories of loss and hope

"I am sure one day I will return to Saffuriya," Ameen Muhammad Ali says of a Palestinian village only two kilometres outside Nazareth that Israel destroyed during the Nakba in 1948. He pauses, then chuckles as he injects a note of realism: "If not me, then my son - and if not my son, then my grandson." Unlike the majority of refugees from the 1948 war, 81-year-old Abu Arab lives near his former village, in a neighbourhood of Nazareth whose residents are all refugees from Saffuriya or their descendants.

Israel accused of trickery to snatch refugee lands

Palestinian leaders in Israel have warned that they suspect the Israeli government is behind recent efforts to trick the families of refugees from the 1948 war into signing away the rights to their lands. Experts say Israel has been working to pressure families into selling their lands for decades as a way to undermine a Palestinian right of return, one of the key demands in any peace agreement.

Fury at Israeli plan to build town on historic Muslim village

An Israeli government plan to build hundreds of homes for the country’s Druze population faces stiff opposition after it was revealed that the new community would be located on the lands of Palestinian refugees. The town, due to be built west of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, would be the first new community for members of Israel’s Palestinian minority since the state’s founding 68 years ago.