Nakba Day marked by pilgrimage to abandoned Israeli Arab villages
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent

13 May 2005

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/575393.html

The Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") Day, which commemorates the establishment of Israel in 1948, was marked Thursday by mass pilgrimages to abandoned Palestinian villages. In the morning, families of internally displaced Palestinians visited the sites of the villages that they left or from which they were expelled in 1948. In the afternoon, 5,000 people held a rally at the site of Khirbet Husha and Khirbet Ksair near Kibbutz Usha in the Galilee.

The rally was organized by the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced together with other Arab organizations and leaders and a few Jewish organizations. It began with a procession on the lands of the abandoned village of Husha, a tour of the cemetery and the ruins of homes. Both Husha and Ksair were abandoned in April 1948, after harsh battles between the Israeli forces and Arab militias.

Few know the location of the two villages. Even in the Arab sector, as the years go by, the locations of abandoned sites has disappeared from local memory. But in recent years, awareness of these sites has been growing among the Arab public, as manifested in organized tours to the sites and the preservation of churches and mosques which remained standing.

More than 250,000 internally displaced people live in Israel, many only a few minutes drive from the villages from which their families came. Most were born into the new reality.

Daud Bader, secretary of the Committee for the Rights of the Internally Displaced, said Thursday that activities involving the abandoned villages began in the 1990s. "The internally displaced in Israel thought someone would act on their behalf, but were disappointed. Young people who began to develop political consciousness took the initiative, and local committees sprouted up in different villages," he said.

Among the speakers at Thursday's rally were Shawki Khatib, chairman of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, Wakim Wakim of the Committee for the Rights of the Internally Displaced, and a representative of the village of Husha, Musa Zrair. Several MKs also attended, including Mohammad Barakeh, the only member of parliament who comes from a displaced family.

Some of the participants at the rally arrived from the center of the country on a bus bearing the symbolic number 194, the number of the UN resolution dealing with the Palestinians' "right of return." The bus ride was organized by Zochrot, an organization dedicated to educating the Israeli public about the state's wrong-doings against the Palestinians. Several weeks ago, Zochrot commemorated the massacre perpetrated by Jewish fighters in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem.