World - Reuters
Palestinian Refugees Twice Over Mark 'Catastrophe'
Date: Sat, May 15, 2004
By Shahdi al-Kashif
GAZA (Reuters) - For Mohammed al-Bassiouny, the war over Israel's creation in 1948 spelled lifelong misery in a dead-end refugee camp. But as fellow Palestinians on Saturday marked the 56th anniversary of the time they call the Nakba or "catastrophe" Bassiouny felt doubly dispossessed, having just lost his three-storey breeze-block house in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites) to an Israeli army raid. "My home is gone, the home also of 40 of my relatives, half of them children. All this, the Israelis destroyed," he told Reuters by telephone from Rafah camp. Throughout Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians stood with heads bowed as sirens wailed from minarets at noon. They then marched in their thousands bearing banners with the names of Palestinian townships now either razed or renamed in Israel. The annual show of mourning was especially resonant in Rafah, where at least 12 Palestinians died in weeklong fighting.
Israel, which lost seven soldiers in Rafah, withdrew its forces from the camp on Saturday after demolishing dozens of buildings it said had concealed gunmen. Palestinian officials said hundreds of residents had been made homeless.
The Gaza bloodshed, like a vast Israeli barrier going up in the West Bank, has all but dashed Palestinian hopes of statehood on the land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Israel claims the right to strike against militants leading a 3-1/2-year old Palestinian uprising -- especially Islamic groups still bent on the destruction of the Jewish state.
Arabs went to war in 1948 over a U.N. resolution dividing Mandate Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. They said it was unfair to lose what they deemed ancestral lands to accommodate Jews seeking a state, after the Nazi Holocaust, in what they saw as a return to their ancient Jewish homeland.
1948 UPHEAVAL
The Nakba marks the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians from towns and villages during that conflict.
Today, descendants such as 45-year-old Bassiouny make up a Palestinian refugee community of some four million in the West Bank, Gaza and abroad who have kept alive the dream of reclaiming homes in what is now Israel under any peace accord.
President Bush (news - web sites) backs Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites)'s new plan to withdraw from Gaza, but angered Palestinians by saying Israel could not be expected to cede the entire West Bank or take back refugees under any peace deal.
"The issue of refugees...is a matter of destiny. There will be no yielding, no bargaining, no resettlement," Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (news - web sites), whom Israel has sidelined with U.S. backing, said in his annual television address.
Israel rejects the "right of return" as a ruse to destroy it demographically, and wants refugees resettled in a future Palestinian state. But that vision has been blurred by Israeli unilateralism Sharon bills as breaking a diplomatic deadlock.
While Israel may pull soldiers and settlers out of Gaza, it plans to leave all but four of its settlements in the West Bank, bolstering its concrete-and-wire barrier through the territory.
Israel calls the barrier a precaution against suicide bombers but Palestinians see it as a land grab that would thwart their dream of a viable state.
"I am afraid they will seize what is left of my land because Israel's policy is an expansionist one," said West Bank farmer Rashid Abu Taher, whose family lost 20 hectares (48 acres) of land in 1948 and another 30 hectares (72 acres) to the barrier.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah)
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