Palestinians Protest Israel’s 1948 Birth

Angry and defiant, tens of thousands of Palestinians rallied across the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a day of national mourning to mark decades of exile and to demand an end to Israeli domination.

Amid pitched violence and solemn remembrance, Palestinians observed the Nakba, or “catastrophe”--the anniversary of the 1948 creation of the Jewish state, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their ancestral homes and cast into a diaspora that has endured for more than half a century.

Israeli troops shot to death at least four Palestinians, and more than 200 people were wounded in clashes at flash points that have become familiar in more than seven months of bloody Israeli-Palestinian warfare.

Reporters at the most intense fighting, on the northern edge of this West Bank city, said Israeli snipers appeared to be picking off demonstrators in the crowd. A French television reporter was shot and injured but evidently saved by his bulletproof vest. The Israeli army later expressed regret for the shooting of the reporter but noted that some demonstrators also opened fire.

One of the dead was Abdel Manameh, a bodyguard for Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the radical Islamic movement Hamas. Israelis said the bodyguard had fired a mortar at a Jewish village in the Gaza Strip. An Israeli settler was killed when Palestinian gunmen opened fire on the car carrying her on a West Bank road.

Despite the enormous emotional content of this anniversary, further inflamed by Israel’s slaying of five policemen Monday, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat managed to make himself scarce. He flew to Egypt, leaving behind a taped national address--his first since his people became engulfed in this new uprising that has claimed more than 520 lives, the majority Palestinian.

In fiery remarks, broadcast simultaneously on Palestinian radio and television and piped into the rallies, Arafat said Israel’s “blind military might” will bring neither peace nor Palestinian capitulation. He called on the world to “wake up” and stop Israeli aggression.

“Executioners continue to walk through the puddles of our blood with their military escalation and siege of our towns,” Arafat said, imploring the Palestinians to “stand strong, with faith, faith, courage, courage.”

Israeli officials were critical of Arafat’s words. “We cannot change the past, but we can change the future,” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said, urging Arafat to “build bridges and not walls of fire and blood.”

Demonstrating in Ramallah and other towns and villages throughout Palestinian territory, elderly refugees, youthful students, professionals in suits and gun-toting militants joined in three minutes of silence as sirens wailed. Many stood at attention and lifted their hands in a V-for-victory sign. Others burned model helicopter gunships, hanged an effigy of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, fired replica mortars, and savaged Israeli and American flags.

“The only way left for us is the armed struggle,” businessman Sadat Yassin said as he watched people filing toward the rally in downtown Ramallah’s Manara Square. Years of attempting to make peace with the Israelis under the landmark 1993 Oslo accords, he said, have ended in nothing but heartbreak and destruction.

Yassin was in his mother’s womb 53 years ago when the family fled its home in what is today the Israeli city of Lod. He was born under an olive tree, he says. Today he, like many Palestinians, holds on to a key and deed for the house and 40-acre farm his family owned and that his elderly father still dreams of working and planting. Despite a lifetime in Ramallah and a successful taxi business, the younger Yassin wants to go back.

“If you don’t have roots, you don’t have dignity,” Yassin said. “Without a homeland, there is no dignity. . . . Nobody forgets.”

The issue of Palestinian refugees and their offspring--whose numbers have swelled to more than 4 million scattered in numerous countries--and what they regard as their right to return home became a deal-breaker in peace negotiations that collapsed last winter on the eve of Sharon’s rise to power.

For Israelis, allowing a “right to return” is tantamount to the suicidal destruction of the Jewish state. In negotiations under the previous center-left government, Israel had said exiled Palestinians should be allowed to resettle in an eventual Palestinian state, with only small numbers permitted to move into Israel proper.

But Palestinian officials, while acknowledging that many people have no interest in returning, insist that the right to do so has been sanctified by U.N. resolutions handed down over the years in response to the Israeli-Arab dispute.

“It is a pity,” Suheil Gideon, chairman of a Palestinian bank, said as he stood in the middle of the Ramallah rally and thought about the death of peace in the region. “We had very high hopes. [With the signing of the Oslo accords] we thought once and for all there would be no more war.”

As Gideon spoke, men fired assault rifles in the air, the Palestinian national anthem played and a poem by preeminent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was read over loudspeakers.

Nearby, two members of Arafat’s Force 17 presidential guard unit, one of numerous security services in the West Bank, vowed revenge for their many colleagues who have been captured or killed in the recent months of fighting.

“This gives us even more energy to fight,” said Raid Kilani, a 29-year-old with a Kalashnikov rifle slung across his back.

It is symptomatic of the wide gulf dividing them that Palestinians and Israelis do not generally agree on the events of 1948. Palestinians say they were driven from their homes or forced to flee out of fear for their lives. Many Israelis say Palestinians left of their own accord, confident that Arab armies assailing the fledgling Jewish state would quickly prevail, or they were encouraged to leave by Arab leaders. The truth is a combination.

“They brought the Nakba upon themselves,” Israeli Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit said, “and Arafat himself, with his own two hands, is bringing yet another Nakba onto his own people.”

Tuesday was one of the most violent days in many weeks, but perhaps not as calamitous as expected. Israel’s killing the day before of five Palestinian police officers at a checkpoint had inflamed furor to such a point that Israeli security forces deployed in what officials said were “unprecedented” numbers, girding for a blood bath.

Four of the five officers were buried in their Gaza Strip hometowns Tuesday as the head of the Israeli armed forces, chief of staff Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, admitted to a parliamentary panel that the slayings, which occurred during a secret military operation, were “not the intended result.” Palestinians claim they were simply coldblooded assassinations. Mofaz said the slayings will be investigated.

This was the first year that the Palestinians chose to mark the Nakba with sirens and silent observances.

On the northern outskirts of Jerusalem, police fired tear gas to disperse a small crowd of Israeli Arab and Palestinian demonstrators who marched to an army checkpoint there to underscore how the division between Israel and the West Bank physically separates the Palestinian people.

Several Arab members of Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, linked arms and marched at the head of a crowd waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “We’re going to Jerusalem!” and “Revenge! Revenge! The Arabs will not be silent!”

Jaber Mohasin, 36, of Jerusalem’s Shoafat refugee camp, said he joined the protest because he wanted to tell the world “that we want to go back to our land.” Mohasin was born a refugee in Jerusalem after his ancestral village, Iraq Manshieh, was destroyed in the war that followed Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence.

“It is not my problem that my village is no longer there,” Mohasin said. “All my life I was taught--and I have taught my family--that we have a right to return to our homes. Maybe it will take another 10 years, maybe longer, but I still have a dream that I will return.”

Wilkinson reported from Ramallah and Curtius from Taibe and East Jerusalem.