EIN El-HILWEH, Lebanon, 16 May 2004 — Thousands of Palestinians shouted anti-Israel and anti-US slogans during a demonstration yesterday in this impoverished refugee camp against the 1948 founding of the Jewish state. Palestinians in refugee camps across Lebanon observed a general strike to mark Al-Naqba, or the catastrophe, the term Arabs use to describe the Palestinians’ displacement when Israel was established 56 years ago.
In the largest camp, Ein El-Hilweh, some 10,000 Palestinians marched through the narrow alleys chanting “Death to Israel, Death to America!” The men, women and children waved Palestinian flags and pledged allegiance to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
One group of protesters burned effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. On the faces of each of the leaders, demonstrators had drawn the Nazi swastika and the word “Criminal.”
The protest at the camp outside the southern port city of Sidon was organized by supporters of Arafat’s mainstream Fatah faction and included representatives from various Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups.
Maj. Khaled Aref, secretary-general of Arafat’s Fatah movement in Lebanon, pledged to the crowd to continue the Palestinian struggle and appealed to fellow Arabs to provide support. “We have no choice but to continue our struggle and our uprising to achieve our national goals,” he said.
“The struggle in all its forms will always be the way to end occupation, expel (Israeli) settlers and establish an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.” The commemoration this year comes during one of the bloodiest weeks of violence in Gaza between Israel and Palestinians. Some 30 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers have died in Gaza since Tuesday.
Some elderly refugees carried the keys of homes in modern-day Israel they left behind when they fled to Lebanon in 1948. There are some 370,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, all of whom are denied citizenship. Around half of them still live in miserable conditions in 12 refugee camps dotted around the country.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, over 2,500 people flocked to the centre, waving flags and chanting “No peace, no stability without the right of return”.
Hundreds of children held up placards bearing the names of Palestinian villages, now inside Israel, from which their families originated before the crowd held a moment’s silence in memory of the events of 1948.
In the northern city of Nablus, some 5,000 demonstrators burned a cardboard model of an Israeli tank, along with life-sized effigies of Sharon, Bush and Blair.
“We say ‘no’ to all projects that deny the right of return,” they shouted, referring to Bush’s endorsement of an Israeli plan to withdraw from Gaza, which also saw the US leader effectively ruling out the Palestinians’ right to return to land that was theirs before 1948.
Another 3,000 demonstrators gathered in the northern city of Qalqilya and a similar number was reported gathering in Tulkarm, Palestinian security officials said. In the southern West Bank, around 1,000 demonstrators gathered in Bethlehem and another 200 were seen in central Hebron, shouting and waving flags, AFP correspondents said.
And in Gaza, for Muhammad Al-Bassiouny, the war over Israel’s creation in 1948 spelled lifelong misery in a dead-end refugee camp. But as fellow Palestinians staged rallies Bassiouny felt doubly dispossessed, having just lost his three-story breeze-block house in the Gaza Strip 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.
