https://soundcloud.com/redrevolutionradio/commemorating-the-nakba
May 15 is Nakba day, the day Zionist forces forcefully removed nearly 800,000 Palestinians from their lands in 1948. And the Nakba isn’t finished.
In a decade, UN climate experts predict catastrophic global ecological collapse if drastic measures aren’t taken today to end the fossil fuel economy. That’s a tight timeline. For some, that collapse happened yesterday or fast approaches tomorrow. Next year, UN human rights experts predict Gaza will be uninhabitable. An economic blockade; the poisoning of water; the constant bombing of hospitals, schools, and infrastructure; the mass maiming, wounding, killing, and imprisoning of the tens of thousands youth by Israeli soldiers are all tactics for the engineered collapse of Gaza.
The goal is to starve the people to kill off resistance to the occupation.
Last year, shortly after US President Donald Trump moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the world’s largest open-air prison erupted in protest. Palestinian journalist Ahmad Abu Artema remembers hearing Trump’s decision—which breaks with nearly seven decades of international consensus. He walked through Gaza just before sunset gathering his thoughts.
“I was struck watching the birds fly freely from tree to tree over fence that separated us from Israel,” Artema recalls. The next day he took to Facebook sharing his thoughts. “I wondered allowed why I couldn’t move freely without being stopped by walls, guns, and checkpoints.”
Every Friday since then, hundreds have walked to perimeter fence. Israeli snipers have taken aim at knee caps to force amputation.
The Palestinian right of return is our moral demand.
In this episode, we commemorate the Nakba by turning to fighting settler colonialism from Turtle Island to Palestine.
Special thanks to the Middle East Children’s Alliance for hosting this talk in Berkeley last week on May 8, and to Ziad Abass, Lara Kiswani, and Kristian Bailey.
Music: Le Trio Joubran, “The Long March”
Fairuz, “Al-Quds”
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