The Nakba Demands Justice
THE GANGS of Israeli teenagers grip their oversized machine guns as they patrol the Damascus Gate, tossing their stun grenades and hearing the stones roar back in the original Arabic: “Jerusalem for the Palestinians.” What scenes those steps have borne witness to—a Nakba, a catastrophe. A shattering of history, a rending of Palestinian masses, now reunited and marching steadfastly along Route 1 toward Al-Aqsa Mosque on one of the last evenings of Ramadan to protect their city, to defend it from Israeli attempts to cleanse it of Palestinian life. In Jerusalem, a boy throws his shoe at a soldier, hitting him squarely in the face. In the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the breakers of the fast are pelted by settler stones, summarily returned—and then some. The apartheid state blankets the Palestinians with water cannons, with beatings, with tear gas, and the apartheid newspapers call for peace-on-both-sides, and a deputy mayor of the apartheid city looks on, all bravado, laughing at the injured Native, pointing at his own forehead and saying of the bullet, “It’s a pity it didn’t go here.”