Yousef Jabareen

• Since 1949, the area has been occupied by Jewish settlers who established Kibbutz Meggido there.
• In the early 1980s, I interviewed Ali Jabareen, a refugee from Lajjun.
• He brought his daughters with him – the first time they had seen their ancestral village.
• Jabareen explained to them what had happened in 1948: “Our house was here and your uncle’s house were there.

Catastrophe

• Later, as a result of the six-day war in 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – the rest of Palestine.
• Palestinians became refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and neighbouring Arab countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
• This gives the lie to Israel’s founding myth that Palestine happened to be “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

Displacement and trauma

• The forced displacement from their homes and land to become refugees in other countries – or even in what had once been their own country – is central to the Palestinian collective memory.
• The events of 1948 and the years that followed fragmented Palestinians – their identity, communities and whole families.

Right of return

• The calamity of the Nakba after 75 years remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and we are now seeing the Palestinian young generation growing more confident to articulate the right of return and their freedom.
• On April 26, Palestinian political organisations and civil society organisation in Israel organised the 26th annual “march of the return” – this time to the village of Lajjun.
• They returned to a village where all the homes had long ago been destroyed and planted with trees to conceal the landmarks of the village.