The catastrophe continues

On Tuesday Palestinians everywhere came together to remember their dispossession and affirm their identity, writes Graham Usher from Ramallah
At noon on Tuesday Palestinians remembered Al-Nakba, the term used to describe the catastrophe of Israel's founding on 15 May, 1948 on the ruins of their patrimony and the resulting exile of most of their people.
In Ramallah, and virtually every other town in the West Bank and Gaza, they observed a three-minute silence in memory of those fallen in the long war with Zionism, including the 426 killed during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
In Israel, for the first time, Palestinians stood at road intersections in a new act of commemoration, fuelled by the 13 killed by Israeli police in the "internal Intifada" in the Galilee last October. In Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Syria, Palestinians held events in solidarity with both and bound by the common, umbilical themes of identity, unity and return.
And tied through resistance. After the memorials in Ramallah, hundreds marched to an Israeli army checkpoint north of the city, where stones were met with live ammunition and Palestinian machine-gun fire was met with Israeli tanks rolling into Palestinian-controlled areas. Two Palestinians were killed and scores wounded on that site in a street battle lasting five hours. Two more Palestinians were killed in Gaza and over 100 injured in similar confrontations repulsed by similar means.
Resistance smouldered on other fronts too. Outside Ramallah, a Jewish settler woman was shot dead in a roadside ambush by a militia affiliated to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, avenging the army's unprovoked and "unintended" murder of five Palestinian policemen (two were sleeping) posted at a Palestinian checkpoint near the city early Monday morning. In Gaza, Israeli tank cannon fire killed a Hamas guerrilla after he and others had fired mortars into Israel.
Israel had other responses also. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres gave Israel's official reaction to the Mitchell report. Praising it as "a balanced document", he refused to countenance its cardinal recommendation that any return to negotiations be accompanied by Israel's absolute freeze on settlement construction. Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer chided Yasser Arafat for "skipping town" on Tuesday "of all days" by flying to Egypt for consultations with President Hosni Mubarak to finalise the Arab response to Mitchell.
In fact, the Palestinian leader was probably more palpable among his people for the Al-Nakba ceremonies than at any other moment during their seven-month long revolt, courtesy of a pre-recorded speech read everywhere after the three-minute silence. He also expressed their absolute consensus.
"The road to peace is clear," he said. "It is represented by the full and comprehensive withdrawal of the Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers from all Palestinian and Arab territories up to the 4 June 1967 lines. It is represented by the resolution of the refugee issue on the basis of UN Resolution 194."
He also reiterated that the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative and the Mitchell report, together with "signed agreements and resolutions of international legitimacy", were the Palestinians' bases for "putting the peace process back on track." But, he added, "blind military might will not force surrender on our people."
That at least is certain. For the extent of this year's Al-Nakba commemorations demonstrated two unalterable realities. The first is that the Palestinians' sense of a common national identity is now deeper than ever before, as is the belief that it will be realised through sovereignty on part or all of their historic homeland. The second, flowing from the first, is Israel's monumental failure to erase either the identity or the aspiration, despite 53 years as a state and 34 as a military occupier.
The failure is shown not just in the useless and increasingly desperate violence Israel has unleashed in a vain attempt to crush the uprising. It is shown in the keys to former homes held in the young and old hands of Palestinian refugees as they marched from their camps to the checkpoints and back again throughout the West Bank and Gaza on Tuesday. It was shown in the forest of V-for-victory salutes that accompanied the three-minute silence in Ramallah and in the clang of church bells, Islamic calls to prayer and bursts of machine-gun fire that ended it.
Above all, it is shown in spontaneous acts of resistance such as the one that occurred at Al-Ram checkpoint north of Jerusalem, where Palestinian students from inside Israel came together with their West Bank compatriots to break the Israeli military curtain between them. One Palestinian scaled an Israeli army pole to fly aloft the Palestinian flag. An Israeli soldier scrambled after him to pull it down, and was immediately faced with a Palestinian woman wrapped in another Palestinian flag, then another woman, and then another flag.
"The Nakba-makers have not managed to break the will of the Palestinian people or efface their national identity," noted Mahmoud Darwish in a piece written especially for this year's memorial and replayed throughout the occupied territories. Nor will they. For Palestinian identity was born from resistance, resistance to a catastrophe that continues.
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