The Palestine thread

[seafoid]

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155617-how-the-2013-world-press-photo-of-the-year-was-faked-with-photoshop

I see that the guy who analysed the photo is starting to back away from his claim that it was a composite picture.
"Updated @ 7:09am 5/13: The language about the final image being a composite of three separate images has been softened slightly."

And here is the prize winning picture compared with an earlier version.
http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/gunthert/8485283411/sizes/o/
The prize winning picture is clearly not a composite it has just has the contrast and colour balance changed, in other words doing to a digital image with Photoshop what photographers have done for decades in the dark room.

The whole Israeli argument is nuts. They moan about photoshopping while the whole point of the photos was the kids they killed.

No, the whole point of the photos is the way they were portrayed, not the subject matter.

You obviously don't understand the non Jewish view of Israel.
Making a song and dance about photo shopping when the issue is Israel's lack of concern for human life.

A customer enters a photoshop.
Customer: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.
(Beaver does not respond.)
C: 'Ello, Miss?
Beaver : What do you mean "miss"?
C: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
B: We're closin' for lunch.
C: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Palestinian child in the picture
B: Oh yes, the, uh, the Palestinian. I think it was photoshopped.
C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
B: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's photoshopped 
C: Look, matey, I know a dead child when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
B: No no he's not dead, he's, he's photoshopped ! Remarkable technique, photoshop, idn'it, ay? Beautiful light !
C: The light don't enter into it. It's a stone dead child .
O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's alive!
C: All right then, if he's alive, I'll wake him up!
(shouting at the photo )
'Ello, child  I've got a lovely bagel for you if you show...(owner hits the photo )
B: There, he moved!
C: No, he didn't, that was you hitting the photo !
B: I never!!
C: Yes, you did!
B: I never, never did anything...
C: (yelling and hitting the Photo repeatedly) 'ELLO PALLY!!!!!
Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call!
(Thumps photo on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)
C: Now that's what I call a dead child .
B: No, no.....No, 'e's stunned!
C: STUNNED?!?
B: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! Gaza children stun easily, major.
C: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. That child is definitely deceased, and when I viewed the picture  not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged sleep
B: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for Jerusalem s.
C: PININ' for Jerusalem ?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he die
C: The Gaza children prefer kippin' on their backs! Remarkable kids, id'nit, squire?

[Ball DeBeaver]

You're wasted in Pallywood. 

Any photographer will tell you that the way a photo is framed means a hell of a lot more than the subject matter of the photo. A photo of an open flower with the background blank gathers a whole new meaning and resonanse when it has a background of a wasteland or batlefield for example. The angle, size, shape, colour, framing background and everything around the subject has just as much impact on the photo as the subject.

[seafoid]

You're wasted in Pallywood. 

Any photographer will tell you that the way a photo is framed means a hell of a lot more than the subject matter of the photo. A photo of an open flower with the background blank gathers a whole new meaning and resonanse when it has a background of a wasteland or batlefield for example. The angle, size, shape, colour, framing background and everything around the subject has just as much impact on the photo as the subject.

Tell us again what technical aspect could have made this photo pro Israel.

[seafoid]

BTW beaver when you get a minute can you prove Mohamed ad Durra was not murdered by Israel?
where does he live now and throw up a few photos as well while you are at it.

I think the Zionist refusal to accept what happened is really fascinating.Like Israel gives a flying f**k about dead kids.  1519 since 2000.
But they can't let the Ad Durra story go for some reason.

[Ball DeBeaver]

BTW beaver when you get a minute can you prove Mohamed ad Durra was not murdered by Israel?
where does he live now and throw up a few photos as well while you are at it.

I think the Zionist refusal to accept what happened is really fascinating.Like Israel gives a flying f**k about dead kids.  1519 since 2000.
But they can't let the Ad Durra story go for some reason.

The article is too long to post. Here are some extracts.

To watch the raw footage is to wonder, repeatedly, What is going on here? In some scenes groups of Palestinians duck for cover from gunfire while others nonchalantly talk or smoke just five feet away. At one dramatic moment a Palestinian man dives forward clutching his leg, as if shot in the thigh. An ambulance somehow arrives to collect him exactly two seconds later, before he has stopped rolling from the momentum of his fall. Another man is loaded into an ambulance—and, in footage from a different TV camera, appears to jump out of it again some minutes later.

At around 3:00 P.M. Mohammed al-Dura and his father make their first appearance on film. The time can be judged by later comments from the father and some journalists on the scene, and by the length of shadows in the footage. Despite the number of cameras that were running that day, Mohammed and Jamal al-Dura appear in the footage of only one cameraman—Talal Abu-Rahma, a Palestinian working for France 2.

Jamal al-Dura later said that he had taken his son to a used-car market and was on the way back when he passed through the crossroads and into the crossfire. When first seen on tape, father and son are both crouched on the sidewalk behind a large concrete cylinder, their backs against the wall. The cylinder, about three feet high, is referred to as "the barrel" in most discussions of the case, although it appears to be a section from a culvert or a sewer system. On top of the cylinder is a big paving stone, which adds another eight inches or so of protection. The al-Duras were on the corner diagonally opposite the Israeli outpost. By hiding behind the barrel they were doing exactly what they should have done to protect themselves from Israeli fire.

Many news accounts later claimed that the two were under fire for forty-five minutes, but the action captured on camera lasts a very brief time. Jamal looks around desperately. Mohammed slides down behind him, as if to make his body disappear behind his father's. Jamal clutches a pack of cigarettes in his left hand, while he alternately waves and cradles his son with his right. The sound of gunfire is heard, and four bullet holes appear in the wall just to the left of the pair. The father starts yelling. There is another burst. Mohammed goes limp and falls forward across his father's lap, his shirt stained with blood. Jamal, too, is hit, and his head starts bobbling. The camera cuts away. Although France 2 or its cameraman may have footage that it or he has chosen not to release, no other visual record of the shooting or its immediate aftermath is known to exist. Other Palestinian casualties of the day are shown being evacuated, but there is no known on-tape evidence of the boy's being picked up, tended to, loaded into an ambulance, or handled in any other way after he was shot.

The footage of the shooting is unforgettable, and it illustrates the way in which television transforms reality. I have seen it replayed at least a hundred times now, and on each repetition I can't help hoping that this time the boy will get himself down low enough, this time the shots will miss. Through the compression involved in editing the footage for a news report, the scene acquired a clear story line by the time European, American, and Middle Eastern audiences saw it on television: Palestinians throw rocks. Israeli soldiers, from the slits in their outpost, shoot back. A little boy is murdered.

What is known about the rest of the day is fragmentary and additionally confusing. A report from a nearby hospital says that a dead boy was admitted on September 30, with two gun wounds to the left side of his torso. But according to the photocopy I saw, the report also says that the boy was admitted at 1:00 P.M.; the tape shows that Mohammed was shot later in the afternoon. The doctor's report also notes, without further explanation, that the dead boy had a cut down his belly about eight inches long. A boy's body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag but with his face exposed, was later carried through the streets to a burial site (the exact timing is in dispute). The face looks very much like Mohammed's in the video footage. Thousands of mourners lined the route. A BBC TV report on the funeral began, "A Palestinian boy has been martyred." Many of the major U.S. news organizations reported that the funeral was held on the evening of September 30, a few hours after the shooting. Oddly, on film the procession appears to take place in full sunlight, with shadows indicative of midday.

In the fall of last year Gabriel Weimann mentioned the Mohammed al-Dura case in a special course that he teaches at the Israeli Military Academy, National Security and Mass Media. Like most adults in Israel, Weimann, a tall, athletic-looking man in his early fifties, still performs up to thirty days of military-reserve duty a year. His reserve rank is sergeant, whereas the students in his class are lieutenant colonels and above.

To underscore the importance of the media in international politics, Weimann shows some of his students a montage of famous images from past wars: for World War II the flag raising at Iwo Jima; for Vietnam the South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head and the little girl running naked down a path with napalm on her back. For the current intifada, Weimann told his students, the lasting iconic image would be the frightened face of Mohammed al-Dura.

One day last fall, after he discussed the images, a student spoke up. "I was there," he said. "We didn't do it."

"Prove it," Weimann said. He assigned part of the class, as its major research project, a reconsideration of the evidence in the case. A surprisingly large amount was available. The students began by revisiting an investigation undertaken by the Israeli military soon after the event.

Shortly after the shooting General Samia was contacted by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist and engineer who had worked closely with the IDF on the design of pilotless drone aircraft. While watching the original news broadcasts of the shooting Shahaf had been alarmed, like most viewers inside and outside Israel. But he had also noticed an apparent anomaly. The father seemed to be concerned mainly about a threat originating on the far side of the barrel behind which he had taken shelter. Yet when he and his son were shot, the barrel itself seemed to be intact. What, exactly, did this mean?

Samia commissioned Shahaf and an engineer, Yosef Duriel, to work on a second IDF investigation of the case. "The reason from my side is to check and clean up our values," Samia later told Bob Simon, of CBS. He said he wanted "to see that we are still acting as the IDF." Shahaf stressed to Samia that the IDF should do whatever it could to preserve all physical evidence. But because so much intifada activity continued in the Netzarim area, the IDF demolished the wall and all related structures. Shahaf took one trip to examine the crossroads, clad in body armor and escorted by Israeli soldiers. Then, at a location near Beersheba, Shahaf, Duriel, and others set up models of the barrel, the wall, and the IDF shooting position, in order to re-enact the crucial events.

Bullets had not been recovered from the boy's body at the hospital, and the family was hardly willing to agree to an exhumation to re-examine the wounds. Thus the most important piece of physical evidence was the concrete barrel. In the TV footage it clearly bears a mark from the Israeli Bureau of Standards, which enabled investigators to determine its exact dimensions and composition. When they placed the equivalent in front of a concrete wall and put mannequins representing father and son behind it, a conclusion emerged: soldiers in the Israeli outpost could not have fired the shots whose impact was shown on TV. The evidence was cumulative and reinforcing. It involved the angle, the barrel, the indentations, and the dust.

Mohammed al-Dura and his father looked as if they were sheltering themselves against fire from the IDF outpost. In this they were successful. The films show that the barrel was between them and the Israeli guns. The line of sight from the IDF position to the pair was blocked by concrete. Conceivably, some other Israeli soldier was present and fired from some other angle, although there is no evidence of this and no one has ever raised it as a possibility; and there were Palestinians in all the other places, who would presumably have noticed the presence of additional IDF troops. From the one location where Israeli soldiers are known to have been, the only way to hit the boy would have been to shoot through the concrete barrel.

This brings us to the nature of the barrel. Its walls were just under two inches thick. On the test range investigators fired M-16 bullets at a similar barrel. Each bullet made an indentation only two fifths to four fifths of an inch deep. Penetrating the barrel would have required multiple hits on both sides of the barrel's wall. The videos of the shooting show fewer than ten indentations on the side of the barrel facing the IDF, indicating that at some point in the day's exchanges of fire the Israelis did shoot at the barrel. But photographs taken after the shooting show no damage of any kind on the side of the barrel facing the al-Duras—that is, no bullets went through.

Further evidence involves the indentations in the concrete wall. The bullet marks that appear so ominously in the wall seconds before the fatal volley are round. Their shape is significant because of what it indicates about the angle of the gunfire. The investigators fired volleys into a concrete wall from a variety of angles. They found that in order to produce a round puncture mark, they had to fire more or less straight on. The more oblique the angle, the more elongated and skidlike the hole became.

The dust resulting from a bullet's impact followed similar rules. A head-on shot produced the smallest, roundest cloud of dust. The more oblique the angle, the larger and longer the cloud of dust. In the video of the shooting the clouds of dust near the al-Duras' heads are small and round. Shots from the IDF outpost would necessarily have been oblique.

In short, the physical evidence of the shooting was in all ways inconsistent with shots coming from the IDF outpost—and in all ways consistent with shots coming from someplace behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location of the Pita. Making a positive case for who might have shot the boy was not the business of the investigators hired by the IDF. They simply wanted to determine whether the soldiers in the outpost were responsible. Because the investigation was overseen by the IDF and run wholly by Israelis, it stood no chance of being taken seriously in the Arab world. But its fundamental point—that the concrete barrel lay between the outpost and the boy, and no bullets had gone through the barrel—could be confirmed independently from news footage.

[Ball DeBeaver]

The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf's evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father's lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead? Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if "directing" a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear—based on the length of shadows—to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father's shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, "The boy is dead" before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?

A handful of Israeli and foreign commentators have taken up Shahaf's cause. A Web site called masada2000.org says of the IDF's initial apology, "They acknowledged guilt, for never in their collective minds would any one of them have imagined a scenario whereby Mohammed al-Dura might have been murdered by his own people ... a cruel plot staged and executed by Palestinian sharp-shooters and a television cameraman!" Amnon Lord, writing for the magazine Makor Rishon, referred to a German documentary directed by Esther Schapira that was "based on Shahaf's own decisive conclusion" and that determined "that Muhammad Al-Dura was not killed by IDF gunfire at Netzarim junction." "Rather," Lord continued, "the Palestinians, in cooperation with foreign journalists and the UN, arranged a well-staged production of his death." In March of this year a French writer, Gérard Huber, published a book called Contre expertise d'une mise en scène (roughly, Re-evaluation of a Re-enactment). It, too, argues that the entire event was staged. In an e-mail message to me Huber said that before knowing of Shahaf's studies he had been aware that "the images of little Mohammed were part of the large war of images between Palestinians and Israelis." But until meeting Shahaf, he said, "I had not imagined that it involved a fiction"—a view he now shares. "The question of 'Who killed little Mohammed?'" he said, "has become a screen to disguise the real question, which is: 'Was little Mohammed actually killed?'"

The truth about this case will probably never be determined. Or, to put it more precisely, no version of truth that is considered believable by all sides will ever emerge. For most of the Arab world, the rights and wrongs of the case are beyond dispute: an innocent boy was murdered, and his blood is on Israel's hands. Mention of contrary evidence or hypotheses only confirms the bottomless dishonesty of the guilty parties—much as Holocaust-denial theories do in the Western world. For the handful of people collecting evidence of a staged event, the truth is also clear, even if the proof is not in hand. I saw Nahum Shahaf lose his good humor only when I asked him what he thought explained the odd timing of the boy's funeral, or the contradictions in eyewitness reports, or the other loose ends in the case. "I don't 'think,' I know!" he said several times. "I am a physicist. I work from the evidence." Schapira had collaborated with him for the German documentary and then produced a film advancing the "minimum" version of his case, showing that the shots did not, could not have, come from the IDF outpost. She disappointed him by not embracing the maximum version—the all-encompassing hoax—and counseled him not to talk about a staged event unless he could produce a living boy or a cooperative eyewitness. Shahaf said that he still thought well of her, and that he was not discouraged. "I am only two and a half years into this work," he told me. "It took twelve years for the truth of the Dreyfus case to come out."

For anyone else who knows about Mohammed al-Dura but is not in either of the decided camps—the Arabs who are sure they know what happened, the revisionists who are equally sure—the case will remain in the uncomfortable realm of events that cannot be fully explained or understood. "Maybe it was an accidental shooting," Gabriel Weimann told me, after reading his students' report, which, like the German documentary, supported the "minimum" conclusion—the Israeli soldiers at the outpost could not have killed the boy. (He could not show the report to me, he said, on grounds of academic confidentiality.) "Maybe even it was staged—although I don't think my worst enemy is so inhuman as to shoot a boy for the sake of publicity. Beyond that, I do not know." Weimann's recent work involves the way that television distorts reality in attempting to reconstruct it, by putting together loosely related or even random events in what the viewer imagines is a coherent narrative flow. The contrast between the confusing, contradictory hours of raw footage from the Netzarim crossroads and the clear, gripping narrative of the evening news reports assembled from that footage is a perfect example, he says.

The significance of this case from the American perspective involves the increasingly chaotic ecology of truth around the world. In Arab and Islamic societies the widespread belief that Israeli soldiers shot this boy has political consequences. So does the belief among some Israelis and Zionists in Israel and abroad that Palestinians will go to any lengths to smear them. Obviously, these beliefs do not create the basic tensions in the Middle East. The Israeli policy of promoting settlements in occupied territory, and the Palestinian policy of terror, are deeper obstacles. There would never have been a showdown at the Netzarim crossroads, or any images of Mohammed al-Dura's shooting to be parsed in different ways, if there were no settlement nearby for IDF soldiers to protect. Gabriel Weimann is to the left of Dan Schueftan on Israel's political spectrum, but both believe that Israel should end its occupation. I would guess that Nahum Shahaf thinks the same thing, even though he told me that to preserve his "independence" as a researcher, he wanted to "isolate myself from any kind of political question."

The images intensify the self-righteous determination of each side. If anything, modern technology has aggravated the problem of mutually exclusive realities. With the Internet and TV, each culture now has a more elaborate apparatus for "proving," dramatizing, and disseminating its particular truth.

In its engagement with the Arab world the United States has assumed that what it believes are noble motives will be perceived as such around the world. We mean the best for the people under our control; stability, democracy, prosperity, are our goals; why else would we have risked so much to help an oppressed people achieve them? The case of Mohammed al-Dura suggests the need for much more modest assumptions about the way other cultures—in particular today's embattled Islam—will perceive our truths.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/06/who-shot-mohammed-al-dura/302735/

It has been widely known for many years that Israel wasn't to blame for the boys "death" but it is the palestinians that continue to peddle the lie that he was murdered by IDF.

Would you like more?

[seafoid]

For some reason this case was taken up by the jewish establishment. A rabidly zionist French jew brought it to court. Even though the IDF admitted responsibility. Show us the child did not die Beaver. You are unable to. Why is this case so.important compared to 1518 others? Possibly child murder by jewish soldiers. Ancient accusations. Very damaging .

[Ball DeBeaver]

Oh sweet jesus and all the saints.


Prove to me that the tooth fairy exists. I demand photos and a sisgned confession.

[muppet]

Oh sweet jesus and all the saints.


Prove to me that the tooth fairy exists. I demand photos and a sisgned confession.

You are a Catholic aren't you?

[Ball DeBeaver]

Not right now, no.

Is it a pre-requisite for posting?

[seafoid]

Oh sweet jesus and all the saints.


Prove to me that the tooth fairy exists. I demand photos and a sisgned confession.

if he wasn't hurt, prove it. I really.do.not understand what you are trying to do. So what if Israel killed him. He wasn't the first. It is not like zionism cares about Palestinian kids. The tooth fairy is a fabrication , like most of your stuff.

[give her dixie]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0514-occupation-20130514,0,1649848.story


Stop ignoring how routine the occupation has become

By Ori Nir
May 14, 2013

Israel TV Channel 2 recently ran a lengthy report of pre-dawn arrests of Palestinian children — rock-throwing suspects — at a West Bank Palestinian refugee camp. The TV crew was embedded with an Israeli unit that raided the camp.

No, there was no blood, no violent confrontations and no big drama. Everything was done routinely, efficiently, as if scripted. Including the polite soldiers ("please get dressed") and the business-as-usual reactions of tweens who moments ago were in bed and are now handcuffed and blindfolded, in a military jeep. One of them, a boy named Ahmad who seemed around 10, tried to negotiate. "Tomorrow I have an exam. I will be thrown out of school if I don't take the test," he tried to reason with the soldiers. "Had you come any other day, I would have gone with you. Please!" Then he manned up and joined the soldiers.

So what's new? What's the big deal, my wife asked me when I told her about the report. That's exactly the point, I replied. The big deal is that there is nothing new, that this routine has been going on for 46 years. My wife and I, both former reporters, reminisced about covering such night raids together, more than 26 years ago.

Ads by Google

Next month, Israelis and Palestinians will mark the 46th anniversary of the occupation. Think about it: For almost half a century, Israeli kids in their late teens have been arresting Palestinian kids in their early teens. Night in, night out, year after year. Guilty or not, justified or not, due process or not — these are not really the questions.

What bothers so many Palestinians and Israelis — among them the six former Israeli General Security Service chiefs who were interviewed for the award-winning documentary "The Gatekeepers" — is how routine it has all become. Israelis and Palestinians live with the perpetuation of the anomaly that the occupation is.

Consider this: Only 7 percent of Palestinians and 19 percent of Israelis are over the age of 55. That means that a small minority of both populations remembers life without occupation. Only a sliver of the Palestinian public has any recollection of not living under a foreign military occupation. For Palestinians, resisting the occupation — the only reality they know — is a way of life. For Israelis, oppressing the Palestinians is perceived at best as necessary evil. And so they both live with the banality of this anomaly.

Nissim Levi, a 20-year veteran of the Israeli GSS, several years ago described the impact of this routine. You go to a Palestinian village to arrest a suspect named Muhammed, he told Israel's Haaretz newspaper. "From the moment you leave for the village, to take the man and go, you create four more potential terrorists. ... You are entering a small room, in which five people are sleeping, and in order to get to my Muhammed, I need to step on four people." He continued: "On the way to enter the village to arrest someone, I already created damage."

How much damage? According to estimates by the Palestinian Authority's Bureau of Statistics, Israel has made more than 800,000 arrests of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. That is an average of almost 50 arrests per day. Go calculate the damage.

Israelis and Palestinians know that their relationship is not normal. They should be shown, however, that it could be different, that things can change. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are now trying to launch a process that would do just that. They deserve our support.

Ori Nir is the spokesman of Americans for Peace Now, an American Jewish nonprofit that is the sister organization of Israel's Peace Now movement.

[Ball DeBeaver]

What's your solution, oh wise one? Ack sure its only a few rocks.
Children have been killed by rocks thrown at cars.

[seafoid]

What's your solution, oh wise one? Ack sure its only a few rocks.
Children have been killed by rocks thrown at cars.

The solution now is one man one vote. If Israelis don't like it they should get the settlers home.

[give her dixie]

The Nakba is a past and a present, a continuous and developing process of Zionist colonization

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the historic ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist movement, and the establishment of the State of Israel on the rubble of hundreds of emptied, destroyed villages.

Nakba Day continues to grow in prominence as a time for remembrance and protest, an alternative history to the narrative of Israeli 'independence', and a reminder that the 'miracle' of a Jewish state was actually realised through the historically familiar methods of expulsion and colonial erasure. But this is more than just an anniversary or commemoration. In three important ways, the Nakba is not simply confined to the history books.

First, the Nakba is a defining event. Many potted histories or summaries of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" cover 1948 with a sentence like this: 'The State of Israel declares independence and is immediately attacked by its Arab neighbours'. The Palestinian refugees emerge in the narrative as if by magic, or as a vague consequence of war.

Yet the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is the heart and soul of the Palestinian people's struggle. This is how a landscape was obliterated and communities destroyed; homes, schools and mosques disappearing under rolling explosions, citrus groves and fields of crops separated from their owners. Palestinian lives are shaped by the Nakba, from refugee camps and fragmented families to destroyed livelihoods and murdered loved ones.

The Nakba is how a Jewish majority was established in the first place, and thus it is no wonder that many people wish to consign it to 'the past'. For just as its impact is felt deeply in Palestinian society so also the Nakba is a defining event for Zionism and the State of Israel - the inconvenient truth that turns myths to dust, the reminder of - in the words of Meron Benvenisti - 'what lies beneath'. Nakba denial is commonplace, a history covered up by distortions and counterfactuals in the same way Jewish National Fund forests were planted over the rubble of Palestinian villages.

Second, the Nakba is also an ongoing event, and not just in the sense that the Palestinian refugees still await return and restitution. The Nakba is a past and a present, a continuous and developing process of Zionist colonization. You can see it in the discriminatory and colonial logic of the land regime and planning laws inside the pre-1967 lines, designed to maintain Jewish spatial hegemony and guard against the threat of the land being 'lost' to its indigenous people.

The admission committees that exclude Palestinians from the kibbutzim and moshavim built on top of ethnically cleansed villages. The 'look out' communities built by the state and the Jewish Agency in the Galilee in order to 'break up' areas of Palestinian territorial contiguity. Zionist forces often described Palestinian villages in 1948 as simply enemy bases to be cleansed. How little has changed, when the existence of Palestinian communities is seen as a threatening presence to be fragmented and watched over by Jewish citizens.

Catastrophes are experienced daily by Palestinians in the south Hebron Hills, Jordan Valley and East Jerusalem, when the bulldozers and soldiers arrive to demolish homes and shelters. More catastrophes are planned, in the name of 'development', 'security' or even 'tourism' - like in the Negev where, 65 years after soldiers pushed them into the 'Fence', Bedouin Palestinians face another mass expulsion.

Third, the Nakba is a paradigm-shaping event. Palestine is not about 1967, warring tribes, a family dispute, or religious fundamentalism. It's not about negotiations over a border dispute or 'confidence-building measures'. It's about settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, about the establishment of an ethnocracy and the exclusion of an indigenous people. Decades before Oslo, before the first red-roofed settlement on the West Bank hilltops, before Hamas and the Quartet, the Catastrophe happened.

Having a Nakba-defined paradigm is not about 'intransigence' or wishing an impossible return to a long-lost past. It is about understanding the roots of what has unfolded over the decades - the establishment of a state for one people at the expense of another, the maintenance of a regime of privilege for some while excluding others to the point of destroying their very existence in the land. It is in the roots where we search most fruitfully for an answer: equality and return, a decolonized space and state that welcomes back and does not expel.

Finally, as a defining, ongoing, and paradigm-shaping event, the Nakba is also therefore, an urgent call to action. The Catastrophe must end.

http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/debate/6012-the-nakba-is-a-past-and-a-present-a-continuous-and-developing-process-of-zionist-colonization