What a hope-filled and inspiring day standing with people who care about what is going on in Palestine. Cari and I found ourselves tearing up as we approached Westlake Plaza and saw the crowds and energy. We joined around 2 thousand people to remember the Nakba, or catastrophe of 1948, and to raise our voices against the current violence in the Holy Land. What is the Nakba? Glad you asked.

 

The 1948 war, which Israelis see as the birth of the modern state of Israel, created the crisis that is with us today. While it gave Jews fleeing Europe after the horrors of Nazi German a home, it simultaneously uprooted 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, creating a refugee crisis that is still not resolved today. Cari and I visited several of the camps in 2018, created to temporarily provide residence for the Palestinians who were victims of this initial tragedy. They are still in place! We had regular contact in two camps right in Bethlehem and another large camp outside of Amman, Jordan. These camps have tragically become permanent fixtures across the region. The neighborhood in East Jerusalem, called Sheikh Jarrah, was another neighborhood providing housing for some families expelled in this initial refugee crisis. The current eviction, of 20 families, is now pending before the Israeli Supreme Court. If this happens, and it is only a matter of time before it does, this would make these Palestinians refugees twice. Refugee status has become baked into the Palestinian psyche around the world. Some of our friends here in Seattle have fled or been forced from their homeland because of a multi-pronged strategy by Israel to rid the land of the indigenous people.

 

This is an effort that is part of a larger strategy across the West Bank by the Israeli government to make room for more Israeli settlements. The move to build more settlements in East Jerusalem is an incremental move to cut the West Bank into two sections, thereby eliminating any chance of a contiguous piece of land for Palestine. So the Nakba was the original, initial eviction of Palestinians from their homes and land. And it continues today in places like Sheikh Jarrah. Israel is steadily erasing and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land. The actual word, “Nakba” — Arabic for “catastrophe” — and its legacy remains one of the most intractable issues in ongoing peace negotiations. This is the root of the current uptick in violence in Jerusalem, the broader West Bank, and now other cities across Israel.

 

It’s been a difficult month, inside a difficult decade, really wrapped around the entire lives of some of the people we stood with on Sunday at the Westlake Plaza in downtown Seattle.

 

As you measure humanitarian crises there is nothing like this one. Nowhere. Palestinians are just asking to be seen. To be granted basic human rights. To NOT be ethnically cleansed from the land of their birth. There’s so much that could be said here that is unjust. Wrong. Ugly. But this post seeks to find hope amidst the darkness. Look at these pictures slowly. Notice the beauty in our shared humanity. In our solidarity.