'To all those for whom these villages were home and to their descendants'

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Amr Abu Daeb and family. Israelis demolished their house in East Jerusalem two weeks ago.

According to Ma'an News: "The director of the cartographic department in the society for Arab Studies, Khalil Toufakji, has warned of an ethnic cleansing operation against some 24,000 Palestinians in the old city of Jerusalem."

"Rubble from village houses" in Al-Mansura. Al-Mansura was ethnically cleansed in mid-November, 1948 when "Israel decided to empty the Israeli side of the Israeli-Lebanese border of its Arab villages." According to Walid Khalidi in All That Remains, "The people of al-Mansura were ordered to leave; some crossed into Lebanon but most were taken in trucks to the village of al-Rama, to the south." The villagers have sought to return home to Al-Mansura for many years, but to no avail, as Israel, in violation of UN Resolution 194 and Article 13, Section 2, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, refuses their inalienable right to return home because they are not Jewish.

The Zionists have razed all the houses in the village. In 1944/45, 26,619 dunums of land were owned by Arabs. Jews owned nothing. "The only village structure that still stands is the church of Mari Yohanna."

Khalidi, Walid. All That Remains: The Palestinan Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies: Washington, D.C., 1991.

Khalidi's Dedication: "To all those for whom these villages were home and to their descendents."

# posted by umkahlil @ 9:10 PM