Israelis Commemorate Anniversary In Their Own Particular Way

Paramilitary Police Attack Al-Nakba March

"Away from the cameras, a fifth of the Israeli population -- more than one million Palestinian citizens -- remembered al-Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948 that befell the Palestinian people as the Jewish state was built on the ruins of their society.

As it has been doing for the past decade, Israel’s Palestinian minority staged an alternative act of commemoration: a procession of families, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. The villages were destroyed to ensure that the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from the state under the cover of war never return.

But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year’s march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children."

Gaza Terrified With Inhuman Nighttime Sonic Booms

"Recent disclosures of the Israeli practice of sonic bombing of the 1.3 million fenced in and captive people in the Gaza Strip may take the award for the meanest trick yet. Israel's pilots fly made in the USA F-16 Fighters low and fast, deliberately breaking the sound barrier over sleeping people."