Tuesday, May 15, 4:30-6:30pm
Broad Street United Methodist Church, 501 E. Broad St.
We will gather outside Broad St. United Methodist Church (corner of E. Broad St and S. Washington Ave) at 4:30 PM for a March to the Statehouse.

This event is in the planning stage. Please contact us if you would like to be part of the planning of this event at centralohio@jvp.org or message us on Facebook. We need speakers who can relate the history to the continued displacement of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 

What is the Nakba? The 1948 war uprooted 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, creating a refugee crisis that is still not resolved. Palestinians call this mass eviction the Nakba - Arabic for "catastrophe" - and its legacy remains one of the most intractable issues in ongoing peace negotiations. Palestinians see a decades long, premeditated Israeli campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Arab population. Today, there more than 7 million Palestinian refugees, defined as people displaced in 1948 and their descendants. A core Palestinian demand in peace negotiations is for justice for these refugees, most commonly in the form of the "right of return" as guaranteed under international law. 

We remember the Nakba because: 

Nakba denial has been one of the most prominent methods of erasing the history of Palestine and the rights of Palestinians. Even use of the word "Nakba" in school textbooks belonging to Palestinian citizens of Israel has been banned and all references to the Nakba condemned as "terrorist propaganda." 

The Nakba law in Israel imposes sanctions on institutions that finance Nakba activities. This pattern of Nakba denial and distorting the narrative culminates in a recent bill to criminalize commemoration of the Nakba. 

The Palestinian narrative of their own experiences is dismissed, disputed and rejected as anti-Semitic, and Palestinians are even accused of being responsible for their own expulsion.