Dear Meteor readers,

This week one of the world’s most respected Palestinian American journalists, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the Palestinian city of Jenin. Shireen was wearing a  bulletproof vest clearly marked “PRESS” and helmet when she was struck precisely in the head by an Israeli sniper.

Over the last three days, millions of Palestinians—myself included—have been holding vigils, organizing protests, and sharing our love and our demands for justice for Shireen. As we mourn the collective loss of someone who was a “big sister” to all of us, I was taken back to the first time I remember seeing Shireen on TV.

In 2000, my brothers and I were sitting on the floor of my grandparents’ living room in New Jersey playing dominos and eating freshly cut apples. My Sidi (Arabic for grandfather) was sitting in his chair in the back right corner of the room glued to the TV, as usual. At the time, I truly believed Al Jazeera was the only channel my grandparents had in their home because it was the only thing ever on their TV. I hated it, mainly because I couldn’t understand a word being spoken.

But on this particular day, I vividly remember my Sidi watching the television and crying. I glanced at the screen and saw the horrific live news coverage of what I’d later learn was the Second Intifada, being narrated by a beautifully brave woman with the most eloquent Arabic accent I had ever heard.

Shireen was a calming voice of reason in the face of endless traumas: settler-colonialism, illegal military occupation, generational displacement, and the apathy of the global community. She took an inconvenient and dangerous truth—one that has been suppressed and distorted for the last seven decades—and reported it as clearly and as honestly as any journalist could ever hope to, even in the face of unyielding violence. She did it for nearly 25 years. And she did it for us. The calculated executions she once covered with unwavering conviction became the very story that claimed her life.

It is a painful coincidence that the week we lost a powerful voice for Palestine is the same week we commemorate the 74th anniversary of Al-Nakba, on May 15th. In today’s newsletter, psychologist Dr. Shirin Zarqa-Lederman writes about the “catastrophe” that altered the course of world history and changed her own family’s life forever.

But first, a little bit of news.

In Shireen’s honor,

Jenan A. Matari

WHAT’S GOING ON

Lady Liberty gets it right: On Thursday, an anonymous group dropped a 30-foot green banner at the Statue of Liberty with the words “ABORTION = LIBERTY” emblazoned on it. This is, of course, in response to the leaked SCOTUS opinion warning that the justices intend to overturn Roe.  The organizers told the Meteor they, “refuse to stand idly by as one of our most fundamental rights is stripped away from us.” The green is a reference to the fight for reproductive rights in Latin America, dubbed the Green Wave—now coming to the United States. Join the movement: abortion rights protests are planned across the country today. If you want to find one near you, check here. #AbortionEqualsLiberty.

About those trigger laws…: As of now, pregnant people in Louisiana will not be charged with murder for having abortions. The state house has thankfully rejected a particularly terrifying anti-abortion bill—HB 813—that would have categorized life as beginning at conception and could have opened up the possibility of criminal prosecution for women who choose abortion. For now, the bill is dead, but there are 13 states that have already passed trigger laws. Here is a list of things you can do to protect abortion rights in these states and beyond.

AND: 

• Is Musk going to buy Twitter or what? This plot needs to die.

• Britney Griner will be detained in Russia for another month. It’s already been 86 days. Bring BG home.

• The defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard carries on, and throughout it,  Heard has been memed, mocked, and called a fraud. So as The Cut asks, what happened to ‘Believe women‘?

PALESTINIAN HISTORY

The Lasting Trauma of Al-Nakba 

Seventy-four years after the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, we’re still here. 

BY DR. SHIRIN ZARQA-LEDERMAN

A DEMONSTRATION COMMEMORATING AL-NAKBA IN GERMANY, 2021 (PHOTO BY CARSTEN COALL VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

“At some point in every Palestinian’s life, we realize that Al-Nakba is far from over.”—Mohammad Al-Kurd, Palestinian poet and activist

In 1948, when my father was just shy of 13 years old, he and his family were forcibly exiled from their village of Ein Karem in Jerusalem, Palestine, along with 750,000 other Indigenous Palestinians. Every year on May 15th, we commemorate this violent displacement known as Al-Nakba, which translates to “the catastrophe.” Al-Nakba was the colonial campaign that forcibly removed Palestinians from their homes beginning in 1947 in order to create the state of Israel—a displacement that continues to this day.

Now 86, my father often regaled us with stories of a pre-Nakba Palestine. He would talk about the kazoz (Arabic for soda) factory that my grandfather would take him to after a day at their olive orchard in Jabil Al Rawas. He would tell us about sitting Sukkot with his Jewish friends until the rain drenched the earth. During Easter, he dyed eggs using onion peels and red currants with his Christian neighbors.  And during Ramadan, his Jewish and Christian friends would fast right alongside him. While pre-Nakba Palestine, of course, had its fair share of societal issues, many Palestinians who were there recall a land that was a religious haven for the three Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). My dad lights up when he tells those stories—but you can see the light dimming as his mind ultimately always leads his thoughts back to Al-Nakba and to the trauma he and our family endured.

The fate of Palestine had actually been decided long before my father’s time. In 1897, at the first World Zionist Congress, Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl declared that Palestine would be the Jewish homeland, and the theft of Palestine was later negotiated by Herzl and Lord Balfour of England in an agreement known as the Balfour Declaration—which stated that Palestine would be the “national home for the Jewish people.” This declaration did not officially establish the state of Israel, but was further supported by the British Mandate over Palestine, issued by the newly formed League of Nations in 1923, which “gave Britain the responsibility for creating a Jewish national homeland in the region.”

Zionists began encouraging more members of the Jewish faith from Eastern Europe to migrate to Palestine, falsely describing the territory as “a land without a people, for a people without a land.” Antisemitism in Europe had long existed and the Jewish communities of Europe were already seeking refuge in Palestine. Palestinians welcomed them, even hosting Jewish refugees in their homes.

Imagine two white men—and the international community—deciding to train armed guards to remove you from your home with the support of multiple governments. That’s what happened to my dad.

Recently, I asked my father how much he remembers of the massacre of Deir Yassin in April of 1948, a village only three miles from his home. The survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre fled to my father’s village for protection from Zionist paramilitary groups. After a long pause, he said, “I remember most, [that] women and children were running towards us crying, so many of them were bloody,” and then he quickly reverted back to the political failures of the era.

THE AUTHOR’S FATHER (CENTER) WITH HIS SIBLINGS IN PALESTINE IN THE 1940s. (PHOTO COURTESY OF SHIRIN ZARQA-LEDERMAN) 

By the time Al-Nakba formally ended in 1949, 13,000 Palestinians had been killed, some 530 villages had been decimated, and Israel had occupied 78% of historic Palestine. My father, his parents, and his siblings fled to Jordan, where a refugee camp had been established; my grandfather farmed in the Jordan Valley until he could afford to buy a piece of property and eventually built a home for his family.

In December of 1949, the United Nations passed Resolution 194, which declared that the 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled during Al-Nakba had a right to return to their property or be compensated for their losses. (Palestinians who remained in occupied territory were given residency as “Arab-Israelis.”) In 1952, Israel did allow members of the Jewish communities of Palestine to return to their lands where they were welcomed as Israelis. However, many Christian and Muslim Palestinians were not allowed to return to their homes and were never given any compensation.

As a Palestinian in the United States being denied the right to return to my ancestral homeland is just one dimension of the generational trauma my family and I experience. A key thing I’ve learned about trauma is that a person cannot begin to heal from it until the traumatic experience ends. But nearly every day, even in 2022, there is footage of some violent act being inflicted on the people of Palestine. Children are shot and arrested, held without charge on the same streets where my father once roamed freely as a child. Thousands of homes are demolished, creating more Palestinian refugees and ensuring that healing can never truly begin. Yet in spite of it all, we remain. In our homeland and across the diaspora we fight, and rally, and shout, and above all we remember. We remember and we hold the pain of our elders so that the Indigenous people of Palestine—no matter their religion—are not forgotten.

That is the burden, the trauma, that follows countless generations who may never experience the peace my father once did, walking to a soda factory from an olive orchard. It is the legacy of Al-Nakba. But so is our steadfastness.

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