On the 50th anniversary of Israeli occupation, Palestinians see an ever-bleak future as they continue to live under apartheid, facing daily humiliation and injustice and watch the Israeli regime erase Palestinian and Muslim identity from the land. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/gntv
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00I'm from Aqqa in Palestine. It's in the north. I think it's very close to Lebanon and it's
00:13now occupied by Israel.
00:15I'm from Deir al-Asi, which is a village just outside of Aqqa, which is currently occupied
00:21by the Israeli government.
00:24I'm from Nazareth, Palestine, which is in the northern part of Palestine and it's part
00:31of the lands that were taken in 1948.
00:34My dad is Palestinian-Syrian. We're from Safad in Palestine. So we left Palestine, my family
00:40left Palestine in 1948 in the first Nakba.
00:44I'm Palestinian. I'm 20 years old and I'm from Tulkarem in Palestine.
00:50It hurts that when you see on the news, you constantly see these conflicts happening.
00:54You see your own people, that's how you capture it, your own people struggling and being put
01:05in the worst possible scenario as human beings.
01:11I have Palestinian documents that state I'm a Palestinian refugee, which makes it hard
01:15for me to travel in general. But as a Palestinian, it's just hard not to be able to visit the
01:23place where you're from, where your family's been.
01:26If I do visit Safad, because it's under the Israeli occupation, it's considered Israeli
01:33territory. I get stamped with an Israeli stamp and then I can't come back.
01:39My grandma told me that in 1948, she told me about the day that it happened, honestly.
01:45She was there at home and my grandma had two kids at the time, not my dad. My dad wasn't
01:50born then. And on that day, she told me people knocked on their door, which they were Israeli
01:57soldiers, and they asked them to get their stuff and leave, just like that.
02:01So my grandma told me she grabbed her two kids and she told me a funny story where she
02:07had very expensive plates and she really loved them. So she went outside to the backyard
02:12and she opened a hole in the ground, in the sand, and she buried some of them because
02:17she didn't want them to break if anything happened. Because all that you think back
02:21then is that you're going to come back.
02:23So when my dad was about 20, 30 years old, he was in Tulkarem, he was around Tulkarem
02:28when the Six-Day War happened. And it was a lot of chaos, obviously. It wasn't easy
02:34to live at the time there. He did face a lot of troubles going, because he was studying
02:41in Baghdad, so he'd go between Palestine and Baghdad, and it was very difficult to do that.
02:47So he would try to stay away from Palestine at that time because it was difficult to go
02:51in and go out, obviously. The checkpoints weren't something easy to go through at all.
02:56So it was difficult. And he told me a lot of stories about him trying to commute from
03:01place to place, and everything was just so difficult there at the time. So it was a very
03:06catastrophic time.
03:07I have more emotions towards 1948 than to 1967. But then 1967 is also, it's kind of
03:15like a year that nobody wants to remember because, I mean, losing in six days to Israel
03:21so many territories is not something that people generally feel very happy to talk about.
03:27Because people were assuming that after 1948 things would, like, this is the worst we can
03:34get and we're only going to get better. But then 1967 proved wrong, that, you know, things
03:40can get even worse.
03:41Think about asking or telling, for example, an Englishman or an American man, you can't
03:48go back home. You can't see what your home looks like. You can see it from the news,
03:52from videos and such. But it hurts that other people, other people can go. They claim it's
04:02their home. It might be now. But at the same time, they have people living there with them.
04:10They have the Palestinians there with them. Even the Palestinians are spread all around
04:14the world. They have a right to visit. They have a right to see what their home is like.
04:19I'm very proud of who I am and I always, even when now I hold passports, but if anyone
04:23asks me where I'm from, I would always say I'm Palestinian. Just holder of a passport.
04:30And we're very proud of where we're from. Like, in our house, everywhere in our house
04:34we're always surrounded by photographs and paintings of our country.
04:39What it means to be a Palestinian is to be courageous, to stand up for my people no matter
04:44what, to fight against the occupation and to fight for our freedom. That's my job as
04:53a Palestinian.