Press Releases

Bethlehem, August 2008: The BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights announces the release of the Autumn 2008 / Winter 2009 issue of al-Majdal, Badil's English-language quarterly magazine.

This issue of al-Majdal is meant as the last of our publications on the sixtieth anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, and the first of our publications on the Ongoing Nakba now in its 61st year. As this issue was going to print, Israel launched its major military offensive against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, opening another chapter of Palestine's Ongoing Nakba. The Israeli assault on Gaza, in many ways, is the Ongoing Nakba in a nutshell: Palestinians, uprooted and displaced in the past, are continually squeezed into ever-smaller pieces of land, and continually subjected to displacement, brutal military violence and the ongoing violation of the most basic of their human rights.

The main feature of this third and last installment of our special Nakba-60 trilogy focuses on a central aspect of the Ongoing Nakba: the systematic, ongoing and arbitrary forced displacement of Palestinians throughout historic Palestine by Israel. The articles describe the policies and practices used by Israel to forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes inside Israel [specifically Jaffa, Akka, and the Naqab] and in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) [specifically Jerusalem, West Bank Villages, the Jordan Valley and the Arab Jahalin] and the various ways in which Palestinians struggle to protect themselves from displacement. While each article stands on its own in describing the Ongoing Nakba as it has affected a particular community, the stories combined offer a clear – albeit by no means comprehensive - picture of the cost for the Palestinian people of Israel's racist colonial enterprise.

The issue also includes a retrospective look at UN General Assembly Resolution 194 sixty-years after it was first issued, a preliminary assessment of the international response to the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians in the OPT, as well as a review of Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh's A Doctor in Galilee, with a reflection by the author on the process of writing the book. On the back cover of the print issue is one of the latest poem by Palestinian refugee poet Suheir Hammad titled jabaliya, named after the largest refugee camp in Palestine located in Gaza and heavily targeted in Israel's recent military assault.

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Visit the al-Majdal homepage at: http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/al-majdal.htm
or download the full PDF version of this issue of al-Majdal at: http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2008/autumn-winter/majdal39-40.pdf
Annual subscriptions to the printed version of the magazine are available for Euro 25 (4 issues).
Subscribe online at: http://www.badil.org/paypal/publications.htm
or through email requests addressed to the editor at: [email protected]