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The memory of the Nakba .. the most that opens our appetite for words that have not been silenced or lost despite all those years and days that have passed.. the Palestinian people have not recovered their wounds despite the passage of 74 years since their Nakba, and the smell of orchards, the keys to return and the simple details of life still dominate the stories of our ancestors wherever they go.

In both the interior and the diaspora, the Palestinians commemorate on May 15 of each year the anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, when the Zionist gangs abandoned them from their homes, and established on their lands what became known as “Israel” under the eyes of most of the British Mandate forces - thousands were killed, the majority of them children. Hundreds of thousands of them were displaced over the course of two decades, either as internally displaced persons inside what remains of Palestine, which the Zionist gangs cannot reach, or as refugees to neighboring countries (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq).

Even these displaced persons and refugees still dream of returning to Palestine, and many of them carry to this day the keys to their homes from which they were displaced.. And whoever died before his dream was realized, he inherited his dream to his children and grandchildren after him.

What does the right of return mean?

It is the right of the Palestinian who was expelled or left his homeland for any reason in 1948 or at any time after that.. It is the right to return to the home, land or home in which he lived a normal life before 1948.

This right applies to every Palestinian, whether he is a man or a woman, and it also applies to the offspring of either of them, regardless of their number, location, place of birth, and their political, social and economic circumstances.

It is an internationally guaranteed and inalienable right, derived from universally recognized international law, and guaranteed by the articles of the Universal Charter of Human Rights promulgated in 1948, as the second paragraph of Article 13 states the following:

 “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

Among the characteristics of the right of return:

It is inalienable, and it is considered one of the inalienable and well-established rights like the rest of human rights, it does not expire with the passage of time and is not subject to negotiation or waiver and does not fall, amend or change its concept in any treaty or political agreement of any kind, even if it is signed by parties representing the Palestinians or It claims to represent them.. it is a personal right, and it will never be forfeited, unless each person himself and of his own free will sign this right for himself only.

The refugee issue began since the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, or the so-called partition resolution, where the division of historical Palestine was imposed into three entities consisting of two states, one of which is Jewish on 55% of the land of Palestine, and the other is Arab and Palestinian on About 44% of the land of Palestine, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem remaining under international trusteeship. The partition decision constituted a justification for the Zionist movement to establish a state on a part of the land of Palestine that exceeded the area mentioned in the partition decision. It also led to the expulsion and displacement of more than half of the Palestinian Arab population from their land, homes and national soil.

In 1948 alone, about 850,000 Palestinians, who constituted at the time 61% of the total Palestinian population of 1,400,000 Palestinians, were displaced to be called "refugees." Most of the Palestinian refugees, following the Nakba of 1948, were concentrated in the Palestinian areas that had escaped the occupation, i.e. in the West Bank and Gaza Strip 80.5%, while 19.5% of the Palestinian refugees were forced to go to the sister Arab countries, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq, and many of them went to economic attractions. In Europe and America, as well as to the Arab Gulf states... the demographic map of the Palestinian people also changed after the Israeli army expelled 460,000 Palestinians in 1967 following the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

On May 15, 1948, the Zionist movement announced the establishment of the State of Israel, and the area of ​​this state expanded to include 77% of the land of Palestine, including the greater part of Jerusalem. In return, Jordan and Egypt controlled the rest of the territories of Palestine, which included (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank), including East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians have been deprived of the right of return guaranteed to them by international and regional covenants and constitutions because of the Israeli intransigence that confronts this right with force, national laws and violence, knowing that all countries of the world have recognized this right except for Israel. Therefore, Israel has benefited from the absence of a Palestinian and Arab strategy to confront settlement and occupation, and make Israel pay the price for its persistence.

Despite the difficult conditions that the Palestinians live in in the areas of asylum, the Palestinian youth adhere to the right to return to their homeland, Palestine. The Arab peoples in general, and the Palestinian people in particular, are aware of the unambiguous truth, which is that the right of return for Palestinian refugees, if implemented, will mean the end of Israel as a racist Jewish state and thus the death of the entire Zionist project.

However, what screams in our hearts and reminds us of the emigration and the Nakba is the horrific state of displacement that the Palestinian refugees from Syria experienced. It was painful for the land to pronounce them twice without any regard for the international community and those who slandered human rights. In their second land, Syria, they are part of the story of a people who were forcibly displaced against their will by force of arms in the shadow of a terrible international silence.

Perhaps the only constant in it is the will of our Palestinian people, who every day invents new methods of resistance that express their originality and adherence to their usurped rights.. As for the occupation, despite the real existential threat it is experiencing, it has made the memory of the Nakba a disaster for it.. The desired stability for this cancerous entity is just an illusion. And that all the frenzied cases of normalization are nothing but bubbles of air, and that any just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region must be based on the recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to return, in accordance with Resolution 194, and the right to self-determination.