New app created for Palestinian refugees

People releasing balloons attached to Palestinian flags during a rally ahead of the 66th anniversary of Nakba, near the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar near the West Bank City of Nablus. Palestinians will mark Nakba (Catastrophe) on May 15 to commemorate the expulsion or fleeing of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in the war that led to the founding of Israel in 1948.

By Linda Gradstein/The Media Line

Seman grew up in Fasuta, an Arab village near the Lebanese border. But for the past 66 years, he has continued to dream of going home.

“We had a large house in Suhmata and I want to return,” he told The Media Line. “My house was destroyed. Whoever destroyed it should rebuild it.”

Seman formed a website called “Abnaa Suhmata”, the sons of Suhmata, documenting the history of the village with photographs and other material. But most Arab villages have very little documentation.

A new app now provides information about all of the 400 Palestinian villages which were destroyed in the fighting in 1948. Palestinians say that as many as 700,000 Arabs either fled or were forced to leave what became Israel. Some, like Seman, stayed on. Others fled to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The new app, produced by Zochrot, an Israeli organisation, is meant to help the refugees maintain their connections to their villages.

“If you are a refugee in the Ein El-Helweh camp in Lebanon and you want to know about your village, you can follow and each time someone adds a comment it goes directly to your inbox,” Ghaneen Jeries, media director for Zochrot and the co-ordinator of iNakba project told The Media Line.

Jeries said the maps uploaded into the app come from British mandatory sources. There are also YouTube clips and photos. She said the idea for the app grew out of Zochrot’s activities to advocate for the right of return, meaning the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in present-day Israel.

Many Israelis argue that because of the numbers involved, allowing the return of Arab refugees would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and that the proper address for returning refugees is the future state of Palestine. But Zochrot believes that justice will only be served when all refugees can return to their original homes or be given compensation.

The app is being released as the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks has ended without any progress, and press reports say that the Obama administration is blaming Israel for its failure. In any case, the talks were about an Israeli withdrawal from most of the land that Israel occupied in 1967, not from 1948.

In recent years, commemorations of the Nakba have become a hot-button issue in Israel. Several members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, have advanced legislation to making any such observance illegal. In 2011, 12 protesters were killed when Palestinians and their supporters tried to enter the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied from Syria in 1967.

But for many Palestinians like Seman, the app is a way to connect to their history.

Seman said that as a teenager he worked in construction, before joining the Communist Party. He was sent to the Czech Republic to study and returned with a masters degree in political science. Today he lives in Haifa.

“We don’t hate Israelis; we hate the Israeli government’s policy,” he said. “We can live together but only if there is justice.”