In an 1852 speech given in Rochester, Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”
Over 100 cities and at least 19 states have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous or Native Peoples Day.
There is another side to our national story.
May 14 marks the 75th anniversary of the formation of the State of Israel. It is Israel’s Independence Day.
Here also, there is another side.
The non-Jewish indigenous people of Palestine, who had lived for centuries on the land now called Israel, declare May 15 Nakba Day, the Day of Catastrophe. In 1947-48, approximately 500 localities were forcibly cleansed of their inhabitants by armed militias. 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. There are now over 5 million Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations. The Nakba continues in the form of ongoing forced displacement, home demolitions, military occupation of the West Bank, a siege of Gaza, discriminatory laws, and administrative detention and imprisonment of children.
So, we ask, what to the Palestinian is Israel’s Day of Independence?
Tom Foster, Rochester Witness for Palestine