San Francisco Chronicle · San Francisco, California · 15 May 1998
CP-1998-004
Arab Protests Erupt in Violence
9 people die in riots over Israel’s birth
Serge Schmemann, New York Times, Jerusalem
Transcribed from the clipping
“Palestinians yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the creation of Israel, an event they call the ‘catastrophe,’ with two minutes of silence and several hours of violence in which nine were left dead… In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces opened fire with live ammunition on Palestinians pressing in toward Jewish settlements, killing eight Palestinians, two of them 8-year-old boys.
Another man was killed by a rubber-coated bullet in the West Bank in Ramallah.
Exactly what led to the shooting is not clear, but the Israeli army said that it fired at rioters at three locations, and that Israeli forces were fired on at two of them… In Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron, Israeli forces seemed to exercise greater restraint, and there was evidence of coordination with Palestinian police to let Palestinian passions play out without inflaming them further… For every poster and slogan commemorating a village or a home lost in ‘al nakba,’ the catastrophe, there was another with a current grievance… ‘The nakba has thrown us out of homes and dispersed us around the globe.
Historians may search, but they will not find any nation subjugated to as much torture as ours.’”
Context added by this archive
The headline calls it Israel’s birth. The Palestinian name appears further down, in quotation marks and glossed as “the catastrophe,” and then unquoted in Arafat’s speech.
Cite this clipping
"Arab Protests Erupt in Violence," San Francisco Chronicle, 15 May 1998, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1998-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1998-004
This clipping is read closely in the section below
More from San Francisco Chronicle
- Palestine Is Celebrating Its Ten Years of ProgressSan Francisco Chronicle · 20 November 1927
- Palestinian ProblemSan Francisco Chronicle · 13 October 1944
- Arabs Call Partition Decision Russ VictorySan Francisco Chronicle · 5 December 1947
- Arab Leader Predicts Renewed Violence in PalestineSan Francisco Chronicle · 19 December 1947
- A Zionist Answer to Mr. LevisonSan Francisco Chronicle · 4 February 1948
- Jaffa——‘Ghost City’San Francisco Chronicle · 9 May 1948
- 22 more from this paper in the full text →
More from the 1990s
- Israeli Arabs Living Inside a Jewish Neighborhood Know FearLos Angeles Times · 5 February 1998
- Arab citizens of Israel despair they’ll never be acceptedThe St. Augustine Record · 6 February 1998
- Palestinian protesters voice support for IraqisChicago Tribune · 10 February 1998
- Netanyahu Snubs BritishTulsa World · 18 March 1998
- Israeli Arabs March Home, To a Place They Can’t Live InThe New York Times · 29 March 1998
- Palestinians confront past, betrayals on path to statehoodKalamazoo Gazette · 5 April 1998
- All 374 clippings from the 1990s →
In these collections
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1998-004.
Read in: Nakba, in quotation marks, for 38 years
Everything printed in 1998 · Printed on this day · See it in the archive reel · Full text of every clipping · Dataset