Detroit Free Press · Detroit, Michigan · 16 May 2005
CP-2005-001
A solemn anniversary for some
Day of Israel’s creation painful for Palestinians · Refugees continue the fight for return of homeland, rights
Mohammed Daraghmeh, Associated Press, Ramallah, West Bank
Transcribed from the clipping
“RAMALLAH, West Bank — Protesters marched through the streets and traffic halted throughout the West Bank and Gaza on Sunday as Palestinians mournfully commemorated the day Israel was created, calling it one of the darkest days in their history.
Israelis held barbecues, concerts and launched fireworks to celebrate the 57th anniversary of their independence Thursday — according to the date on the Hebrew calendar.
Palestinians see the day very differently, marking it Sunday as Al-Nakba, which is Arabic for ‘the catastrophe’… About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes in the fighting that followed Israel’s independence in 1948.
Their demand to return to their homes with their descendants — a total of 4 million people by a United Nations estimate — represents one of the toughest issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Palestinian cities and towns Sunday, traffic stopped and people stood silent at noon.
The sirens paralleled those that sound throughout Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day, but the silence was broken by shots fired in the air by gunmen… ‘The Nakba is still a black day in the history of the Palestinian people, and we’ve been suffering since that day,’ said 61-year-old Gaza resident Suleiman Arabeed.
Like many of the protesters, Arabeed is a Palestinian refugee. Hamas, the largest Palestinian militant group, released a statement referring to Israel as a ‘cancer’ and promising to continue fighting ‘until the liberation of the last inch of our land and the last refugee heads back to his home.’
In his speech, Abbas called on the host countries to ensure basic civil rights for the refugees, demanding they be granted the right to work and travel freely. Some 350,000 Palestinians live in 12 refugee camps in Lebanon and have no civil rights. In Syria, Palestinians can work and join the army. In Jordan, most have Jordanian citizenship.”
Context added by this archive
The qualifier is in the banner over the page: a solemn anniversary for some.
Cite this clipping
"A solemn anniversary for some," Detroit Free Press, 16 May 2005, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2005-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2005-001
This clipping is read closely in the section below
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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-2005-001.
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