Nakba - the movie.

If you find the time, please read my article on the Nakba - here.

There is a movie out, a documentary, about Nakba. It is made by a Japanese, and is an amazing story in and of itself.

The website is here - please, please take a look..

From the website:

Director Ryuichi Hirokawa went to Israel in 1967 and worked on a kibbutz.
One day he found rubble at the edge of the kibbutz that later proved to be the remains of a village once lived in by the Palestinian people; his friend showed him an English map where next to the names of Palestinian villages was printed the word “destroyed."
It was evidence of the fact that the Kibbutz had been founded on the land where this destroyed Palestinian village once stood.
Hirokawa’s journey to find out what had happened to the village started at that moment.
In his journey into the past, he learned about the NAKBA and a history which had been waiting to be revealed.

The year 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the foundation of Israel. It marks also the beginning of 60 years of the suffering for the Palestinian people. This tragedy is referred to as the “Nakba,” meaning catastrophe in Arabic.
Since 1948 at least 420 Palestinian villages have vanished. The photo journalist Ryuichi Hirokawa has filmed over 1,000 hours of footage and has taken thousands of photographs of the Palestinian people and their vanished villages. This film is a distillation of this footage.

Short version - one man's quest for justice and, perhaps more importantly (as I doubt the Palestinians will ever receive any justice whatsoever from the neocon controlled "Western" world) - the truth.

In November 2006 Ryuichi Hirokawa revisited Kibbutz Dalia, where he used to live when he first went to Israel in 1967.
Intrigued by the idea of a kibbutz, an agricultural community advocating socialism, he worked and studied Hebrew there. But he found that on one area then covered with cacti and scattered rocks Palestinians had once lived. It was the site of a Palestinian village called “Daliyat al-Rawha,” which had disappeared from the map. Hirokawa began his quest to discover what had happened to the villagers of Daliyat al-Rawha.
His 8mm film footage of the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 was an international scoop and launched his career as a video journalist.
When taking footage in Shatila of 8 year-old Mervat, whom he had met just before the incident, he learned of an elder sister of hers named Kifah that had been arrested for involvment in guerilla activity. Hirokawa worked for the release of Kifah, who had been imprisoned in the notorious Khiam detention center in South Lebanon for six years. Overcoming the trauma of her torture there, Kifah recovered to rebuild her life. Hirokawa has followed her experience.
Hirokawa’s search for the vanished villages, beginning with Daliyat al-Rawha, has become a path into the history of destruction and massacres the Palestinian people have had to endure; Kafr Bir’im, Tantura, Dayr Yasin…
He recorded vivid testimonies of massacres in villiages since deserted. And he eventually managed to find the former villagers of Daliyat al-Rawha.
Four hundred and twenty villages vanished in 1948. Hirokawa’s mission to record those testimonies, which started with his first visits to Israel 40 years ago, has not yet finished.

People like that - who see an injustice, and then act to combat it - those people are my heroes.

Rachel Corrie, murdered by a vengeful Israeli thug in uniform, or that anonymous Chinese hero standing in front of a tank on Tianammen Square, blocking its path, or the nameless Solidarity activists who were imprisoned, beaten and starved by the communist security in 1980's Poland, or this man - Mr. Ryuichi Hirokawa.

I am a coward - I anonymously blog, without taking any concrete action to fight the injustice.

Mine is the voice in the wilderness, a cry of anguish, of frustration, of the unfairness of it all, unheard amid the general apathy and aggressive ignorance of the masses.

We need more Hirokawas, and less AmericanGoys.

But, we all do what we can, whether we are heroes... or cowards.