60 years of Israel in Palestine

David Ben-Gurion described Zionist aims in 1948 thus: "A Christian state should be established [in Lebanon], with its southern border on the Litani river. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the Arab Legion's strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo... And in this fashion, we will end the war and settle our forefathers' account with Egypt, Assyria, and Aram."

60 years after the Arab defeat in the1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of Israel, many of Ben-Gurion's stated aims can still be discerned in the language of Israeli and Zionist leaders. The biblical language in which Ben-Gurion chose to state his meaning starkly expresses the deeply-rooted nature of these violent fantasies of conquest and destruction. Al-Ahram Weekly commemorates the Nakba's 60th anniversary by giving voice to Palestinian victims of Israel's politics of dispossession.

This state cannot survive

A growing number of Israeli intellectuals believe their state may soon implode by force of its contradictions and failures, writes Saleh Al-Naami

Israel's twilight years

Palestinians are increasingly rejecting the crumbs of a two-state solution in favour of justice for all in a single state, Palestine, writes Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah

Because it is our right

Anayat Durrani outlines plans to mourn 60 years of tragedy

Nakba ongoing

Unseen and unreported, Israeli police attacked children and parents who wished to remember the Palestinian national tragedy that is the flipside of the birth of Israel, writes Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

Remembrance and struggle

Sixty years into the Nakba, Palestinians cannot forget the blood and the horror attendant to the organised Zionist plan of expelling them from their homes and land and destroying their culture and identity

Memory for forgetfulness

Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 in the village of Birwe, in Upper Galilee. Birwe was destroyed in 1948 after its inhabitants were made to flee the village. The extract which follows is taken from a memoir Darwish wrote during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In it, he remembers his first encounter with Beirut in 1948, before his family stole back into what has since become Israel, where Darwish remained until 1972 .

Recalling the fallen

In Gaza, Saleh Al-Naami records the stories of those who witnessed the violence upon which Israel was founded

Project tabula rasa

In the Galilee, Jonathan Cook hears how erasing all traces of Palestine and its people was the lynchpin of the Zionist agenda

An irreducible fact

In the face of the most sustained assault on the collective memory of a people in recent history, the Palestinians still remember who they are, writes Ramzy Baroud

Forbidden dreams

In Amman, Oula Farawati traces the longing to return, still alive after 60 years of dispossession

The Dome of the Rock, Islam's third holiest shrine, is engulfed with fireworks marking the start of Israel's celebrations; Palestinians watch as a huge 10-metre long iron key is brought to the symbolic "Return Gate" at Aida refugee camp in the West Bank town of Bethlehem during a gathering to mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (photos: AFP)

Top right: Hanzala, the infamous caricature character by Nagi Al-Ali has become an icon of the disgruntled Palestinian dismayed with the disheartening Arab status quo