Below is a translation of the full text, written in Arabic by Mahmoud Darwish, that will be broadcast on 15 May, the 53rd anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, and the beginning of the Palestinian Nakba. The day will be marked by mass demonstrations throughout the Palestinian territories.
Today is the great day of remembrance.
We are not looking back to dig up the evidence of a past crime, for the Nakba is an extended present that promises to continue in the future. We continue to resist its consequences, here and now, on the land of our homeland, the only homeland we have. Nor will we forget what was done to us on this land of grief and what continues to be done. For the Palestinians the meaning of this war consists in their being subjected to continual uprooting, in their transformation into refugees on their own land and beyond it, in the attempt, following the occupation of their land and history, to banish their existence, to turn their existence from an unequivocal entity in space and time to redundant shadows exiled from space and time. After five decades they have managed neither to force us into absence and oblivion nor to divorce Palestinian reality from world consciousness through their false mythologies and the fabrication of a moral immunity bestowing upon the victim of the past the right to create his own victims.