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Contents/Editorial

Al Miskin

Democracy or Ethnocracy?
Oren Yiftachel

Dis/Solving the "Refugee Problem"
Rosemary Sayigh

Arab Women, Liberal Feminism and the Israeli State
Lisa Hajjar

From Schmaltz to Sacrilege - Rubber Bullets
Rebecca Stein

Countering Israel's 50th on the Internet
Al-Nakba Websites Document Palestinian Dispossession

The struggle over the historical record and popular memory of 1948 has reached the internet. A number of websites and posted materials devoted to the Palestinian experience in 1948 known as al-Nakba (national catastrophe) offer a wealth of information to counter the virtual media silence about the victims of Israel's independence. Two comprehensive Nakba websites have been created by The Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem <www.arabstudies.org/mainp.htm> and The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah <www.alnakba.org/>, both of which provide historical accounts of the Nakba, survivors' testimonies, chronologies and photo galleries. The Bir Zeit university homepage <birzeit.edu> is a valuable starting point for locating more websites and materials relating to the Nakba and maintains a comprehensive guide to Palestinian websites <www.birzeit.edu/links/>. Bir Zeit University's Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society has a website devoted to the documentation of the 415 destroyed Palestinian villages in 1948 <www.birzeit.edu/crdps/village.html>. The massacre and expulsion of the Palestinians of the village of Deir Yassin is commemorated by an on-line information center called "Deir Yassin Remembered" <www.deiryassin.org>. The plight of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their dispersion around the world is dealt with by the Shaml Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Centre website <www.shaml.org/frmain.htm>. Finally, The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (LAW) <www.lawsociety.org/> has a special section of its website dedicated to its conference "50 Years of Human Rights Violations-Palestinians Dispossessed," <www.lawsociety.org/conf> which catalogues the myriad human rights abuses and Israeli distortions of the last 50 years.

The Israeli government offers its own self-congratulatory account of 1948, unblemished by any mention of Palestinian dispossession and suffering, in the official "Israel at Fifty" website <www.israel.org/mfa/israel50/index.html>. The very existence of a Palestinian counter-narrative of the events of 1948 has generated the predictable rise of "Nakba denial" among threatened Zionists such as the Zionist Organization of America <www.zoa.org/> which has posted on its website a revisionist account of the events around Deir Yassin entitled "Deir Yassin: History of a Lie" <www.zoa.org/archives/pr-980309-99.html>.

--Steve Niva