Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Israel Leftists Detained Over Memorial Day

Israel Police prohibited members of a left-wing NGO from exiting a Tel Aviv building on the eve of Israel’s Independence Day, activists said, claiming that the lockdown was meant to prevent them from distributing postcards concerning the displacement of Palestinians during the War of Independence in 1948.

According to the report, members of Zochrot – an NGO working to inform the Israeli public of what the Palestinians call the Nakba, or, the Palestinian disaster in 1948 – police officers surrounded the group’s offices, and barred the doors for four hours on Wednesday.

The activists planned to hand out postcards in Hebrew, Arabic, and English during Independence Day celebrations in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, which cite the names of villages from which Palestinians were uprooted and which were destroyed in 1948.

Liat Rosenberg, the NGO’s director general, said that “as we were about to step out of the offices, at around 10:30 P.M., we discovered, to our dismay, that the police were already surrounding the building and had closed all the exits.”

“The senior police staff at the scene made it clear that they were determined not to allow us to ‘disrupt public order,’ and so did not permit us to leave the premises,” Rosenberg added.

For more, go to Haaretz.com

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.