Why would the Palestinians want to mark Israels independence?
For them, it is a time of mourning and anger. They say that the foundation of the Jewish state was a catastrophe for the Arabs in general and for the Palestinians in particular. What happened in 1948? The Arabs rejected a United Nations plan for Palestine, then under British mandate, to be carved into two countries; a Jewish homeland and a new Arab state. By the time the British mandate expired in May, a vicious civil war was under way, and the nascent state of Israel was under full-scale attack by the armies of neighbouring Arab states. Israel, backed by donations of arms and cash from the USA, turned back the invading forces and seized sizeable chunks of land designated by the UN for the Palestinians. What happened to the Arab population of the conquered lands? Some 700,000 fled into neighbouring countries. Many ended up in squalid refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, then under the control of Jordan and Egypt respectively. The refugees and their descendants now number
