CJIP

The event centered around a map of Palestine in 1947. The small green boxes dotting the map represent Palestinian villages.

A photo exhibit portrayed Palestinian life before 1948 and the traumatic events of the Nakba.

The event began with Maher Hashweh, professor of education at Birzeit University in the West Bank, who spoke about his experience of the Nakba and Palestinian aspirations for peace.

Saed Muhssin's oud-playing evoked the solemnity of the occasion in a distinctly Palestinian way.

Khalil Barhoum and his daughter Lara read poetry about the Nakba by leading Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Tawfiq Zayyad. Barhoum is coordinator of Stanford's African and Middle Eastern Languages Program.

The focus of the event was a symbolic re-enactment of the Nakba. One by one, the names of Palestinian villages destroyed in the Nakba were read out.

A drumbeat sounded as the name of each village was read, together with the number of its inhabitants who were expelled.

For each name, a green box representing a Palestinian village was removed from the map, symbolizing that village's destruction.

The green boxes were deposited in the larger boxes around the map, which represent the refugee camps established after the Palestinian expulsion.

By the time all the names had been read, the map had been largely cleared of villages, and the refugee camps were full.

The places where the villages once stood were given Hebrew names, obliterating the Arabic names that came before.