The Palestinians observed the 64th Yawm an-Nakba or Catastrophe Day, marking the forced exodus of Palestinians from their lands after Israel’s creation on May 14, 1948, on May 15. The ‘Nakba Day’ is not observed as an event but as the process of displacement, disenfranchising, and deprivation of Palestinians that it initiated and continues to blight them. Last year’s Nakba Day march at the Lebanon-Israel border was called ‘March for the return to Palestine’ with protestors chanting, “By our soul, our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Palestine.” Israeli forces, using live ammunition, had injured more than 100 protestors and killed six, among them two girls aged six and eight; in all 12 protesters died. Israeli firing on ‘Naksa Day’, meaning ‘Day of the Setback’, observed on June 5 to commemorate the displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 Six-Day War, in June near Golan, resulted in protestors suffering 20 killed and hundreds injured. During the 1948 Palestine war, some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed. The vast majority of Palestinian refugees, both those outside the 1949 armistice lines at the war’s conclusion and those internally displaced, were barred from returning or reclaiming their property. After forcibly expelling the Palestinians in 1948, the Israelis set about on an ever-intensifying systematic policy of ethnic, historical and cultural cleansing. Since Israel’s creation, Palestinians have resiliently survived as refugees, aliens, victims of persecution and in deprivation, but they have not given up their valiant struggle. Israel keeps altering the ground reality to ensure that the Palestinian right to return to their land is thwarted forever. Israel, with the west’s support, the US in particular, has succeeded in denying the Palestinians their rights; Arab spinelessness is equally culpable. The Israelis, not content with depriving them of political and economic rights, have built the ‘wall’ across the West Bank as a means of physically imposing their brand of apartheid, which is as vicious as the one practiced by the white South Africans. Palestinians call it ‘racial segregation wall’; some call it the ‘apartheid wall’ and that is what it in fact is, while the west and its pusillanimous media call it a ‘security barrier’. This apartheid-enforcing wall along and within the West Bank will be approximately 760 kilometres and because of it 8.5 percent of the West Bank territory and 27,520 Palestinians will be on the ‘Israeli’ side and another 3.4 percent of the area with 247,800 inhabitants will be completely or partially surrounded by it. The wall has indiscriminately destroyed and disrupted the lives of the Palestinians by restricting their movement and isolating them. It will also deprive 57 Christian families of their land in the Christian town of Beit Jala. The Nakba Day clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces, in which more than 200 Palestinians were injured, took place near Qalandia checkpoint located between Jerusalem and Ramallah and near Ofer military prison in Betounya, where 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners had just ended a two-month long hunger strike after the acceptance of their demands. They were protesting against ‘administrative detentions’ — the policy of detention without charge or trial. This year protestors carried keys with the slogan: ‘Haifa, we will return for sure.’ Many nations have their own Nakba Days. March 27, 1948 is the Baloch Nakba Day as Balochistan was forcibly annexed to Pakistan and the Baloch have faced five military operations since. The latest round of hostilities, in fact, a ‘dirty war’, began in 2005. It has been extremely vicious with innumerable disappearances and killings. Recently, during the Supreme Court hearings about missing persons, the Inspector General (IG) of the Frontier Corps (FC), Major General Obaidullah Khattak, when confronted with the CCTV footage showing a Baloch, Mehran Khan, being abducted by uniformed FC personnel, denied involvement by claiming that there existed the possibility that FC uniforms were being misused by unknown people. People often insult the intelligence but never before has it been insulted so brazenly. The IG of the FC trying to justify their brutality said that security forces had come under militant attacks 1,900 times in the last 18 months. Ironically, no one has bothered to count the number of attacks and atrocities by security forces against the Baloch since March 1948. The Supreme Court remains helpless where powerful departments are concerned. The pervasive sense of alienation among the Baloch has intensified in proportion to the repression and economic deprivation. As the state unravels and poverty pervades, the rich-poor gap widens, it only alienates further and creates a sense of despondency. There is poverty across the board but elsewhere there is hope of improvement while in Balochistan it is the hopelessness that is most striking. The Baloch people no longer have faith in the much-flaunted promised measures of justice and rights. They therefore seek their own solutions to their problems. Sindhis too are becoming increasingly alienated and in future Sindhis may someday observe August 14, 1947 as Nakba Day because this day sealed their fate and is the reason for their hardships. Moreover, now the MQM demands a Muhajir sooba (Refugee province), which seeks the division of Sindh into an Urdu-speaking Southern Sindh and a Sindhi Northern. Sindh may soon turn into strife-ridden Cyprus. This unjust and illegal demand is a certain recipe for a Cyprus-type civil war but Sindh is not an island and cannot remain isolated and neither is there an overwhelming majority of Urdu speaking persons in Southern Sindh. All talk of a separate province only exacerbates ill will. Instead of demanding the division of Sindh, the MQM would do better to live in peace because a Sindh at war with itself will see a conflagration that will consume all. If the foolish rulers do accede to division, it will be a Naksa Day for Sindh. Selig Harrison in his book, Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations, talking about the large Baloch population in Sindh and intermittent collaboration between Sindhi and Baloch leaders tells that in August 1978, my father, Mir Ali Ahmed Talpur, said in an interview, “If worst comes to worst and Pakistan should disintegrate, the Baluch and Sindhis would be together. They like each other and might well create a federated state of Sind and Baluchistan.” The unjust demand for the division of Sindh might just make this foresight materialise into reality. The situation demands a working unity between the Baloch and Sindhis. The writer has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He tweets at mmatalpur and can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com