The Story of the Key In 1948 Zionist terrorist gangs and extremist groups ethnically cleansed and destroyed over 500 Palestinian towns and villages, renamed them, and repopulated those towns and villages with Jewish immigrants in order to create Israel. Palestinian refugees fled for their lives, leaving everything behind except one thing, the key to their homes, with the belief that one day they will return. Palestinian refugees to this day still have these keys, and pass them onto the next generation in the hope that they will be the generation that returns. The catastrophe of 1948 created the world’s largest as well as the world’s longest waiting refugee population, from being both internally and externally displaced. Today there are over 7 million Palestinian refugees, who are denied their Right of Return. The majority of these refugees are forced to live in refugee camps either in Gaza, the West Bank, or in Lebanon, Jordan or Syria, where they are not recognized as citizens, have laws that directly discriminate them for being Palestinian and are forced to live in a vicious cycle of both violence and poverty. The Creation of KEY48 In 2017 our Palestine Society collaborated with Olive, a youth organization focused on the empowerment of Palestinian youth in the UK, and we collectively made it happen, and created our first batch of KEY48’s. We had our official KEY48 launch at the University of Westminster in October 2017, and had Palestinian refugees host the launch, perform at the launch, and had Palestinian refugees wearing KEY48 for the first time and demanding their Right of Return. We also wanted KEY48 wearers to be at the forefront of Right of Return advocacy, so if a person sees them wearing KEY48, they can explain to them why they are wearing it, why they are calling for the Palestinian Right of Return and why the person asking them why they’re wearing it, should call for it too. A huge part of KEY48 for us, is to educate and to inform, to use social media and other platforms to give Palestinians the platform to explain what is happening in Palestine, and to not further feed the biased media’s pit of conflict confusion. We believe the best way to do this is to deconstruct the conflict analogy, and replace it with three clear demands, and these three demands is what you’re calling for when you wear and support KEY48. As these three demands immediately disqualify the media’s conflict myth.
