The Nakba Never Ended
Written by Samara Attalla, Raneem Hijazi and Shafika Husseini
The colonization of Palestine is a result of Zionism, a settler colonial project intent on displacing and taking over Palestinians’ native land to establish a Zionist colony.
One of the ways that Zionism garnered support was through the statement “a land without a people for a people without a land,” which explicitly erased Palestinian presence on their ancestral homeland and enforced the idea that Palestinians were not a people with unique ties to the land. The slogan, according to Ismail Zayid in “Zionism the Myth and the Reality,” ran into trouble once Zionists had begun to settle on Palestinian land: they found that there were Palestinians there with extensive histories and complex cultures — but that didn’t matter to the colonists, as they found themselves superior to the non-European native inhabitants and would often denigrate and ignore them.
Many of the founding fathers of Zionism used the Bible as their deed to colonize the land — oftentimes making up stories for applying nonhistorical facts to different aspects of Palestinian land. Archeology is used as a tool to further narratives of Zionist ‘rights’ to the land, through the established methods of using the Bible as a historical document.
Through this, academia and politics work hand in hand to build the working arm of Zionism as an ideology and industrialized machine that has been the cause of generations of Palestinian trauma. But even as Palestinians constantly recount the dangers of Zionism through first hand experiences, we are often ignored or made out to be deniers of ‘peace.’ This is made apparent in Edward Said’s “Permission to Narrate,” which describes this phenomena as far back as 1982 after the Zionist invasion of Lebanon.
As such, it’s important for us to recenter Palestinian voices throughout our descriptions of Zionism and its effects, because our reclamation of the narrative is a necessary tool in dismantling the ideology of Zionism.
The Nakba, meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, refers to the ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion of the Palestinian people from their indigenous and ancestral homeland. Beginning in 1948, the Nakba marked when Zionist terrorist militias, such as Haganah, Irgun, Stern, and Lehi, forcibly displaced nearly one million Palestinians (killing at least an additional 15,000), destroying entire villages and towns to make room for over 100,000 illegal European settlers. These militias combined to form what we know today as the ‘Israeli Defense Force’ (IDF).
Palestine Vocab Tip;
We do not refer to the Zionist army as the IDF.
They are an occupying force, and therefore, we call them the
‘Israeli Occupation Forces’
Initially, Jews arriving in Palestine were perceived as fellow Semites and were welcomed. The First Palestinian Congress issued an anti-Zionist manifesto that rejected Zionist immigration and urged Palestinian Jews to abandon Zionism.
As Palestinians became more aware of the Zionists' ideology focused on colonizing Palestinian land, the acts of terrorism and massacres by Zionist settlers intensified. This escalation revealed their intentions to displace and ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
Palestine Nakba Fact;
Zionist soldiers used mass rape, massacres,
burning of villages, and psychological warfare
to instill fear in Palestinians and begin a century-long system of colonization.
By 1967, the settler colony of Israel illegally stole the remaining land of Palestine, expelling an additional 300,000+ Palestinians. Out of these, 150,000 had already been displaced once before in 1948. It even went as far as seizing Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights in an atrocious event known as the Naksa, or ‘setback.’ The Naksa continues to have significant effects on Palestinian communities, as ‘Israel’ created hundreds of illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
While 1948 marked the beginning of the Nakba, it’s still ongoing with a brutal force than ever before. Zionist violence has morphed into its most cruel and barbaric state with the genocide in Gaza. Illegal settlements have only continued to expand year after year, marking the Zionist Regime's intent to maintain its colonial domination over native Palestinians, by creating brutal realities such as forcing them to navigate over 500 checkpoints that restrict their movement throughout their land. By the time they retreated from the Gaza Strip and moved their illegal settlers out, the historic Mediterranean coast became an enclave known as the world’s largest open-air prison. Essentially, ‘Israel’ created a concentration camp, where it had total control over the movement of Palestinians, preventing them from leaving the enclosed land and limiting their access to the sea.
The current genocidal actions committed by the Zionist regime are reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, as a Gazan resident shares, “this is a second Nakba. But the occupation should understand that we will continue to remain rooted in our land and stand for our just rights of freedom, peace and safety.” After October 7, thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced, which echoes the experiences of their ancestors in 1948, when Zionist militias destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages, thousands were murdered, and more than 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted from their land and forced to flee. This second Gazan Nakba is the most violent escalation of Zionist terrorism since 1948.
Due to the recent attacks in northern Gaza, thousands of Palestinians were told to flee south along the Salah al-Din road (the only exit route for civilians) as the siege and bombings intensified by the Zionist regime. The similarities of the atrocities in 1948 are remembered as the war criminal and Israeli Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter himself described the displacement of large numbers of Palestinians from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip as the "Gaza Nakba 2023." The humanitarian crisis is dire as 'Israel' continues to intensify its attacks, violent massacres and restrict the entry of aid waiting at the borders of Gaza.
The systematic displacement of Palestinians, forcibly pushing them into densely populated areas like the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, and neighboring countries, aligns with the objectives of the Zionist project, effectively contributing to the process of ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Gaza Strip. It's imperative to confront and abolish Zionism while unequivocally calling for an end to the ongoing Nakba.