78 Years On, and the Nakba Continues…
To commemorate the Palestinian Nakba as an annual ritual in which the memory of that land's dispossession from its original inhabitants, and its colonisation by the Israeli entity, is revisited does not truly convey that the Nakba is still ongoing — when in fact it is. As though this people had not suffered enough from displacement, destruction and defeat, the facts themselves are now transmuted into questions that appear legitimate in the eyes of public opinion while being, at their core, far removed from reality.
Among these questions, widely in circulation across Western media — and in which any guest daring to defend the Palestinian cause finds themselves ensnared — is the following: “Do you recognise Israel’s right to exist?” The UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was perhaps the one who addressed this matter most shrewdly, when she replied: “Nobody asks Italy or Spain, or any other state in the world, to justify its right to exist!”
Naturally, the question conceals an entirely different purpose: to divert attention from Palestinian rights, to suggest that Israel is forever on the side of the oppressed, and, above all, to bury the history attached to the Nakba of 1948 and to the forced expulsions that preceded it, through which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were torn from their homes, their properties and their livelihoods, so that the Zionist movement might erect its project of a Jewish state on Palestinian land.
The same question pursues an additional aim: to avert the gaze from what Israel accomplished in 1967 by expanding its occupation to new Arab territories, most notably East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Syrian Golan and the Egyptian Sinai. While Israel withdrew from Sinai under the Camp David Accords concluded with Egypt in the late 1970s, it has formally annexed the Golan and not only refuses any withdrawal from the West Bank — the core of what would remain of the long-promised Palestinian state — but continues to plant settlements across it, generating facts on the ground that render the state project impossible, in addition to the political, military and legal impossibilities already bearing down upon it.
Some, particularly among the states sympathetic to Israel, pay little heed to the fact that there are no official borders for a state that, within minutes of proclaiming its “birth” in 1948, obtained international recognition from the world’s most powerful nations. Leaving the question of borders deliberately vague is obviously not a political oversight but a premeditated choice, intimately connected to Zionist expansionist projects that show no signs of halting at the boundaries of 1948, nor perhaps even at the additional territories annexed after the 1967 war.
It is true that the “international community” has failed, over decades, to compel Israel to honour the two-state project, yet even this broad heading has by now largely disappeared from international political discourse — and most markedly from American discourse, given the weight and global standing of the United States and its strategically unbreakable relationship with Israel. This sweeping political retreat has enabled Israel to resume its belligerent enterprises and to persist, with full deliberation, in rejecting every settlement proposal, from Madrid (1991) to the Arab Peace Initiative adopted at the Beirut Summit (2002), which enshrined the land-for-peace principle. As for the Oslo Accords (1993), Israeli political conduct aims to empty them of all substance, so that no real gains whatsoever accrue to the Palestinian people.
Israeli preponderance of power, backed by uninterrupted American support, has allowed Israel to escape all accountability in spite of decades of deliberate killing, displacement and extermination, whose apex has been reached in Gaza and Lebanon. The arrest warrant issued against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, significant as it is in legal and symbolic terms, has remained a dead letter: the man has traveled abroad on multiple occasions since its issuance, carefully skirting the limited number of countries that declared they would proceed with his arrest should he pass through their territory.
On the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, Palestine appears to stand at a historical crossroads. Armed resistance to the occupation has been answered with genocide; political negotiation has been blocked by Israel’s deliberate intransigence and has reached an absolute dead end for lack of any Israeli willingness to make progress in this direction. The internal Palestinian division further compounds this already difficult situation — a division over strategic choices, not over secondary or tactical questions.
Yet it is impossible not to acknowledge that all attempts to circumvent the Palestinian question through regional agreements — whether through successive waves of normalisation from which Israel is, first and last, the sole beneficiary, or through the effort to reduce this question to a mere matter of property or economics — have failed. It has become plain that regional stability can only be achieved through a just and lasting resolution of the Palestinian question.
The Nakba, undeniably, continues…