The 76-year-long Nakba

Today marks the 76th anniversary of the Nakba. Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic. It refers to the ethnic cleansing of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and lands in 1948, along with the systematic destruction of at least 530 Palestinian towns and villages.?

Palestinians inhabited, shaped, and thrived in a rich “two-thousand-year-old built environment dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods.” My parents and their families were displaced from Ramla and Jaffa, and like all the other refugees, they were never allowed to return.

In this article, I examine how the Palestinian Nakba has persisted for 76 years, with its latest tragic chapter being the ongoing genocide in Gaza, now on its 222nd day, and how it can be understood as a case of settler-colonialism.

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Israel’s founding 76 years ago was rooted in the Zionist vision of an exclusively Jewish state in all of historic Palestine (encompassing modern-day Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza). To realize this vision, early Zionist leaders, including Israel’s founder David Ben Gurion, deemed the expulsion of Palestinians necessary. Ever since, Israel has perpetuated a regime that perceives Palestinians as an existential demographic threat. A threat that it addressed through ethnic cleansing, legal discrimination, military occupation, subjugation, segregation, denial of self-determination, and now, genocide.

Two years after orchestrating the mass expulsion of Palestinians and establishing its statehood, Israel enacted the draconian Absentee Property Law. This law provided the pretext to systematically confiscate, in one fell swoop, all movable and immovable properties belonging to the hundreds of thousands of expelled Palestinian refugees. Homes, lands, businesses, cash, bank accounts, gold, books, and personal belongings became the property of the state of Israel for it to develop, lease, and dispose of. Leaving no recourse for refugees to claim their property or compensation in lieu of.?

Even more perniciously, the Absentee Property Law paradoxically designated up to 46,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel as "present absentees”. This group, representing approximately a third of the Palestinians who never left the boundaries of the nascent state, lost their homes and lands. Despite eventually acquiring Israeli citizenship, they have been denied the right to fairly reclaim what was taken away from them.

Now a minority, the Palestinians who remained in Israel lived under military rule for about 18 years. Until 1966, they endured severe movement restrictions, censorship, land confiscations, and political repression. Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel represent roughly 21% of the country’s population, and while they no longer live under military rule, they are treated as second-class citizens.

The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) has documented over 65 laws that discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinians in Israel. According to Adalah: “These laws limit the rights of Palestinians in all areas of life, from citizenship rights to the right to political participation, land and housing rights, education rights, cultural and language rights, religious rights, and due process rights during detention.”

Israel's Jewish Nation-State Basic Law is of particular concern. Enacted in 2018, the law declares that only Jews have the exclusive right to self-determination in Israel, effectively establishing two tiers of citizenship –Jewish and non-Jewish. Adalah, again: “This law –?which has distinct apartheid characteristics?– guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality.” Therefore, Israel can be fairly characterized as an ethnocracy, rather than “the only democracy in the Middle East”, as some claim.?

In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, leading to a new wave of refugees and bringing major Palestinian population centers and agricultural areas under its control. With this move, Israel asserted control over 100% of historic Palestine, regarded as the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) in the view of the Israeli body politic, thereby denying Palestinians their rights and connections to their ancestral homeland. For nearly sixty years, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have endured Israeli military rule, characterized by provocations, oppression, widespread abuse, recurring deadly assaults, and a perpetual cycle of violence impacting both Israelis and Palestinians. Given Israel’s advanced weaponization and the international impunity it has, it is Palestinian civilians who have invariably borne a disproportionate and devastating toll.

Driven by demographic concerns for a Jewish majority, Israel has avoided the outright annexation of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip despite illegally absorbing East Jerusalem. Instead, it has pursued gradual yet relentless Jewish-only settlement building on stolen land, establishing de facto annexation. Every Israeli government since 1967, including during periods of ostensible peace negotiations, has dedicated significant financial and military resources to construct, expand and protect settlements and their associated infrastructure across the West Bank and until 2005 in Gaza.

Considered war crimes, Israeli settlements have expanded apace while thousands of Palestinian homes have been demolished. Today, over 700,000 Israeli settlers illegally reside in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, eating away the very lands originally envisioned for a Palestinian state within the two-state solution framework. As a result, Palestinians in the West Bank inhabit fragmented and isolated enclaves, divided by an array of military checkpoints, permit systems, closures, and separation barriers. Dozens of segregated roads, with separate lanes for Israeli and Palestinian vehicles, crisscross the West Bank, further compromising its contiguity.

Between 1993 and 1995, the Oslo Accords were signed by both Palestinians and Israelis, the only major peace agreement reached between the parties. In a speech to the Knesset, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s man of peace, presented the Oslo II agreement, framing it as both a sacrifice and a solution to the Palestinian demographic problem, never as a fulfilment of Palestinian self-determination and rights to their homelands:

“... we made clear and we emphasized to the electorate, at every opportunity, that we preferred a Jewish state, even if not on every part of the Land of Israel, to a binational state, which would emerge with the annexation of 2.2 million Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

We had to choose between the whole of the land of Israel, which meant a binational state, and whose population, as of today, would comprise four and a half million Jews and more than three million Palestinians, who are a separate entity -- religiously, politically, and nationally -- and a state with less territory, but which would be a Jewish state. We chose to be a Jewish state.?

We chose a Jewish state because we are convinced that a binational state with millions of Palestinian Arabs will not be able to fulfill the Jewish role of the State of Israel, which is the state of the Jews.”?

In any case, the Oslo Accords and later peace talks were never to be successful due to Israel’s unceasing settlement expansions and its insistence on exercising perpetual domination over the Palestinians. In the aforementioned Knesset speech, Yitzhak Rabin envisioned a future Palestinian entity as “less than a state.” A framing that persisted in all subsequent negotiations.

The failure of the United States to fulfill its role as an honest mediator ultimately sealed the fate of the peace negotiations. As Aaron David Miller explained, the US acted as "Israel's lawyer," consistently subordinating Palestinian interests to Israeli demands. Palestinians found themselves engaging in a “rigged” peace process while sitting across the table from a regional superpower backed by a global superpower.?

Right-wing Israeli governments actively worked to dismantle the Oslo Accords altogether. The settler movement became increasingly militant and violent. With the complicity and armed protection of Israeli authorities, settlers routinely engage in unrestrained rampages - perpetrating pogroms, destroying Palestinian property and livelihoods, and uprooting communities. Israel continues to illegally confiscate vast swaths of Palestinian lands for future Jewish-only settlement construction, emboldened by feeble condemnations from Western countries, which only give lip service to Palestinian rights and sovereignty.

In 2005, Israel “disengaged” from the Gaza Strip by withdrawing its military, dismantling its settlements, and encircling the territory. Israel did not undertake to liberate Gaza; rather, its move was unilateral, contravening the Oslo Accords by severing the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, thereby weakening Palestinian governance and undermining Palestinian unity. And, importantly, it was seen by Israel as an effective way to “reduce the demographic threat” by “significantly extending the time until the Palestinian population under continuing Israeli control constitutes a majority.”?

The Gaza Strip was to be isolated and rendered into an entity with nominal sovereignty but under complete Israeli domination. Israel exercised control over the entry and exit of people and goods, the population registry, air space, coastline, energy supplies, drinking water supplies, telecommunications spectrum and tax revenue collection. Israel also reserved its right to intervene militarily in Gaza as it wished. This comprehensive control is why most of the world, including the US and Canada, still regards Gaza as occupied territory.?

Hamas' victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, widely viewed as free and fair, was met with US-led crippling sanctions and a Western-backed coup by rival Fatah. In the aftermath of this internal conflict, Hamas assumed control of the Gaza Strip. Consequently, Israel imposed a severe blockade on Gaza, devastating its economy, isolating its residents from the rest of the world, and causing widespread poverty and malnutrition. Gaza became an open-air prison often described as a ‘pressure cooker’ waiting to explode.

The pressure cooker did explode on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched surprise attacks on Israel, leaving behind a horrifying human toll and instigating a hostage crisis. Since then, for the past seven months, Israel has been waging a military campaign against Gaza that has been credibly characterized as genocide - a systematic onslaught that goes far beyond any claims of self-defence or hostage rescue operations.?

Genocidal rhetoric and intent against the Palestinian people came from all levels of the Israeli political and military establishment: Describing Palestinians as “vermin,” “a cancer,” and “animals.” Assigning collective responsibility and blame even to children. Giving Israeli soldiers full release from any restraints on the use of force. Explicit calls to “annihilate” Gaza. Demands to block all medical and life-sustaining aid. Calls to make living conditions in Gaza "impossible" and to "erase the memory" of the Palestinian people.

Israel's actions have matched its rhetoric. The Gaza Strip has become an uninhabitable hellscape, with nearly 2% of its population killed, including many children. These numbers are certainly an undercount due to the near impossibility of extracting the many individuals trapped under rubble and for accurate reporting to take place. The number of deaths will certainly rise due to Israel's engineered famine compounded by a collapsed healthcare system and the squalid and unsanitary conditions the displaced are living under.?

Nearly all of Gaza’s residents have been displaced multiple times. All of its children are deeply traumatized, a burden they will carry for decades. The ferocious Israeli assaults have been indiscriminate, calculated to make life in Gaza impossible. Nothing was spared: hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, residences, government offices, cultural sites, universities, roads, and utility infrastructure have all been targeted.

Israel's intentions are clear: to commit another demographic correction in Gaza, the latest chapter in the ongoing 76-year Nakba. Reports have surfaced detailing the Israeli government's plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza's population, “thinning it out” to a “minimum” through expulsion to neighbouring countries or via the sea. While this has not yet occurred, the threat is real and is growing by the day. If the exodus doesn’t materialize soon, the extreme hardships of life in the Strip will undoubtedly compel many Gazans to seek refuge elsewhere in the coming years.

The Israeli government openly plans to carve out territory from Gaza to establish a 'security buffer,' seizing more land from Palestinians while squeezing them into high-density squalor. Resettling the Strip is an ongoing topic of conversation.

Yesterday, several Israeli government ministers attended a rally for the resettlement of Gaza. Addressing the crowd, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir confirmed his government’s designs:

“So that the problem [of Gaza] does not return, two things must be done: return to the Gaza Strip and encourage the voluntary departure of the residents of Gaza. This is moral, rational and humanitarian.”?

Palestinians know that, just like their grandparents, if they leave, they will never be allowed to return.

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Many around the world correctly understand the Israel-Palestine conflict as a case of settler-colonialism. South Africa's ICJ genocide case against Israel situated the Hamas attacks of October 7 and the ensuing Israeli onslaught within the historical context of the 1948 Nakba and the subsequent realities of Israeli occupation, oppression, apartheid, and denial of self-determination. Over 125 countries have welcomed or endorsed the case, and even more stood up for the Palestinians at the UN. When asked why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar invoked Ireland’s painful history under British colonialism:

“We see our history in [Palestinian] eyes, a story of displacement, of dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination and now hunger.”

In the US, Canada, and other Western countries, entrenched political and media establishments remain stubbornly committed to providing unconditional support and impunity to Israel, exposing the hypocrisy and double standards of the “rules-based international order.” This stance reflects complete disdain for the Palestinian people, who are perceived as no more than a demographic threat to Zionism. Deep divides are emerging, with mass grassroots protest movements gaining momentum, driven by diverse sections of society who are incensed by their governments’ material complicity in Israel’s genocide and their open displays of racism and bigotry. These movements see the Palestinian cause as interconnected with other social struggles—such as domestic racism, indigenous rights, and systemic inequality—under the same hegemon.

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Sources:

1. The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, Rashid Khalidi.
2. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappé.
3. The Absentee Property Law and its Application to East Jerusalem, Norweigan Refugee Council.
4. Present Absentees in Israel, Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question.
5. The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah).
6. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
7. Yitzhak Rabin: Speech to Knesset on Ratification of Oslo Peace Accords, Jewish Virtual Library.
8. Israel's Lawyer, Aaron David Miller.
9. Impact of the Disengagement Plan on the One-State Threat, Reut Institute.
10. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel) - Application.