The Nakba is 'more present and ongoing than ever', say Palestinians

The Palestinian Nakba is "more present and continuing than ever," Palestinians told The New Arab, as Palestinians across historical Palestine, in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians by Zionist forces.

In Ramallah, thousands of Palestinians of all ages marched from the mausoleum of late Palestinian leader Arafat to Jerusalem Street, which used to connect the city to Jerusalem directly before the construction of the Israeli separation wall.

School students lifted banners with the names of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages destroyed by Zionist militias, which later became the Israeli army, between November 1947 and March 1949.

At 1:00 pm, sirens sounded for 75 seconds, marking the ongoing Palestinian Nakba.

"As a Palestinian, you don't have to be born before 1948 and had lived the expulsion, and you don't have to be a son or daughter of a refugee to know what is the Nakba," Ali Awad, a young resident and activist in Masafer Yatta, in the south Hebron hills, told The New Arab.

Haaretz newspaper revealed that during the Nakba, Ben-Gurion ordered that Palestinian wells be poisoned to prevent people from return. Wells in Acre, Gaza, Beersheba, Jericho, Galilee, Bedouin, & Jerusalem were poisoned. Zionist gangs spread germs that caused typhus and… pic.twitter.com/fwxJsmgPV6

— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) May 15, 2023

"In 1999, the Israeli army expelled 700 Palestinian from our homes in Masafer Yatta, including my family, and I was loaded into a truck to be transferred as a child," said Ali.

"What is happening in Masafer Yatta today is the continuation of the Nakba, in forms very similar to what happened in 1948, and it's just a taste of what is being prepared for the rest of the West Bank and Palestine," he added. "1948 was not the year of the Nakba, but the year of the beginning of the Nakba, which we continue to live in today." 

"The biggest example of the ongoing Nakba is what happened in Hawara recently when Israeli settlers tried to give a message to all Palestinians through our town that the Nakba will be repeated," Mahmoud Shehadeh, a resident and business owner in Hawara, south of Nablus, told TNA.

In late February, hundreds of Israeli settlers attacked Hawara, burning 3o Palestinian houses and more than 90 cars, killing one Palestinian and injuring dozens.

"The burning of cars and homes and destruction of crops and trees is a small example of what happened in 1948," said Shehadeh.

"At the same time, it is a reminder that the Nakba goes on and that its tragic events can be repeated, but we also continue to resist it," he added.

The Palestinian Nakba is mostly associated with Palestinian refugeehood and refugee camps, 20 of which are located in the occupied West Bank. Their residents are descendants or living survivors of those who were expelled from the centre part of mandatory Palestine, such as West Jerusalem, Lod, Yafa and hundreds of surrounding towns, villages and cities.

Tribute to Shireen Abu Akleh yesterday at the first ever UN mandated Commemoration of the Nakba #Nakba75 pic.twitter.com/WxeofCjDiw

— Ambassador Majed Bamya 🇵🇸 (@majedbamya) May 16, 2023

"I still can't belong to any place I live in, because I can’t go back to Lod, my parent's hometown," a young Palestinian resident of the Jalazon refugee camp near Ramallah, who asked not to be named, told TNA.

"I don't belong to Jalazon or to Ramallah, where I live now, and the fact of knowing that where my family belongs to is occupied by somebody else is a form of the ongoing Nakba," she said.

"The ongoing Nakba also means the fragmentation of the Palestinian people in different and separate geographical and political realities, so that each one has their own separate struggle," she added. “This is a way of erasing the Palestinian identity, which is a manifestation of the Nakba." 

"For me, the fact that I was deported from my country at the age of 38 and denied the right of living in my hometown, is my share of the Nakba," Salah Hammouri, the Palestinian-French human rights lawyer resident in Paris, told TNA.

Over 180 Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948 are now Israeli recreational sites or national parks, with environmentalism used to conceal the history of the Nakba. @jess_buxbaum reports 👇#Nakba75 https://t.co/LTkzp5UP0I

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) May 17, 2023

Hammouri was deported by Israel last December after seven months of detention without charges, which followed the revocation of his residency rights in Jerusalem, his home city.

"I have lived the Nakba on my own skin," he stressed. "However, the continuation of the Nakba after 75 years also means to me the continuation of the will to resist it."

On Monday, the UN held the first-ever Nakba Day commemoration at the international organisation. The commemoration comes after a bill presented by Arab countries and was considered a "UN recognition of the historical injustice that befell the Palestinian people", by Palestine's ambassador to the UN, Riyadh Mansour.