Seventy-six years of continuous Nakba

Soraya, Palestinian/Brazil

Nakba is an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.” It describes an ongoing process that began over 100 years ago, with the emergence of the Zionist political movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The cornerstone of the Nakba was laid on 15 May 1948, when the racist and genocidal state of Israel was founded through a planned campaign of ethnic cleansing. ..
Israel was established on 78% of historic Palestinian territory, built on the bodies of Palestinians and the ruins of their villages. At that time, there were genocides in dozens of Palestinian villages, instrumental in this ethnic cleansing. Around 20,000 Palestinians were killed, and rapes occurred in several of these villages. 800,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their lands, including my father, who was 13 at the time, along with my grandparents and uncles. About 530 villages were destroyed, including my family’s.
Israel has never stopped. In 1967, it occupied the remainder of Palestine—what is now called the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem’s Old City. More than 15,000 people were killed, 300,000 Palestinians were expelled, and Israel militarily occupied the last 22% of Palestinian land.
The Nakba continues; it has never ceased. Aggressive colonial expansion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and racism are integral to the state of Israel.

What we are witnessing now, since 7 October, didn’t begin just recently. This year, we continue to witness genocide in the narrow Gaza Strip, where most of the population—or at least half—are under 14 years old, with the average age being 17. Many had already been expelled from their lands and have lived under a brutal siege for 17 years. . …………………………………..
These children, these young people, have already lived through four or five massacres in Gaza before 7 October, in addition to intermittent bombings lasting hours or entire days earlier this year, even before 7 October.

The action on 7 October was a coordinated act of resistance, which is a legitimate right. Since then, Israel has continued to kill Palestinians, carrying out successive massacres in this ongoing genocide: massacres in schools, hospitals, and shops; beheading babies; burning Palestinians alive.
A recent study by a professor from the University of Edinburgh warns that if the genocide does not end immediately, 335,000 Palestinians could be brutally killed by the end of 2024—14% of Gaza’s population. To put that in perspective, imagine what that would mean in a country like Brazil with 210 million people—it would be the equivalent of nearly 30 million dead in a single year.
Gaza will be completely destroyed—starved under siege, with no water, no access to healthcare, no sanitation.

The genocide continues, spreading further. Israel enjoys historic international complicity, feeling free to pursue its final solution to this new phase of the Nakba, backed by millions of dollars and weapons from US and European imperialism. This is what we are witnessing today.
Now, Israel extends this genocide, this ethnic cleansing, into Lebanon as well.
In the West Bank, deep ethnic cleansing is already underway, with pogroms in dozens of villages, now completely emptied. Every two hours, a Palestinian is killed in the West Bank. More than 70 Palestinians have already been killed there.
The number of political prisoners has more than doubled this year. There were 5,200 Palestinians, including women and children, imprisoned—now that figure has more than doubled. These prisoners endure unspeakable torture and even rape.
Meanwhile, Israel pushes its aggressive colonial expansion, replicating its Gaza tactics in parts of the West Bank, such as the Jenin refugee camp, where 80% of the shops have been destroyed, water and hospital access cut off, and many northern West Bank towns are under siege.

The advance continues into Lebanon, with bombings on the outskirts of Beirut that have already killed 2,000 Palestinians.
The bombings do not stop. People in the West Bank and Lebanon ask: Are we the new Gaza?
We see Israel freely reproducing its “Gaza experiment” as it expands. It bombs Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and still claims self-defence.

Israel is a terrorist state. For the Palestinian people, resistance is existence. .   
The Palestinian people, under constant threat of being wiped off the map, resist. And they will not be erased. We will not be erased.
Our heroic, historic resistance exists in all forms. We are 13 million Palestinians worldwide—half of us are refugees or in the diaspora, and the other half endure continuous ethnic cleansing, genocide, racism, apartheid, and colonisation—the ongoing Nakba. And now, the Lebanese people are being subjected to this advancing genocide.

We must stop this process. To do so, we need to strengthen international solidarity, isolating Israel as a racist, genocidal state on the global stage. From our respective countries, we must fortify this solidarity movement, calling for unity in action, despite our differences, because it is a matter of life and death for both Palestinians and Lebanese. We must urge people to join the central international solidarity campaign called by the Palestinians: the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel. All countries must immediately sever economic, diplomatic, and political relations with the genocidal state of Israel.
There is no solution for Palestine only for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.