Nakba Day Commemoration Passes Mostly Quietly Amid Gaza Hostilities
The annual observance of Nakba Day takes on heightened significance as Palestinians face continued displacement and hardship in Gaza
Wednesday marks the observance of Nakba Day, the commemoration of mass Palestinian displacement that took place during the 1948 war that saw Israel emerge as an independent state. This year’s commemoration is especially bitter, as the ongoing Israel-Hamas war drags into an eighth month with no end in sight.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, 35,000 Palestinian civilians and combatants have been killed in the war. Israel launched its military operation following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals were killed and more than 250 were abducted into Gaza. After an initial hostage release deal in November, 132 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, of whom at least 38 are no longer living.
While 1948 is celebrated in the Jewish community as the start of Israeli independence and Jewish sovereignty, for Palestinians, the year symbolizes the beginning of the Palestinian diaspora.
The word “nakba,” which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians during the war. In the nearly 80 years since then, Palestinians have shaped their collective consciousness around this story of relentless dispossession.
During the 1948 war, some Palestinian civilians were massacred by Jewish militias and Israeli soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of others were expelled from their homes or fled fearing violence. The UN resettled most of those who left in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in neighboring states including Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Others moved abroad to the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere.
The process of displacement started in 1947 and continued at least through the end of the war in 1949, but the event is commemorated on May 15, the day following the declaration of Israeli independence.
Those commemorating Nakba Day this year have compared the war in Gaza to the events of 1948, accusing Israel of carrying out a “new nakba.”
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Last week, the Israeli military ignored US warnings and ordered 100,000 Gazans to evacuate Rafah. Those fleeing Rafah add to the 1.7 million Palestinians—about three-quarters of Gaza’s population—thought to be internally displaced, according to a UN report from last month. The Gaza Strip is facing a “full-blown famine” in the north, the UN said, as well as a breakdown of the health care, water, and sanitation systems.
Gaza’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing reported in January that more than 70,000 housing units in the strip had been destroyed. It may take 14 years just to remove debris and unexploded ordnance from Gaza, and as long as 80 years to reconstruct homes laid to waste.
Videos and images of death and suffering in Gaza have been shared and posted on social media recently, opening an additional front against Israel among social media users.
Social activists from around the world have declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide and called for their states to cut off ties with Israel.
Over the last few months, students at universities across the US and Europe have mobilized in support of Palestine. Ongoing university encampments in major cities around the world are calling for a global “student intifada” in solidarity with Gaza.
Many of those student groups organized speakers from Palestinian and anti-imperialist movements to speak in commemoration of Nakba Day.
Protests are expected in Europe this evening, especially on Italian campuses where students and professors are protesting together against the academic senate of the University of Padua and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice for not dissolving ties with Israel.
In Israel, thousands of Arab Israeli citizens took to the streets yesterday for the annual Return March in northern Israel, near Haifa. A few marched this morning in East Jerusalem, while in Ramallah, the de facto administrative of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, thousands marked the day with a march from the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s grave to Manara Square in the city. In clashes that broke out following a Nakba Day rally outside Ramallah, Israeli forces killed Ayser Mohammad Safi, a 20-year-old resident of the Jalazoun refugee camp who studied at Birzeit University.
Nakba Day demonstrations were also held in Jordan and Lebanon, where approximately 2 million Palestinians are registered as refugees. American University of Beirut students marked Nakba Day with a demonstration outside the British Embassy in Lebanon’s capital, where they held signs promising “resistance until return” and proclaiming a “student intifada.”
Giorgia Valente is a recent graduate of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and an intern in The Media Line’s Press and Policy Student Program.
