05/06/2026
From the Nakba to the Naksa, the Genocide Continues.
This week marks 59 years since the Naksa. In June 1967, Israel seized the territory of historic Palestine that had been under Jordanian and Egyptian control since the Nakba in 1948, massively expanding its territory. Over the course of six days, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, forcing more than 300,000 Palestinians from their homes.
Today, we can hear the terrible echoes of that moment in Palestinian history.
The Israeli regime is expanding and accelerating its colonisation of Gaza and the West Bank through horrifying violence. The so-called Yellow Line in Gaza keeps moving forward. In recent days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli army to seize 70% of Gaza. This, coupled with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, shows us that the Greater Israel project is being actively pursued and consolidated even as the language of 'reconstruction' and 'ceasefire' is used to disguise it.
Palestinian analyst Tareq Baconi said in April that this aggression is weakness, not strength. “Today, US hegemony and Israeli settler colonialism are both unfolding through excessive force, extreme violence, and escalation precisely because their legitimacy is eroding. We see this clearly within Zionism: in many ways, it is at its weakest historical point, and that weakness is manifesting as aggression, devastation, and mass killing. Understanding this dynamic is essential to understanding Palestine's place in these shifts in global power.
That is, an empire becomes most violent when it still has the capacity for force but has lost the ability to maintain legitimacy."
The Naksa imposed Israeli rule over much of historic Palestine so we are not only commemorating the horror of that loss of life and land, but the ongoing military occupation that denies Palestinians their rights to life, freedom and dignity. And even as we hold that knowledge, we remember that the Naksa also planted the seeds for the resistance and mass organising that make up the Palestine liberation movement today.
This is the movement you are part of.
See you Saturday, 1 pm on the Grand Parade, to stand with Palestine.
