05/15/2025
NAKBA DAY - MAY 15
Today marks 77 years since the single most impactful day in Palestinian history: the Nakba, meaning "the catastrophe" in English.
The Nakba was the mass ethnic cleansing and displacement of the Palestinian people by Zionist paramilitary forces from 1947-1949. Through employing threats, psychological and biological warfare, sexual violence, property destruction, and wholesale massacres, approximately 15,000 Palestinian Arabs were killed and 750,000 displaced by Zionist militias in order to establish a Jewish majority population for a so-called "Jewish state." The Palestinians forced from their homes were never allowed to return, despite international law enshrining their right to do so.
Today, Zionist propaganda attempts to paint the Nakba as "a war of independence" that Israel had no choice but to fight, but the reality is that Palestinians were being systematically expelled from December 1947 until May 1948 until armies of the surrounding Arab countries finally intervened. Afterwards, the displacement continued until the armistice in 1949. Even then, massacres and deportations were still a regular occurrence for the indigenous Palestinian population over the following years, and remain so today. For this reason, many say the Nakba never really ended.
All current-day issues in Palestine must be contextualized by the Nakba; even the atrocities we see committed by Israel in Gaza today are a continuation of standard Israeli policy. As long as national and human rights are denied, and as long as the Palestinian diaspora is refused their right to return, the Palestinian question will never be answered, and the struggle for justice and self-determination will continue.
On May 15, we remember the Nakba and we remember why we keep fighting — for justice, for dignity, for equality, and most of all, for return.
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