05/16/2020
Today marks seventy-two years since the Nakba, when three quarters of a million Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland, and cast into decades of exile and misfortune.
During that fateful year, Palestinians were massacred, decapitated, and disemboweled. Women were r***d, children were shot, and water supplies were poisoned.
The culprit was Zionism: a European settler-colonial ideology which sought to replace the indigenous Palestinian population with an exclusively Jewish one. And so, with Western backing, the land was stolen, and the people who had lived upon it for centuries, were expelled.
And so, on this sad anniversary, let us remember those 700,000 refugees. Let us also remember the Palestinians of the present, who have spent their lives under Israeli military occupation, from the West Bank to Gaza.
But more than that, let us remember the primary source of their woes. Let us never forget that violence and racism is, and always has been, an inseparable part of Zionism’s DNA. Indeed, the end-goal of Zionism is the erasure of Palestine, and of the Palestinians, and it cannot be justified.
But we have held strong, and we cling tightly to our roots. Seventy-two years later, we are still here. And we will be here long after Zionism has passed.
The photos below depict a time before the Nakba, with the magnificence of our people and the richness of our culture on full display. Let it serve as a reminder of what once was, until our return.
