When will the world act to end Israel’s ‘ongoing Nakba’?

In English, Nakba means “catastrophe” – and yet this basic translation cannot adequately capture the devastating experience when Israel unleashed huge levels of violence to forcibly displace Palestinians, confiscate their land and property, de-populate and destroy their villages, and refuse to allow them to return.

This all sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it? We are currently witnessing the most recent stage of what Palestinians refer to as the “ongoing Nakba” – because the catastrophe of 1948 was not a one-off historical event. The establishment of the state of Israel set in motion a process of displacement, dispossession and violence which Palestinians have experienced at the hands of Israel ever since.

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Israel’s current war against Palestinians is immense – violence so extreme that human rights experts such as Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian Human Rights, and countries such as South Africa, Namibia, Nicaragua, and Brazil (among many others) argue it constitutes genocide.

In Gaza since October 7, Israel has killed nearly 35,000 and injured more 75,000 Palestinians and has created the conditions for mass starvation. But these are only estimates. We may never know the full extent of the casualties.

More than 10,000 Palestinians are missing, most likely under the rubble of collapsed buildings or buried in mass graves. Last month, the World Bank estimated Israel had caused damage of about $18.5 billion to Gaza’s infrastructure. It is unimaginable what Gaza will look like when there is a final ceasefire.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israel has gone on an unprecedented repressive rampage, killing nearly 500 Palestinians, arresting well over 7000, destroying infrastructure, bombing refugee camps and cities, continuing to expand its illegal settlements (more accurately referred to as colonies), and supporting heavily-armed messianic settlers to carry out violent pogroms.

The destruction Israel has unleashed in the past seven months should not be underestimated or downplayed, but its violence against Palestinians is not new – it has been going on for more than 75 years.

Palestinians who remained within Israel’s newly established borders in 1948 also had their land and property confiscated and were placed under military rule until 1966. The mechanisms and strategies that Israel developed to control, dispossess, and repress its own Palestinian citizens – and that only applied to them, not to its Jewish citizens – are the same ones Israel applied to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza after it occupied these territories in 1967.

Israel's war against Gaza and its most repressive military campaign in the West Bank since the Second Intifada (2000-05) is rooted in over a century of settler colonialism and counterinsurgency campaigns designed to dispossess, oppress, uproot, and annihilate Palestinians.

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This is a conflict over land – Israel wants all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This is not a religious conflict, although religion has been weaponised because Israel has imposed military rule and apartheid over millions of Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

This, the ongoing Nakba, is what Palestinians are resisting. Israel’s brutal counterinsurgency strategies against this resistance include mass arrests, incarceration without trial, assassination, deportation, collective punishment, indiscriminate killings, punitive home demolitions and disproportionate military violence.

Israel has always employed draconian measures to crush Palestinian resistance – whether that be inside the “green line”, inside the occupied territory of the West Bank and Gaza, or in neighbouring states, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon. All decades of this history have been brutal and repressive. But in the past 15 years, Israel’s violence against Palestinians has reached new heights, particularly in Gaza. The current military campaign is Israel’s sixth war against Gaza since it imposed its blockade in 2006.

After each of these wars, the UN held commissions of inquiry, all of which reported on Israel’s grave human rights abuses, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. On no occasion has Israel been held accountable. Israel continues to explain its current military actions in Gaza as a legitimate response, to the Hamas attacks on October 7. But, as many commentators have repeatedly pointed out, history did not begin on that date.

It is not only Israel which is to blame for the ongoing Nakba that has left Palestinians stateless in an ever-shrinking geographical space and facing ever-increasing levels of violence. The United Nations and Western states must also take some blame for this travesty.

The majority (139 out of 193) of UN member states have recognised Palestine as a state – in fact, more recognise Palestine than recognise the state of Kosovo – but among those that have not are the United States, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and Canada. The most recent UN Security Council vote on Palestinian statehood, which took place on April 18, was supported by 12 states out of 15, but was blocked by a US veto, while the UK and Switzerland abstained.

These Western states are trying to defend the indefensible – to shore up support for Israel, an ethnonationalist apartheid state, even while their publics are increasingly heading in the opposite direction.

How much violence is the world prepared to allow before it stops Israel’s “ongoing Nakba” and insists on and enforces the right of Palestinians to live in freedom and in dignity? So that, eventually, Nakba Day is an annual event which commemorates a past injustice, not an injustice that continues against Palestinians every single day.

Dr Mandy Turner is a senior researcher with Security in Context and a visiting senior research fellow at the International State Crime Initiative-Queen Mary University of London