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Al Jazeera
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, we are naming our new ruin
When my grandmother, Khadija Ammar, walked out of her home in Beit Daras for the last time in May 1948, she embarked on a lonely journey. Even though she was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – also forced to leave behind their cherished homes and lands to escape the horror unleashed by Zionist militias – there was no one in the world watching. They were together, but utterly alone. And there was no word to describe their harrowing experience. In time, Palestinians came to refer to the events of May 1948 as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The use of the word nakba in this context invokes the memory of another 'catastrophe', the Holocaust. The Palestinians were telling the world: just three years after the catastrophe that befell on the Jewish people in Europe, a new catastrophe – very different, but no less painful – is unfolding in our homeland, Palestine. Tragically, our catastrophe never came to an end. Seventy-seven years after my grandmother's expulsion, we are still being hunted, punished and killed, for trying to live on our lands with dignity or demanding that we are allowed to return to them. Because it has never truly ended, commemorating the Nakba as a historical event has always been difficult. But today, a new challenge confronts us as we try to understand, discuss or commemorate the Nakba: it has entered a new and terrifying phase. It is no longer just a continuation of the horror that began 77 years ago. Today, the Nakba has transformed into what Amnesty International described as a 'live-streamed genocide', its violence no longer hidden in archives or buried in survivors' memories. The pain, the blood, the fear and the hunger are all visible on the screens of our devices. As such, the word 'Nakba' is not appropriate or sufficient to describe what is being done to my people and my homeland today. There is a need for new language – new terminology that accurately describes the reality of this new phase of the Palestinian catastrophe. We need a new word that could hopefully help focus the averted eyes of the world on Palestine. Many terms have been proposed for this purpose – and I have used several in my writing. These include democide, medicide, ecocide, culturicide, spacio-cide, Gazacide, and scholasticide. Each of these terms undoubtedly defines an important aspect of what is happening today in Palestine. One term that I find especially powerful as an academic is scholasticide. It underlines the ongoing, systematic erasure of Palestinian knowledge. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Ninety percent of schools have been reduced to rubble. Cultural centres and museums flattened. Professors and students killed. The term scholasticide, coined by the brilliant academic Karma Nabulsi, describes not only the physical destruction of Palestinian educational institutions but also the war being waged on memory, imagination and the Indigenous intellect itself. Another term I find evocative and meaningful is Gazacide. Popularised by Ramzy Baroud, it refers to a century-long campaign of erasure, displacement and genocide targeting this specific corner of historic Palestine. The strength of this term lies in its ability to locate the crime both historically and geographically, directly naming Gaza as the central site of genocidal violence. Although each of these terms is powerful and meaningful, they are all too specific and thus unable to fully capture the totality of the Palestinian experience in recent years. Gazacide, for example, does not encompass the lived realities of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, or those in refugee camps across the region. Scolasticide, meanwhile, does not address the apparent Israeli determination to make Palestinian lands inhabitable to their Indigenous population. And none of the aforementioned words address Israel's declared intentions for Gaza: complete destruction. On May 6, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich chillingly stated, 'Gaza will be entirely destroyed … and from there [the civilians] will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.' As such, I propose a new term – al-Ibādah or the Destruction – to define this latest phase of the Nakba. The term reflects the horrifying rhetoric employed by Smotrich and numerous other Zionist fascist leaders and captures the comprehensive and systematic erasure under way not only in Gaza, but across historic Palestine. Al-Ibādah is capacious enough to encompass multiple forms of targeted annihilation, including democide, medicide, ecocide, scholasticide, culturicide and others. In Arabic, the phrase for genocide, 'al-Ibādah jamāʿiyyah' meaning 'the annihilation of everyone and everything' has the word al-Ibādah as its root. The proposed term al-Ibādah intentionally truncates this phrase, transforming it into a concept that signifies a permanent and definitive condition of destruction. While it does not assign a specific geographical location, it draws conceptual strength from the work of Pankaj Mishra (The World After Gaza), who argues that the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza represents a qualitatively distinct form of genocidal violence. According to Mishra, Gaza constitutes the front line of Western neocolonial and neoliberal projects, which seek to consolidate global order around the ideology of white supremacy. By pairing the definite article with the noun, al-Ibādah asserts this condition as a historical rupture – a moment that demands recognition as a turning point in both Palestinian experience and global conscience. Today, when it comes to Palestine, the word 'destruction' is no longer whispered. From military commanders to politicians, journalists to academics, vast segments of the Israeli public now openly embrace the complete destruction of the Palestinian people as their ultimate goal. Entire families are being wiped out. Journalists, doctors, intellectuals and civil society leaders are deliberately targeted. Forced starvation is used as a weapon. Parents carry the bodies of their children to the camera, to document the massacre. Journalists are killed mid-broadcast. We are becoming the martyrs, the wounded, the witness, the chroniclers of our own destruction. My grandmother survived the Nakba of 1948. Today, her children and over two million Palestinians in Gaza live through even darker days: the days of destruction. My pregnant cousin Heba and her family, along with nine of their neighbours, were killed on October 13, 2023. By then, just days after October 7, dozens of families had already been erased in their entirety: the Shehab, Baroud, Abu al-Rish, Al Agha, Al Najjar, Halawa, Abu Mudain, Al-Azaizeh, Abu Al-Haiyeh. On October 26, 2023, 46 members of my own extended family were killed in one strike. By last summer, that number had grown to 400. Then I stopped counting. My cousin Mohammed tells me they avoid sleep, terrified they won't be awake in time to pull the children from the rubble. 'We stay awake not because we want to but because we have to be ready to dig.' Last month, Mohammed was injured in an air strike that killed our cousin Ziyad, an UNRWA social worker, and Ziyad's sister-in-law. Fifteen children under 15 were injured in the same attack. That night, as he had done countless times over the past 18 months, Mohammed dug through the rubble to recover their bodies. He tells me the faces of the dead visit him every night – family, friends, neighbours. By day, he flips through an old photo album, but every picture now holds a void. Not a single image remains untouched by loss. At night, they return to him – sometimes in tender dreams, but more often in nightmares. This month, on May 7, Israeli strikes on a crowded restaurant and market on the same street in Gaza City killed dozens of people in a matter of minutes. Among them was journalist Yahya Subeih, whose first child, a baby girl, was born that very morning. He went to the market to get supplies for his wife and never returned. His daughter will grow up marking her birthday on the same day her father was killed – a terrible memory etched into a life just beginning. Noor Abdo, another journalist, compiled a list of relatives killed in this war. He sent the list to a human rights organisation on May 6. On May 7, he was added to it himself. A worker at the restaurant that was hit spoke about a pizza order placed by two girls. He said he overheard their conversation. 'This is expensive, very expensive,' one girl said to the other. 'That's okay' she replied. 'Let's fulfil our dream and eat pizza before we die. No one knows.' They laughed and ordered. Soon after their order arrived, the restaurant was shelled and one of the girls was killed. The worker does not know the fate of the other. He, however, says he noticed a single slice from their pizza was eaten. We can only hope that the one who was killed got to taste it. This, all this, is al-Ibādah. This is the destruction. In the face of global inaction, we are all but powerless. Our protests, our tears, our cries have all fallen on deaf ears. But we are still left with our words. And speech does have power. In the Irish play Translations, which documents the linguistic destruction of the Irish language by the British army in the early 1800s, the playwright Brian Friel explains how by naming a thing we give it power, we 'make it real'. So in a final act of desperation, let the commemoration of this year's Nakba be the time when we name this thing and make it real: al-Ibādah, the Destruction. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Al Jazeera
15-05-2025
- General
- Al Jazeera
In Gaza, the Nakba is being relived in 2025
The Nakba. It's a concept that accompanied me from birth until I lived through it myself these past two years. I was born a refugee in the Khan Younis camp, known by the city's residents as the largest gathering of refugees expelled from their lands during the Nakba, when Israel was founded in 1948. Whenever someone asked me my name, it was always followed by: 'Are you a refugee or a citizen?' As a child, I would ask: 'What is a refugee?' I attended a school run by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and my documents always had to include proof that I was a refugee. I received treatment at UNRWA clinics, always needing to bring that refugee card. I spent a lot of time trying to understand what being a refugee meant. How did my grandparents flee their land in Beit Daras, a village north of the Gaza Strip that no longer exists? How did my grandfather end up in this camp, and why did he choose this place? Before Israel's war on Gaza, May 15, or Nakba Day, the day Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, was a unique occasion. Everyone paid attention to it, seeking out people who had lived through it to hear their stories. When I began working as a journalist in 2015, Nakba Day was one of the events I looked forward to covering. That year, I went along with colleagues to the Shati camp, west of Gaza City. It would be my first time writing about the Nakba, and my first visit to a refugee camp in 13 years, since we had moved from camp life to village life in al-Fukhari, south of Khan Younis. When I entered the camp, memories of my childhood in Khan Younis came flooding back: the small, crowded houses, some newly built, others still original structures. It was nice that the commemoration falls in May, with good weather. Elderly men and women sat by their doors, just as my grandmother did when I was a child. I used to love sitting with her; she seemed used to open spaces, like her pre-1948 home in Beit Daras. We sat with elderly women, all over 70. They talked about their homeland, the stability they had in their lands, their simple lives, the food they grew and ate, and the heartbreak of not being able to return. We met many – from Majdal, Hamama, and al-Jura, all depopulated villages and towns taken over by Israel in 1948. Whenever I met someone from Beit Daras, we'd share memories, and laugh a lot, talking about the maftoul (Palestinian couscous) the town was famous for. The visit was light-hearted, filled with laughter and nostalgia, despite these people having been forced into camp life after the occupation drove them from their towns in horrific ways. I began to understand those Nakba stories more deeply when my grandfather began to tell me his own story. He became the central character in my Nakba reports every year, until his death in 2021. He estimated he was about 15 years old at the time. He was already married to my grandmother, and they had a child. He would describe the scenes as I sat in awe, asking myself: How could the world have stood by silently? My grandfather told me they had a good life, working their farm, eating from their crops. Each town had a specialty, and they exchanged produce. Theirs was a simple cuisine, with lots of lentils and bread made from wheat they ground in stone mills. Until that dreadful displacement. He said the Zionist militias forced them to leave, ordering them to go to nearby Gaza. My grandfather said he shut the door to his home, took my grandmother and their son – just a few months old – and started walking. Israeli planes hovered overhead, firing at people as if to drive them to move faster. The baby – my uncle – didn't survive the journey. My grandfather never wanted to go into the details, he would only say that their son died from the conditions as they fled. After hours of walking, they reached Khan Younis and, with nowhere else to go, he pitched a tent. Eventually, UNRWA was set up and gave him a home, the one I remember from my childhood. It was so old; I spent years visiting them in that asbestos-roofed house with its aged walls. That memory of being forced into exile became their wound. Yet, the idea of return, the right to go home, was passed down through generations. The Nakba was a memory passed down from the elderly to the young. But in the war that Israel began waging on Gaza on October 7, 2023, we lived the Nakba. We were forcibly displaced under threat of weapons and air strikes. We saw our loved ones arrested before our eyes and tortured in prisons. We lived in tents and searched everywhere for basic provisions to save our children. My grandfather told me they fled under threat of weapons and planes – so did we. He said they searched for flour, food, and water while trying to protect their children – so are we, right now in the 21st century. Perhaps in 1948, the media was more primitive. But now, the world watches what's happening in Gaza in many formats – written, visual, and audio – and yet, nothing has changed. Never did I imagine I'd live through an existential war – a war that threatens my very presence on my land, just as my grandparents lived through. The repeated scenes of displacement are so painful. They're a cycle, one that we have been cursed to live through as Palestinians again and again. Will history record this as Nakba 2023? Years from now, will we speak of this Nakba just as we've spoken about the original one for 77 years? Will we tell stories, hold commemorations, and hold close memories of the dream of return that has stayed with us since childhood? Since I realised what it meant to be called a refugee and learned I had a homeland, I've been dreaming of returning. This pain, we can never forget it. I still remember the camp and my life there. I'll never forget the moment Israel destroyed my house and made us homeless for two years, 24 years ago. Now we live our painful days searching for safety, fighting to survive. We will tell future generations about this war, the war of existence. We resist hunger, fear, thirst, and pain so we can remain on this land. The Nakba hasn't ended. The 1948 Nakba continues in 2025.
