How Israel's genocide in Gaza brought the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, into global focus

Every year on May 15, Palestinians across the world in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, and diaspora communities on every continent pause to remember one of the most devastating humanitarian disasters in modern history, the Nakba.

This year, the 78th anniversary arrives amid growing recognition of that catastrophe that is still unfolding today.

Yusuf Abu Hamam, 78 years old and one of a dwindling number of Nakba survivors, now lives next to his heavily damaged home in the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza. The village his family fled in 1948, al-Joura, has since vanished under Israeli occupation. He says the current war is an even greater catastrophe. 

“There is no country left, a square kilometre and a half extending from the sea… it’s indescribable, unbearable.”

For decades, the Nakba occupied a largely suppressed and unrecognised space in the global imagination. While it remained etched into Palestinian memory, it was, unfortunately, erased from dominant Western narratives. 

Israel’s genocide in Gaza changed that, according to Moonis Ahmar, Meritorious Professor of International Relations and former Dean Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Karachi.

“Thousands of Palestinians were killed in Gaza. Around 2.1 million people were displaced, the majority of them forced from their homes. So it reminded people in the Global North, in the West, who had little sympathy, knowledge or awareness, about the Nakba,” Ahmar tells TRT World.

“Through the print media, electronic media and social media, it created a sort of awareness about what the Nakba was in 1948 and how it is being repeated today by Israel through the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.”

“Globally, there is now an understanding about the systematic Israeli policy of displacement of Palestinians from Gaza,” Ahmar adds.

The second Nakba

What the world has watched since October 2023 has collapsed the distance between 1948 and now as more and more people are starting to gather how today’s aggression in Gaza and the occupied West Bank is a continuation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people from their homeland that began in 1948.

Between 750,000 and a million Palestinians were expelled from their homeland and made refugees by Zionist militias and the new Israeli army during Israel’s establishment in 1947-1949, amounting to approximately 75 percent of all Palestinians.

And around 500 Palestinian towns and villages were systematically destroyed by Zionist militias and the Israeli army. Most Palestinian communities, including homes, businesses, houses of worship, and vibrant urban centres, were destroyed to prevent the return of their Palestinian owners.

Today, their descendants are being displaced again. The Abu Jarad family, for instance, have been displaced more than a dozen times over 31 months of war as they fled Israeli bombardment across Gaza. Their hometown, Majida Abu Jarad now simply calls it “our Nakba”.

The rhetoric that Palestinians are a population to be repeatedly displaced or ‘cleansed’ has also been promoted by Israel’s staunchest ally and accomplice, the United States.

“That is also what Trump argued when he said that Palestinians should leave Gaza so it could be transformed into a paradise, a tourist resort, which was unacceptable to the local Palestinians,” Ahmar says.