May 15, 2025, will mark the 77th anniversary of the Nakba. For Palestinians worldwide, it is not simply a historical date to commemorate, but an open wound, a “catastrophe” – the meaning of the Arabic word Nakba – whose consequences continue to define every aspect of their existence. It is not an event confined to 1948, but a collective trauma and an oppressive reality that persists today.
This narrative, long marginalized or denied, is gaining wider international recognition. The United Nations itself, for the first time in its history, officially commemorated the Nakba in 2023, mandated by the General Assembly, which also requested annual commemorative events. This step, although symbolic, recognizes the centrality of the Nakba to Palestinian identity and political aspirations. However, for millions of Palestinians, this recognition clashes with the ongoing denial of their fundamental rights. The insistence on using the term “Nakba” is, in itself, an act of resistance against the erasure of Palestinian memory and history. As the world prepares for the planned commemorations for the 77th anniversary, the reality on the ground, especially in Gaza and the West Bank, offers brutal testimony to the fact that the catastrophe began in 1948 never truly ended but has transformed today into an ongoing genocide.
The origin (1948)
Before 1948, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multicultural land. However, growing Zionist migratory waves, beginning in the late 19th century and intensifying in the 1930s under the British Mandate, fueled by persecution in Europe and the political goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, heightened tensions. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN Partition Plan of November 1947 (Resolution 181), which proposed dividing Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, were perceived by the Arab world as unjust and a violation of the rights of the indigenous population.
What followed was a cataclysm for the Palestinians. Between late 1947 and 1949, during the civil war preceding the end of the British Mandate and the subsequent first Arab-Israeli war following Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, around 750,000 Palestinians – over half the Arab population at the time and more than 80% of those living in the territories that would become Israel – were forced to leave their homes or were forcibly expelled. This mass exodus was not an accident of war, according to the Palestinian perspective and research by historians like Ilan Pappé, but the result of a deliberate policy of “ethnic cleansing” Pappé and other scholars point to the existence of detailed plans as evidence of a systematic project aimed at emptying the land of its Arab inhabitants to ensure a solid Jewish majority in the new state.
Violence was a key tool in this uprooting. Zionist militias such as the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi attacked Palestinian towns and villages well before the entry of Arab armies in May 1948. It is estimated that around 15,000 Palestinians were killed during this period. Beyond the lives lost and people uprooted, the Nakba also meant the physical destruction of Arab Palestine. More than 530 villages and towns were depopulated; many were razed to the ground to prevent their inhabitants from returning, while others were repopulated by Jews and renamed with Hebrew names. This systematic destruction aimed to erase traces of the Palestinian presence from the land, making tangible the “replacement” that is at the heart of the Nakba process. The exodus continued even after the formal end of the war, with the “cleansing” of border areas leading to the expulsion of tens of thousands more Palestinians until 1950.
The endless refugee crisis
The 1948 Nakba generated one of the longest and most unresolved refugee crises in modern history. Those approximately 750,000 Palestinians uprooted from their homes have become, along with their descendants, a population of refugees registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which today numbers nearly 5.9 million people. This figure represents a minimum, as it does not include all displaced Palestinians who did not register. Overall, refugees and internally displaced persons constitute over two-thirds of the global Palestinian population.
About a third of these refugees still live in 58 recognized camps, in precarious socio-economic conditions, characterized by overcrowding, inadequate housing, and poor infrastructure. Camps like Jabalia in Gaza, Baqa’a in Jordan, or Burj El Barajneh and Ein el-Hilweh in Lebanon have become symbols of this suspended existence. Created as a temporary solution, the camps have become permanent homes for generations, a tangible testimony to the international community’s failure to find a just and lasting solution. However, the camps are also spaces of strong community identity, collective memory, and political and cultural resistance.
The lives of refugees vary significantly depending on the host country. While in Jordan most have obtained citizenship (with the significant exception of refugees originating from Gaza) and enjoy relative integration, in Lebanon Palestinians face severe discrimination: they are excluded from citizenship, many professions, and access to essential public services like healthcare and education, living in a state of perennial legal and economic precariousness. In Syria, they enjoyed civil rights, but the civil war has again upended their lives, forcing many into a second displacement.
In this context, UNRWA plays a fundamental and complex role. Created in 1949 specifically to assist Palestinian refugees, it provides essential services like education, healthcare, and social assistance to millions. Its mandate, extending to the male-line descendants of the original refugees, recognizes the hereditary nature of Palestinian refugee status, pending a “just and lasting solution.” For this reason, UNRWA has become a symbol of unresolved international responsibility and the persistence of the refugee issue. Precisely because of this symbolic and operational role, the agency has been subject to political and financial attacks, particularly from Israel and the Trump administration, aimed at dismantling it to liquidate the refugee issue and the right of return.
Life under occupation and siege
For Palestinians who were not expelled beyond the borders in 1948, or for those living in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, the Nakba is not a distant memory but a daily reality. The 1967 war, known as the Naksa (“the setback” or “the defeat”), represented a second collective trauma, with the expulsion of another 250,000-300,000 people and the beginning of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. This occupation, now lasting 57 years, completed Israeli control over all of historic Palestine and created a system of control and oppression that perpetuates the uprooting begun in 1948.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the occupation manifests through a myriad of policies aimed at fragmenting the territory, controlling the population, and facilitating Israeli expansion. Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, house around 750,000 settlers and are constantly expanding, eroding Palestinian land and making the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. Settler violence is a daily phenomenon, often perpetrated with the collusion or protection of Israeli forces: attacks on people, destruction of property, uprooting of olive trees, intimidation. This violence, along with access restrictions, creates a “coercive environment” aimed at pushing Palestinians, especially in rural and Bedouin communities in Area C (which constitutes nearly 60% of the West Bank and is under full Israeli control), to abandon their lands – a “silent transfer”.
The demolition of Palestinian homes for lack of building permits – permits that Israel makes nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain in Area C and East Jerusalem – is a systematic practice. Thousands of structures have been demolished in recent years, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Added to this is a regime of unprecedented movement restrictions: hundreds of checkpoints, roadblocks, gates, and a complex permit system fragment the West Bank into isolated enclaves, hindering access to work, education, medical care, and even family ties. Israeli control also extends to natural resources, with a blatant disparity in access to water: Israeli settlers consume on average three times more water than Palestinians in the West Bank. Human rights organizations like B’Tselem argue that this system of differential control, based on ethnicity and aimed at maintaining Jewish supremacy over the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, constitutes the crime of apartheid.
The Gaza Strip, already overcrowded and impoverished before 2007, has been subjected to an almost total blockade by Israel, considered an illegal form of collective punishment under international law. This siege, further tightened after October 2023 to become an almost complete blockade on aid entry, has strangled the economy, causing extremely high unemployment and poverty rates, and has made daily life a struggle for survival, with chronic shortages of electricity, drinking water, medicine, and basic goods. Gaza has suffered repeated large-scale Israeli military offensives, causing tens of thousands of deaths and injuries, largely civilians, including thousands of children, and immense destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, and vital infrastructure. The offensive begun in October 2023 has brought the catastrophe to an unprecedented level, with over 52,400 deaths reported by April 2025, the forced displacement of almost the entire population (around 1.9 million people), a catastrophic humanitarian crisis with an imminent risk of famine, and accusations of genocide brought forth by experts and international organizations. Access for humanitarian aid has been systematically hindered or blocked by Israel. This daily reality of oppression, fragmentation, and violence, documented by reports from OCHA, B’Tselem, and other organizations, is not seen by Palestinians as a series of separate crises, but as the ongoing manifestation of the Nakba, an incessant process of uprooting and denial of fundamental rights.
The indomitable hope of the right of return
At the heart of Palestinian collective memory and political aspirations lies the right of return. This principle affirms that Palestinian refugees, both the first generation and their descendants, have the inalienable right to return to the homes and lands from which they were expelled in 1948. This right is primarily anchored in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, adopted on December 11, 1948.
Paragraph 11 of this resolution, repeatedly reaffirmed by the General Assembly over the decades, states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return…“. For Palestinians, this resolution is not a mere recommendation, but the international recognition of a fundamental right also based on broader principles of customary international law and human rights, such as the right of everyone to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 13) and the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter one’s own country (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 12). The Palestinian interpretation of Resolution 194 includes three interconnected rights: the right to return to their original homes, the right to restitution of confiscated property, and the right to compensation for losses incurred.
The right of return is much more than a legal or logistical issue; it is an existential matter, deeply tied to Palestinian identity and the demand for justice for the dispossession suffered. The keys to lost homes, often preserved and passed down through generations, have become a powerful symbol of this unbreakable bond with the land and the hope of return. It is not just about returning to a physical place, but about reclaiming a denied history, dignity, and sense of belonging. It is the demand for recognition of the Nakba as a historical injustice and the assertion that lasting peace cannot be achieved without redressing that original wrong.
Israel, however, has always categorically rejected the Palestinian right of return as a “right”. It considers it a political issue to be negotiated within the framework of a final agreement, arguing that the implementation of such a right would undermine the very existence of Israel as a Jewish-majority state. From the Palestinian perspective, this “demographic threat” argument reveals the inherently exclusivist nature of the state established upon their dispossession, a state that prioritizes its ethnic character over the universal rights of Palestinians. Various peace processes, including the Oslo Accords, have systematically failed to adequately address the refugee issue in line with Resolution 194, often marginalizing it or proposing solutions based on resettlement in other countries or in a future limited Palestinian state, thus betraying the expectations and rights of the refugees. Despite the Israeli position and political difficulties, for millions of Palestinians, the right of return remains an indomitable hope and an essential condition for a just peace.
In conclusion…
Seventy-seven years after 1948, the Nakba remains the central wound in the Palestinian experience, a collective trauma that has not healed because the catastrophe has never ended. It is an ongoing process of uprooting, dispossession, fragmentation, and denial of rights manifested daily in the lives of refugees in the diaspora, Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and those under siege and bombardment in Gaza.
In this context, commemorating the Nakba every May 15th is a vital act of resistance. It is challenging the narrative that seeks to deny, minimize, or justify the catastrophe. It is affirming one’s existence, identity, and unbreakable bond with the Palestinian land, despite decades of attempts at physical and cultural erasure. The international community is beginning to acknowledge the Nakba more openly, but this recognition remains empty without concrete actions to end the ongoing injustice.
From the Palestinian perspective, true and lasting peace cannot be built on the denial of history or the perpetuation of oppression. It requires acknowledging historical responsibility for the Nakba and implementing the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, enshrined in international law: the right to self-determination, the end of the occupation, and a just solution for the refugee issue based on the right of return. As long as these rights remain denied, the Nakba will continue. And as long as the Nakba continues, memory will be a battlefield, and remembering will be an act of resistance, an affirmation of the Palestinian will to exist, free and with dignity, in their own land.
Dan ROMEO