Less than a week before the commemoration, Israel is bombing Gaza again. The deadliest round of bombings in less than a year. And the latest round of airstrikes in…I don’t know how long. It’s difficult to keep track.
Every time Israel bombs Gaza, many things come to mind: the siege, the fact that more than 2 million people are living in an open-air prison with nowhere to go, children killed while they sleep and discarded as “collateral damage,” Israel bombing civilians to score political points, the world watches on in silence and complicity, etc. etc. The list goes on.
Today, as the latest round of bombings rage on and we are flooded with the faces of innocent children who were killed, I think not only about the past 16 years of trauma that Gazans have suffered under siege, but about the past 75 years. About the Nakba that happened, and the one that is still ongoing.
Gaza’s population is largely made up of refugees – an estimated 70% of the population. The descendants of those forced out of their homes in 1948, now being forced out again. Their grandparents were driven out of their homes at gunpoint by Zionist militias. Today, their grandchildren are being bombed out of their homes by those same militias, now the “Israel Defense Forces.”
75 years of the same story, repeating itself.
The ongoing Nakba. النكبة المستمرة in Arabic.
It’s an idea, or rather, a reality, that is so widely talked about and understood in Palestine, but rarely acknowledged in the outside world, and media. Afterall, when the world still denies the Nakba of 1948, how could it accept that the Nakba never ended?
But if there was ever any proof of the ongoing Nakba, the continuous catastrophe that Palestinians live in every single day, it is everything we are witnessing in this current moment.
Almost every day there is an Israeli army raid in the West Bank, where Palestinians are killed, arrested, and injured. In present-day Israeli territory, Palestinian citizens, the ones who remained, who Israel did not manage to drive out, are being lynched in the street and shot dead while driving.
Schools are being demolished, Palestinians are being forced out of their homes, through bombs, court decisions, and bulldozers. Palestinian’s ancient trees are being uprooted, and their holy sites are being overtaken. Palestinian prisoners are starving to death in pursuit of freedom.
All the while, settlements keep growing, settlers become more violent, the state becomes more brazenly transparent in its goals: erase and replace. The same strategy of 75 years ago, is very much in place today.
The policy of bombing Gaza every few years, every few months, is not just an Israeli political strategy. It fits hand in hand with the forcible evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and Masafer Yatta, the deadly raids in Jenin and Nablus, and the displacement projects in the Naqab and Yaffa.
It is all part of the larger story. The larger Israeli story, forced upon Palestinians in their own land.
The common thread that weaves together the everyday events of the past 75 years. The ongoing Nakba. The catastrophe continues.
Yumna Patel is the Palestine News Director for Mondoweiss.
Photo: Heinrich Böll Foundation Palestine & Jordan / Wikimedia Commons
