By Nadia Abu-Shanab
This May, we do more than commemorate Al Nakba. We bind memories of 1948 to a livestream from Rafah. These are two crime scenes which must be understood in tandem. Memory and the present, encasing the hundreds of seasons in between. Coloured by our olive harvests, births, graduations, marriages, deaths and many intifadas. All taking place against a backdrop of catastrophe. Memory and the present, like the hardback cover to a banned book.
The task of this year’s anniversary is to do exactly as Dr Refaat Alareer compelled us to do. In a recorded lecture Dr Alareer outlines the purpose of his poetry course. He describes the way Palestinian writing not only re-tethers us back to our own land. It also has the power to futurecast us into a world where this ongoing catastrophe is over.
For the five decades before 1948, before Zionism had won its violent expression in the state of Israel, it existed as an idea. An idea romanticized and socialised through literature and poetry, says Dr. Alareer. To achieve any vision, you need, on a most basic level, to move people to action.
Dr Alareer also reads a quote from Former Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan. Dayan’s words compare facing the poems of Fadwa Tuqan to facing twenty enemy fighters. Tuqan, a legendary Palestinian poet, was known for her gorgeously defiant poems. She invoked the Palestinian right to return with a lucidity which makes it feel inevitable. Tuqan captured the pain of dispossession, but also in the alchemy of her prose, enlivened ingredients essential to sustaining struggle: rebellion, unity and hope. Both Dayan and Tuqan knew, the hopeless and divided do not organise, and they do not win.
We have millions of renderings of Al Nakba. These are now told by the grandchildren of survivors into every corner of the world. Articulated in dozens of languages. They are shared to rupture the Zionist timeline and to unpick the many stinging revisions. To remember ourselves as we once were. Even in these distant islands of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, we have the privilege of hearing them from people like Reem, Yasmine, Tameem, Wajd, Shahd, Afnan and Ayah.
These stories are withheld from official recognition. The massacres and mass displacement of 1948 were, of course, subject to erasure. A largely agrarian people who had worked the land since the dawn of agriculture uprooted themselves voluntarily? Farcical. Every settler colony, including New Zealand, builds its nationhood on these deceptions. Burying the truth of its native people under the weight of fragile fictions. The same fictions Moana Jackson so deftly cracked open. Who would give up their own rangatiratanga?
For too long, we Palestinians have been suffocating inside someone else’s story of victimhood. A story we can trace back into the guilty stomach of 20th century Europe. A time when the genocidal practices used by Britain, France, Spain and others in their colonising endeavors washed up on their own continent, inside the camps of the Nazi empire. Before this, the genocidal practices of mass killings, forced displacement, enslavement and trauma had reconfigured Africa, Australia, Asia, New Zealand, the Pacific and the Americas. There is nothing quite like being confronted by your own shadow.
To understand Zionism is to reckon with how an idealised homeland, an imagined and ethnically pure community, seeded in poems became a brutal military power with impunity to commit genocide. It is to understand how a valid longing for Jewish safety was captured by toxic settler-colonial yarn, and how historical factors created an opening where this arc made sense.
Arthur Balfour — the man who signed historical Palestine, then a British possession, over to Zionist promise — was an antisemite. A former Prime Minister who had prevented Jewish refugees fleeing to Britain from Russia. For imperial powers, gifting a land that wasn’t theirs to Zionist nationhood was always about strategic geopolitical interests, never moral or anti-racist ones. For Europeans (notably in Germany) support for Zionism is also an atonement for, and avowal from, their crimes of catastrophic antisemitism.
Zionism is therefore, all at once, a denial of Europe’s own shadow, a regional bunker for the imperial core and a pitch about settlers making virtuous use of empty land. It speaks to settler nations in multiple dimensions. Support for Israel is etched deep in both the material and narrative interests of settler nationhood. With the benefit of 76 years worth of data, we recognise Zionism today as an extension of the same ideologies which paved the way to the Holocaust. Racial supremacy. Dehumanisation. Practices as indigenous to European colonialism as Zionism itself.
For its own part, the Gaza District, known now as the Gaza Strip, was fundamentally transformed by the events of 1948. The vast majority of Gaza’s population descends from people displaced from villages stolen in the original Nakba. Many live in refugee camps that grew out of tent cities. Today, in an episode of ethnic cleansing which outstrips the creation of Israel, tented cities reemerge.
The cyclical trauma of this moment for Gaza is no narrative device. Gaza is the grieving, beating and bleeding heartland of Palestinian pain. Meanwhile, in an inseparable series of events, the West Bank is on fire with unrestrained, vigilante settler violence. Rivers of this common (but unequal) pain flow also from where the borders and walls will not allow us, all over historical Palestine. And across vast oceans to millions of Palestinians in exile. Welcome as it is, no amount of growing global support for Palestinian freedom can eclipse the unacceptable human cost. Our people are not collateral suffering their darkest passage to provide evidence of the need for a new world.
But now our book is finally wide open. In fact, it is the most-read underground text of our moment, being passed through the hands of the global masses like a wildfire. For indigenous people, our story affirms their own embodied knowledge. For others in the global North, it turns their understanding of the world they inhabit on its axis. This upending feels expedient. People everywhere are alive with a gnawing sense that, with our communities and planet buckling under the compounding crises of colonial capitalism, things are somehow upside down.
We exist collectively at the apex of billionaire power. Dissatisfied with the limits of material extraction from the global south and workers, our new colonial emperors seek expansion at stratospheric levels. These men, spiritually corrupted by obscene wealth, seek accumulation and domination everywhere. The online spaces where we once gathered. Desecrating the night sky. Mars. The moon. The depths of the ocean. Observe how their individual ambition has no limits. We should never concede that our collective dreams for dignity are too wild.
Our book is a timely companion text to existing in a world increasingly alive with indigenous memory. During the Enlightenment era, the prevailing science classified people as racially inferior and therefore undeserving of their land or rights. That same discipline is now discovering evidence that validates long-known indigenous truths. Affirming oratory traditions once coded as “primitive” that spoke of the intricate connections between all living things. Discovery has always been a duplicitous claim.
Amongst this climate, the Nakba of now is destroying life in Gaza at a scale most of us could barely even comprehend,let alone put into words. And yet. Gaza continues to write, to dance, to resist. Even now, Gaza keeps writing back. The students and peers of Refaat Alareer, people like Mosab Abu Toha, Yousef Aljamal, Abeer Barakat and Alia Kassab write back. While we do not, and unfortunately cannot, ignore the massive military and material power of Israel, or its backing by the US empire, Zionism as an idea has never been so fallible.
We Palestinians are also great students. The craft of the pen we are so adept at wielding is translating a story of victimhood into one of liberation. Liberation is an expansive principle, not an exclusive one. The specifics of our struggle have universal implications. Both those who stand with and against us know that Palestinian victory has much bigger implications for what else is ours to win.
In spite of their technologies of extermination, the will for Palestinian self-determination triumphs. The Zionist trajectory only exposes that they are, and have always been,colonial invaders. They no longer seek to deny Al Nakba, they are so brazen as to declare their intent to commit one. Invoking the term itself in this campaign. In the Zionist attempt to erase Gaza, they have surfaced mass graves the world over. There is no propaganda big enough to obscure genocide. Our story has spanned too much ground, and the world is too full of cues to believe us.
In this darkness, and with the scale of loss so unimaginable, it is not fantastical to say we owe Palestine, and particularly Gaza, unyielding ambition. The only antidote to our ongoing Nakba is our complete liberation from Zionism. In narrative and in deed. We are not just calling for a cease-fire. Palestinians have been resisting for generations, at huge cost, for no less than life, dignity, justice, freedom and of course, return.
The last few pages are undetermined, but we know what to do. Remember, Zionism was once a dream on a page. Palestine was an imaginary possession of the British empire, gifted away. All with a symbolic scribble.They gave their wild and dangerous fictions effect because the conditions, powers and times facilitated it. We are shifting the conditions, we have our own forms of power. Now our truth, dangerous in its own way to those who benefit from oppression, is being read.
It is not only injustice that is moving people to act. The promise of Palestinian liberation, too, is capturing and channeling a near-universal longing for a new world. Let it bring hope; let it be a tale.
This piece was generously copy edited by Brigid Quirke. It also draws on the work of poems, writing and words of Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuqan, Yousef Aljamal, Dr Refaat Alareer, Dr Lana Tatour, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, Naomi Klein and many, many others.
Justice for Palestine 