This is a new Nakba
The Nakba (“catastrophe” in English) is marked on 15 May every year to remember the day the state of Israel was founded in 1948 on the back of a genocide of the Palestinian people. In that year, Zionist militias—armed and trained by various great powers including Britain and the Soviet Union—carried out a campaign of massacres and ethnic cleansing, forcing around 750,000 Palestinians to flee their homes. They have never been allowed to return.
This year, the Nakba was remembered with mass protests and student occupations around the world, as people strive to stop Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many have dubbed the nearly eight-month-long invasion of the Gaza Strip “a new Nakba”, and they are right to do so.
The Nakba of 1948 was planned, calculated and articulated in advance. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and commander of the Haganah militia, which carried out massacres and forced expulsions during the Nakba, was crystal clear that the creation of Israel required genocide. He spent years campaigning and preparing for it.
“The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple”, said Ben-Gurion in 1937. In a letter to his son, he stated, “We must expel the Arabs and take their places”.
During the ethnic cleansing operations his armed forces were carrying out, he wrote in his diary in July 1948, “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return”.
The United Nations helped pave the way for the Nakba through its partition plan of 1947, which backed the creation of Israel. While publicly pretending to accept partition alongside a Palestinian state, Ben-Gurion planned a violent expansion. In a 1948 letter he wrote, “If we will receive in time the arms we have already purchased, and maybe even receive some of that promised to us by the UN, we [can] ... take over Palestine as a whole”.
The Nakba of 2023-24 must be understood in this larger context. It is the latest episode of Israel’s ceaseless expansionism, which has always required an ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
The latest news from Gaza is that Israel is expanding its assault on Rafah, pushing further west into more populated areas. Bombing and massacres continue throughout the Strip, including in northern and central Gaza. The official number of Palestinians killed is now over 35,000, with thousands more still buried under the rubble of their homes.
But like the original Nakba, for Israeli political and military leaders this is not merely about blind revenge for Hamas’ attack on 7 October. It is a calculated offensive, albeit one that is ill defined and politically contested within the Israeli war cabinet. The assault has been designed to destroy the necessities of human life and society in Gaza through the targeting of power stations, bakeries, water and sewage systems; the systematic destruction of hospitals, residential buildings, universities, schools, mosques and churches; the starvation-siege; and the deliberate killing of huge numbers of civilians, including children.
As in the 1948 Nakba, Israeli politicians have been open about their plans and dreams. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba”, Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter declared in November. In October, a leaked document revealed that the Israeli Intelligence Ministry advised the government to forcibly expel the entire Gazan population.
Millions have mobilised around the world to stop this genocide, which has led to international pressure from Israel’s chief arms suppliers, notably the US, to rein in civilian casualties and tone down the planned invasion of Rafah.
In a big blow to Israel’s legitimacy, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for their war crimes in Gaza, along with three Hamas leaders.
The Israeli government and its international supporters are apoplectic at the “moral equivalence” they accuse the ICC of drawing between themselves and Hamas. Indeed, there is no equivalence: whatever you think of Hamas, they are not the occupying power, and they have never killed 35,000 people, razed entire cities or tortured and starved on a scale such as Israel has done in Gaza since October.
For now, at least, it seems the more ambitious goal of some in the Israeli establishment to expel or eradicate the entire Gazan population will not be carried out in the short term. That is a small mercy. But Israel clearly intends to keep killing and starving the population for some time to come, and any ceasefire that eventually emerges will leave Gaza in ruins and its people subject to an ongoing brutal occupation and siege.
The Nakba of 1948 never really ended. In that sense, this is not a new Nakba, but a continuation of Israel’s foundational genocide. It won’t end until the state of Israel itself is stopped.
