The Palestinian Right to Remember
On the infinite temporalities of Nakba Day
Priya Prabhakar
Courtesy of The Palestine Poster Project Archives
[Image description: Three overlapping hands, black and red, recall the drip of blood. Overlaid text in Arabic reads: May 15 / Day of solidarity with the students in the occupied homeland. Students of the world / Raise your voices / And link your hands in solidarity with the Palestinian students in the occupied homeland.]
On May 15th of 2011, during the second year of the Arab Spring, thousands of flag-carrying Palestinian protesters marched to the borders and checkpoints in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza. In a deeply revolutionary moment, protesters started to climb and push at the fence as their chants demanding liberation and the right of return echoed in the face of brutal Zionist repression. On that day, Israeli troops murdered 15 Palestinians and maimed hundreds more.
These protests occurred on Nakba Day, an annual commemoration of the months from December 1947 to May 1948 and beyond when Israel established itself as a state on Palestinian land. Zionist paramilitary groups expelled over 750,000 Palestinians; conducted raids, massacres, and depopulation campaigns all across Palestine; and created the largest refugee population in the world to date. In an attempt to erase all histories and indications of Indigenous presence, they displaced people in over 500 Palestinian villages and planted forests in their place. Today, Palestinians remember this as al-Nakba, “the Catastrophe.”
The Nakba, however, is not merely an occurrence in the distant past. Israel is an enduring settler colonial project that relies on the destruction of Indigenous peoples, or what Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe calls “the logic of elimination.” The Nakba must be seen as a “structure, not an event,” Wolfe offers. The Nakba has not ended. It is a constant struggle as Israel continues to displace Palestinians and bar them from returning, hindering their movement with checkpoints and walls.
Each year, Israelis celebrate their Independence Day by showcasing US-funded tanks, fighter jets, and weaponry to the public. They honor Isreali Defense Soldiers, watch fireworks, and celebrate over barbecues. They celebrate a patriotism that is held together by a colonizing imaginary, a worldview that is wholly dependent on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In the words of Palestinian protesters, “their independence is our Nakba”; while Israelis celebrate, Palestinians mourn. And, in order to legitimize its national identity, Israel seeks to deny the Nakba through a violent erasure of its histories and the criminalization of its remembrance. Since the Nakba, Israel’s Ministry of Defense has been systemically hiding hundreds of documents from Palestinian and Israeli scholars from that period, filing them away in vaults and completely concealing them from the public. Central to Israel’s project of historical revisionism is the continued eradication of Palestinians' right to remember their histories. As Frantz Fanon once said, “the settler makes history and is conscious of making it.”
For decades, observance of Nakba Day has taken several forms. As Palestinian migration researcher Zarefa Ali notes, “Palestinians have for the past 65 years commemorated the memory of their Nakba in various ways, whether from the poems of Mahmoud Darwish, the novels of Ghassan Kanafani, the caricatures of Naji Ali, the stories of Samira Azzam, or in the annual festivals and Palestinian parades.” Thousands of Palestinian prisoners have carried out hunger strikes through Nakba Day. Palestinian students across Israeli universities fight tooth and nail to screen films about the Nakba and hold demonstrations on campus. International solidarity events are held by Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as their allies, to honor this date.
The annual Nakba Day contains all-encompassing temporal possibilities; observance represents the past, the present, and the future all at once. As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said in 2001, “the Nakba is an extended present that promises to continue in the future.” What is embedded in the memorialization of this forced exodus is the promise of the Right of Return—a promise that is guaranteed by international law, a promise championed by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and, most importantly, a promise that is embedded in all forms of Palestinian resistance. This promise is a threat to the future of the settler state and, in response to it, Israel seeks to penalize, criminalize, and suppress all commemoration of Palestinian history.
In 2011, the Israeli Knesset, the country’s legislative body, imposed the Budget Foundations Law. Also known as the “Nakba Law,” the ordinance prevents Palestinian institutions inside Israel and Occupied East Jerusalem from receiving state funds if they observe Israel’s Independence Day as a “day of mourning.” The bill directly punishes institutions—such as schools, cultural and community centers, and political organizations—that observe Nakba Day, specifically withholding funding from institutions under the following accusations:
Rejecting the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;
Incitement to racism, violence or terrorism;
Support for an armed struggle or act of terror by an enemy state or a terrorist organization against the State of Israel;
Commemorating Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning;
An act of vandalism or physical desecration that dishonors the state’s flag or symbol.
Situating Israel as the victim and scapegoating Palestinian resistance as a justification for occupation, the Nakba Bill effectively exerts severe forms of hegemonic control, collective punishment, and surveillance over Palestinians and their ability to grapple with the historic and continuous trauma of the Nakba. The bill’s charges are a continuation of the pernicious tactics of Israeli settler colonialism, given that throughout history the Nakba has been denied by not only the Israeli state but also imperialist actors, including the US—an erasure that has legitimized the sovereignty of Israel as well as silenced any dissent under the guise of anti-Semitism. These forms of historical denial have resulted in deep generational trauma that Palestinians have not been able to grapple with in the context of ongoing ethnic cleansing and Israel’s control and censorship of history.
The rituals of Nakba Day are not merely a commemoration of the past but a renewal of the future, an assertion of the Right of Return that is so deeply sacrosanct to Palestinians. Israel continues to suppress Indigenous Palestinians under systems of mass surveillance, imprisonment, militarism, and intentional maiming. The observance of Nakba Day is Palestinians harnessing their power to refuse these systems of domination. Through rituals of remembrance and storytelling, they recount both atrocities and resistance that they, along with their families and ancestors, have sustained. Honoring the history, resisting in the present, and reconciling the future of the Nakba are the ways Palestinians preserve collective strength and resist the ongoing ethnic cleansing of their people.
As Palestinians continue to fight against the suppression of their right to observe Nakba Day, allies must listen and support the collective strength of Palestinians. We must champion all forms of international solidarity and fight back against not just the Nakba Bill but the Zionist occupation and all the atrocities it bears. We must continue to fight for a liberated Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Liked this piece? Support the Palestinian Youth Movement, a North America-based grassroots and independent movement of Palestinian and Arab youth struggling toward the liberation of the Palestinian homeland and people.