On the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, Palestinians are not only remembering a past tragedy, but its continuation in the genocide in Gaza. A catastrophe for humanity's collective conscience.
Each year on May 15th, Palestinians commemorate the flight and expulsion from their homeland in 1948, known as Nakba (eng.: catastrophe). The Nakba was not merely a political event that resulted in territorial loss or population displacement; it represented a comprehensive collapse of an entire way of life — a forced rupture that redefined the meaning of homeland, identity, and even the relationship between human beings and place itself.
The Palestinian refugee came to carry homeland as a deferred possibility rather than a tangible present. Today, over 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees remain under UNRWA’s mandate, transforming the Nakba into an intergenerational condition. It entered Palestinian consciousness as an ongoing experience, continuously reshaped by every war, every displacement, and every loss––a prolonged condition between occupation, exile, and the unfulfilled promise of statehood.
The First Nakba: The Founding of a Modern Tragedy
After the end of the British Mandate and with the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, followed by the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli war, Palestine witnessed one of the twentieth century’s largest forced displacement events. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians — nearly two-thirds of the Arab population at the time — were compelled to leave their homes.
More than 530 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, depopulated, or forcibly repopulated, dismantling a social and economic fabric developed over centuries. Major urban centers such as Jaffa, Haifa, al-Lydd, and Ramla lost most of their Arab inhabitants within months.
1948 to 1988: From Total Liberation to Political Realism
Following the Nakba, Palestinian discourse initially centered on full liberation of the territories. However, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, shifting regional and international dynamics pushed Palestinian leadership toward strategic redefinition. The 1974 Ten-Point Program of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) marked the first diplomatic opening toward establishing authority on any liberated Palestinian territory. This transition culminated in the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, implicitly accepting UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and endorsing the two-state solution.
Palestinians effectively accepted a state on only 22% of historic Palestine — an unprecedented concession among modern national liberation movements. Israeli governments, however, did not reciprocate with equivalent recognition of Palestinian sovereignty; settlement expansion continued, creating an early divergence between diplomatic discourse and territorial realities.
1993 to 2000: Deferred Peace
The Oslo Accords, starting in 1993, represented the most consequential turning point. Palestinian leadership formally recognized Israel while accepting postponement of core issues — Jerusalem, refugees, borders, and settlements— under the assumption that incremental confidence-building would lead to final peace.
Negotiations advanced diplomatically while occupation deepened territorially. Settlement populations doubled during the peace process itself. This fact on the ground transformed the interim phase into a permanent condition and eroded the feasibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.
2000 to 2008: From Negotiation to Conflict Management
At Camp David in 2000, Palestinians entered negotiations prepared for historic compromise based on the 1967 borders. Negotiations collapsed amid irreconcilable gaps over sovereignty and Jerusalem.
Subsequently, Israeli strategy shifted toward managing rather than resolving the conflict, building separation barriers, expanding settlements, and reducing Palestinian statehood to administrative autonomy without genuine sovereignty.
The Arab Peace Initiative in 2002 offered comprehensive regional normalization in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967. Despite unprecedented regional guarantees, successive Israeli governments declined to engage with it as a serious negotiating framework.
Structural International Failure
The Nakba occurred during a transitional moment preceding the consolidation of the modern human rights system––with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights being adopted in December 1948. Following the declaration, UN General Assembly Resolution 194 affirmed Palestinian refugees’ right of return or compensation. Yet, despite repeated reaffirmations, the resolution was never implemented, leaving the Palestinian question among the longest unresolved conflicts in modern international politics.
Israel achieved rapid international recognition as a state, while Palestinians have continued seeking recognition of their political rights. This asymmetry created an exceptional condition within international politics: a people acknowledged humanitarianly but denied a final political resolution.
Contrary to prevailing Western stereotypes, Palestinian political evolution reveals gradual pragmatism and cumulative concessions. Israeli policies, by contrast, was largely characterized by territorial consolidation and shrinking political horizons for any resolution. The international community was structurally incapable to reverse this trajectory. Peace failed not because Palestinians rejected compromise, but because negotiations unfolded without implementation capacity.
Gaza: The Nakba as Present Reality
What is unfolding in Gaza today forcefully returns this unresolved question to the forefront. Most Gazans are themselves refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948. They are reliving historical uprooting within borders they cannot leave. It appears as an intensified reappearance of the original Nakba’s imagery: mass displacement and erased cities. The recent war represents not merely military confrontation, but systemic societal collapse, where daily life becomes impossible to reproduce.
Gaza’s tragedy exposes a deeper crisis within the global order. A world established after World War II on promises of protecting humanity from collective catastrophe now appears unable to prevent the reproduction of such catastrophe. Thus, commemorating the Nakba becomes a moral and political reassessment of the present.
The Question of Shared Humanity
The defining feature of the Gaza moment is not merely escalating violence, but a shift in global moral perception. Engagement is increasingly happening outside traditional diplomacy, in universities, civil society, and transnational activism. The debate is shifting from who holds power to who holds moral legitimacy. Security cannot sustainably rest upon permanent human precarity, and stability cannot emerge from indefinitely managing tragedy rather than ending its causes.
From the Nakba of 1948 to Gaza today, the Palestinian question reveals itself not as a regional dispute but as an enduring struggle over the meaning of justice in the post-colonial world. The question Gaza now poses to Western readers — and to the international order itself — is profoundly civilizational: What meaning remains for humanity if it is not universal?
Gaza, therefore, is not the end of a story: It is a moment of global awakening still unfolding. If the Nakba began as a Palestinian tragedy, its continuation risks becoming a crisis of humanity’s collective conscience. For Palestinians, the Nakba is not a memory observed — it is a lived time. And Gaza today is perhaps the most painful chapter of a yet unfinished book.
