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Nakba : the Catastrophe (1948) / Nakba 78: Palestinians Call For a Global Day of Action On 15 May 2026

mei 15

Nakba

The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, ’the “disaster”, “catastrophe”, or “cataclysm”‘), also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs.

May 15, 2026, marks the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, the forced expulsion of approximately 750,000 Indigenous Palestinians from their homes in 1948. On top of the ruins of our homeland, the Zionist movement established Israel as a settler colony, which has adopted apartheid and military occupation to achieve its declared goal: maximum land, minimum Palestinians. Israel’s livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza is the darkest chapter in this ongoing Nakba of oppression and ethnic cleansing. Cutting all links of state, corporate, and institutional complicity in its genocidal regime has become an irrefutable legal, not just moral, obligation. Israel seeks to normalize and divert attention from its settler-colonial origins by overwhelming the world with tens of thousands of current crimes against Palestinians and the peoples of the region from Lebanon and Iran to Syria and Yemen. Perpetrating unspeakable depraved violence, it aims to colonize our minds not only with despair but also with amnesia. But Palestinians, like our ancient olive trees, are resilient and patient; we also have a fertile collective memory. Our refugees’ right to return home and receive reparations is our most fundamental goal. We struggle, after all, not just to end the genocide and the ongoing Nakba but also to dismantle their root cause: 78 years of settler-colonialism and apartheid.

The term Nakba is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region. The foundational events of the Nakba took place during and shortly after the 1948 Palestine war, including 78% of Mandatory Palestine being declared as Israel, the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages by Zionist militias and subsequent geographical erasure, the denial of the Palestinian right of return, the creation of permanent Palestinian refugees and the “shattering of Palestinian society”. The expulsion of the Palestinians has since been described by some historians as ethnic cleansing. In 1998, Yasser Arafat proposed that Palestinians should mark the 50th anniversary of the Nakba declaring 15 May, the day after Israeli independence in 1948, as Nakba Day, formalizing a date that had been unofficially used as early as 1949.The Nakba greatly influenced the Palestinian culture and is a foundational symbol of Palestinian identity, together with “Handala“, the keffiyeh and the symbolic key. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish described the Nakba as “an extended present that promises to continue in the future.”