Agenda

Name: Nakba : the Catastrophe (1948) / Nakba 77: Palestinians Call For a Global Day of Action On 15 May 2025
Start: 2025-05-15T00:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-05-15T23:59:59+02:00

Zie verleden, heden en toekomst door de ogen van A3…

Archief

Agenda’s

« Alle Evenementen

Dit evenement is voorbij.

Nakba : the Catastrophe (1948) / Nakba 77: Palestinians Call For a Global Day of Action On 15 May 2025

15 mei 2025

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.

Approaching the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of most of the Indigenous people of Palestine, your action is needed now more than ever. For almost 20 years, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been leading the call for strategic and impactful grassroots solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice, freedom and equality. Since the start of Israel’s livestreamed genocide against the people in Gaza, BDS pressure to end international complicity in its regime of settler-colonial apartheid and illegal occupation has risen exponentially. We all know that Israel is only able to continue its genocide, including daily massacres, burning our children, men and women alive, or starving and thirsting them to death, due to the ongoing complicity of states, companies and institutions around the world. Israel announced its genocide against Palestinians is about to get even deadlier, as it prepares for mass ethnic cleansing and total destruction of Gaza. “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians,” is a popular slogan of solidarity around the world. Given the ferocity of Israel’s daily massacres and its criminal impunity, we need to escalate pressure. Corporations and governments are feeling the heat and have cut ties of complicity. BDS works but we need more to force Israel to stop its crimes. So in your thousands, and in your millions: Rise up and escalate BDS now! The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society that is leading the global BDS movement, calls for mass global mobilizations and civil disobedience on 15 May. Let’s show complicit governments, institutions and corporations what real people power can do.

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.”