May 15, 2025

NAKBA 77 STATEMENT

Today marks 77 years since the start of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, an ethnic cleansing campaign waged by Zionist terror militias. Over the span of the 2 intervening years, dozens of massacres took place with the intention of eliminating entire villages and bloodlines, resulting in the destruction of over 530 villages, the murder of 13,000 Palestinians, and expulsion of 1 million Palestinians.

Those who fled their homes carried the hope and belief they would soon return. Instead, they would be relegated to four generations and counting of statelessness and exile. On the graves of our people's villages, Zionists declared the formation of their settler colonial state. 77 years later, the original Nakba survivors and their descendants still hold the keys to their homes, along with the promise of return to that land which is rightfully ours.

The Nakba was not a singular event in time, nor did it come about it abruptly or spontaneously. The political groundwork for the Palestinian people’s dispossession began in the late nineteenth century in Europe, where Zionism was first conceived and popularized as an ideology and political project.

The Sykes-Picot agreement between the French and British in 1916 redrew the map of the region along colonial lines and stripped Arabs of their sovereignty, while the Balfour Declaration in 1917 served as the official justification for our people’s ethnic cleansing three decades later. The subsequent period of British rule in Palestine economically weakened the Palestinian people, and British support for Zionism as an imperialist tool emboldened Zionist militias to massacre Palestinians.

The ongoing 77-year-long campaign of massacres, land theft, siege, forced expulsion, and ethnic cleansing escalated over the decades, culminating in the genocide of Gaza to which the world has borne witness from October 2023 to the present. In the West Bank, increased repression and violence from both Zionist settlers and the occupation army have severely constricted our people's freedom to move, live, work, and inhabit the land, while home demolitions, forced exodus, and massacres have created a slow-motion genocide for our people in the occupied interior.

Yet the Palestinian struggle is not defined by the ongoing Nakba, but by the resistance that Palestinians have continuously waged against colonization and imperialism since the Zionist project was first conceived. From the Great Arab Revolts in 1936, to the First and Second Intifadas, to the tearing down of Gaza’s prison fences, the Palestinian masses have continued to confront and resist Zionist occupation and settler colonialism for generations.

It is Palestinians' tireless and principled struggle, passed down generation after generation, that has generated an internal crisis among Zionists. They can only fathom to crush it through spectacular violence and brutality, but they fail to realize that their own violence is what is self-cannibalizing their society, rotting it from within and inching it closer and closer to internal collapse.

Painful and disorienting as Palestinian existence can often be, our struggle is not rooted in the hopelessness of exile, but in the dream and promise of our people's return. Down that path first forged by our ancestors and the survivors of May 1948, we pledge to continue the struggle, generation after generation, until the hour of Palestine's liberation.