Annie's New Letters (& notes): Nakba

Showing posts with label Nakba. Show all posts

Thursday, June 11, 2026

"Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map." Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago. In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

A Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli strike on a tent encampment for displaced families, according to medics, is carried at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on 25 May, 2026 (Reuters)

Jonathan Cook

11 June 2026

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”.

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” - the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war.

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state.

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt.

The 1967 war was... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-not-an-aberration-israels-genocide-gaza-was-planned-decades-ago

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

Monday, June 8, 2026

"We live in an age saturated with Holocaust books, films, documentaries, and lessons that teach us how dangerous dehumanization can be. We are reminded time and again that before people can be mistreated, displaced, or killed on a mass scale, they are first stripped of their humanity through words and imagery. And yet, when similar language is used today to describe Palestinians, much of the world remains silent—or worse, offers its support. If history has taught us anything, it is that when human beings are reduced to weeds, thorns, insects, or any other nuisance, the groundwork is being laid for people to accept what would otherwise be unacceptable. That is why the language matters. And that is why the silence is so troubling." ~ Mike Odetalla

Mike Hanini Odetalla

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Morning reflections regarding Gaza with coffee as I look over my yard:

6/08/26

I can't look at my lawn without thinking about the terminology that has been used over the years to describe military assaults on Palestinians.

"Mowing the lawn" was one such phrase used to describe repeated assaults on Gaza, reducing Palestinian men, women, and children to little more than blades of grass to be cut down.

More recently came "Field of Thorns," a term associated with the current Israeli leadership, where Palestinians are once again reduced to an unwanted nuisance that must be removed.

What I find most disturbing is not merely the language itself, but the world's reaction to it.

We live in an age saturated with Holocaust books, films, documentaries, and lessons that teach us how dangerous dehumanization can be. We are reminded time and again that before people can be mistreated, displaced, or killed on a mass scale, they are first stripped of their humanity through words and imagery.

And yet, when similar language is used today to describe Palestinians, much of the world remains silent—or worse, offers its support.

If history has taught us anything, it is that when human beings are reduced to weeds, thorns, insects, or any other nuisance, the groundwork is being laid for people to accept what would otherwise be unacceptable.

That is why the language matters.

And that is why the silence is so troubling.

~ Mike Odetalla

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10166147366441977&set=a.10150390714236977

Sunday, June 7, 2026

"I visited almost 200 locations. It was never intended to be a project — it was a journey to educate myself and to witness the Palestinian loss of 1948." A Palestinian photographer’s ‘search for what remained’ from 1948 When Nablus-based journalist Ahmad Al-Bazz received an Israeli travel permit, he rushed to visit nearly 200 villages depopulated in the Nakba. Five years later, his new book offers a powerful visual archive of erasure.

Ahmad Al-Bazz | The Erasure of Palestine

How did the experience of documenting these depopulated villages shape the way you perceived and moved through the 1948 territories?

Once you cross the wall, everything feels very foreign. I knew that I was still in Palestine — I’m just crossing a wall that divides it — but what I saw on the ground felt very different from what I was used to. It looked Western, but not like any specific place. You might be standing in front of a very Western-looking city, yet know that it was built over a Palestinian one — like Tel Aviv, which was built on part of Al-Manshiyya and a few other villages. As a photographer, that pushed me to search for what remained and to photograph it. In that sense, the act felt like a form of visual decolonization.

It was also a weird feeling because you are suddenly among the settler community. They don’t know that you’re Palestinian, and you never feel completely okay about it. Yet architecture photography helped me connect with these sites. That was also the visual style of the book: you see the Palestinian layer and the Israeli layer in the background, and I wanted to show the contrast between the two.

As you said, many of your photographs show how closely these depopulated Palestinian villages lie beside new Israeli construction, fenced off with vegetation growing over and obscuring them. What did the condition of these villages tell you about Israeli society?

Palestinian sites take different forms today. Some are destroyed, completely erased, or reduced to rubble, sometimes in nature in the middle of nowhere. In other places, surviving structures are scattered between Israeli houses, as in Haifa, or in Ijzim [now the Israeli moshav Kerem Maharal) and Ein Hod, where wealthy Palestinian houses are inhabited by Israelis. Some sites are abandoned, while others are reused in strange ways: a Palestinian school may become an Israeli school, as in Al-Tira, or a mosque may be turned into an animal shelter, as in Kawfakha.

https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-destroyed-villages-nakba-photography/

Saturday, May 16, 2026

The True Story of Israel's Creation: Debunking Israel's Foundational Lies from Their Leaders' Mouths

Muhammad Shehada

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk55AwbXDaw

Historical reckoning: The push for the US to acknowledge the Nakba... On the 78th anniversary of the mass expulsion of Palestinians, experts say US ‘political amnesia’ continues.

Palestinian villagers who fled from their homes during fighting between Israeli and Arab troops, on November 4, 1948 [Jim Pringle/AP Photo]

By Joseph Stepansky

Washington, DC – It is a question that reaches a fever pitch this time of year for Palestinian survivors and rights advocates: Can the United States government create just policy in the Middle East without a full accounting — or recognition — of Palestinian history?

Thursday marks the annual day of remembrance for the Nakba, a period that began in 1948 with the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the creation of the state of Israel.

Since then, Palestinians have endured decades of displacement and ethnic cleansing.

But the US government does not recognise the Nakba, which translates to the “catastrophe” in Arabic, even as it continues to assert gargantuan influence over the region and maintains ironclad support for the Israeli government.

Under the second administration of President Donald Trump, the US has taken a further active role in Palestinian affairs, establishing the controversial “Board of Peace” to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, even as it continues to take a permissive approach towards Israel’s genocide.

When faced with the question of whether the US can responsibly address Palestinian issues without acknowledging the Nakba, Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, believes the answer is simple: No.

“If you only acknowledge the humanity and suffering of one side, that forces you also to ignore historical realities that are still with us today,” he told Al Jazeera.

Elgindy said “political amnesia” has long defined the US government’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

For decades, the US has supported Israel with billions in foreign assistance and military aid, despite the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and a system of segregation that rights groups say constitutes apartheid.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians. Elgindy told Al Jazeera that the US has played a key role in underwriting the conflict.

“For better or worse, mostly for worse, the United States is inextricably tied to the Palestinian issue,” Elgindy said.

A fundamental – if long delayed – corrective step would be recognition of the Nakba, he said. “It is a historical reality that Palestinians have a collective trauma that is part of their identity and part of their political psychology.”

‘The ongoing Nakba’

On Thursday, US Representative Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution to officially recognise “the ongoing Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights”.

It was the fifth consecutive time she has put forward the bill, with the latest version carrying 12 co-sponsors, up from six when it was first introduced in 2022.

In a video conference this week, she explained that it was necessary to draw attention to the Nakba, given that the human rights abuses against Palestinians continue.

“Too many of my colleagues in Congress like to act like … the state violence against the Palestinian people began with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Tlaib said.

“We know that Palestinian history has been one of the ongoing Nakba and the ethnic cleansing campaign since the creation [of Israel] in 1948.”

All told, about 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled during the Nakba, displaced to refugee camps across the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab countries.

About 400 cities and villages were depopulated, with massacres committed in Balad al-Sheikh, Saasaa, Deir Yassin, Saliha and Lydda, among others.

Like in past years, Tlaib’s latest legislative effort is largely symbolic, with little chance of progressing in Congress, which remains predominantly pro-Israel.

Still, the latest resolution comes amid signs of shifting public awareness, with polls showing increasing sympathy for Palestinians and a rise in negative views towards Israel’s government. Polls have shown tanking support for Israel, particularly among Democrats, amid the genocide in Gaza.

Attitudes in Congress have also shown significant, if more incremental, signs of change. Though support for Israel was once considered sacrosanct... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/15/historical-reckoning-the-push-for-the-us-to-acknowledge-the-nakba

The original Nakba

Abdel Mahdi’s sharp memory carries him back to his childhood, living with his parents on their land, among their livestock and property – a normal life, before everything changed.

Abdel Mahdi says he still remembers the heated discussions among families in Bir al-Saba when news first spread that Zionist Haganah militias were approaching, with some wanting to flee, and others insisting on staying.

The decision was eventually made to leave for Gaza, to the west, with the hope of returning in a few weeks.

And so Abdel Mahdi, along with his parents, three siblings, and the rest of his extended family, left, carrying whatever livestock, money and supplies they could manage.

“We all left … We walked for days. We would rest, then continue walking,” he says. “We carried some of our belongings with us. We never imagined it would become a permanent exile.”

The family initially settled in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood before later moving to Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, where the harsh realities of refugee life began.

“We lived in tents. The rain and wind would flood them, the cold was unbearable, then came the scorching heat,” he says. “There was hunger, exhaustion, long lines for food and water, shared toilets, lice, poor sanitation … painful memories.”

Right of return

“I remember my father and grandfather always saying we would return, and they told their children and grandchildren to hold on to the right of return,” Abdel Mahdi says.

But the return never came. Instead, decades of exile, wars and repeated attempts to rebuild life followed.

Abdel Mahdi worked for years inside Israel in construction, during a period when Palestinian labourers were granted work permits.

Together with his brothers, he managed to build homes and buy land, only for the current war to erase everything once again.

“We worked, built homes and bought land,” he says. “We thought we were finally compensating for something after the displacement that destroyed our families and lives. We thought it was over.”

“But this war destroyed everything completely,” he adds. “At the end of our lives, it brought us all back to zero. Nothing is left – no stone, no trees.”

Abdel Mahdi acknowledges that life in Gaza was never truly stable – with several Israeli wars and a years-long blockade – but he says the scale of destruction during the latest war is unprecedented.

“A Nakba at the beginning of my life … and another Nakba at the end of it. What can we even say?” he murmurs while staring at the devastation surrounding him.

The war on Gaza

Abdel Mahdi recounts how his life was turned upside down during the latest Israeli war on Gaza, beginning in October 2023.

This time, he was forced to flee his home as an elderly man, struggling to walk alongside his ageing wife and the families of his nephews.

He was displaced multiple times – once to the Gaza seaport area in western Gaza City, another time to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

Before that, he had sought shelter in a United Nations-run school in Jabalia before Israeli forces stormed it.

He recalls the terrifying moments when Israeli tanks and soldiers entered the school during the early months of the war, as chaos, gunfire and screams erupted while loudspeakers ordered everyone to evacuate southwards.

“They forced us out of the school,” he says. “My elderly wife and I leaned on each other to walk. Some people couldn’t get out and were killed there.”

“We walked long distances until we reached western Gaza, together with what remained of our family, who had scattered in different places,” he adds.

“We were collapsing from exhaustion, but the shelling and fear forced us to keep moving.”

Abdel Mahdi says that he considered staying in his home and refusing to leave, unwilling to repeat what he called “the mistake of our ancestors” when they fled in 1948. But he says the danger eventually forced him to flee.

For the elderly man, displacement itself became one of the cruellest parts of the war.

“When a person leaves his home, he loses his dignity and worth,” he says quietly. “We lived in tents, in the sand, exposed to everything… We lived through famine and shortages of absolutely everything.”

“I wished for death with all my heart,” the octogenarian admits, his eyes filling with tears. “All I wanted was a concrete wall to lean my exhausted back against, but there was nothing. It was unbearable for both the young and the old.”

A taste of return ... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/5/16/from-the-nakba-to-gazas-ruins-one-mans-lifetime-of-displacement

Nakba: Jewish voices are challenging the stories Israel tells about itself A film director, historian and Holocaust survivor speak to Al Jazeera as opinions shift.

Stephen Kapos and Gillian Mosely at the London screening of Planet Israel [Beardvoyage]

By Indlieb Farazi Saber

London, United Kingdom – The lights come up slowly inside a cinema in London’s buzzy Soho district, but nobody rushes for the exit.

As the credits roll, one woman lowers her face into her hands. A couple sit motionless. In the row ahead, someone exhales and says “Free Palestine”.

This screening of Planet Israel: A Cautionary Tale took place on the eve of Nakba Day, the annual commemoration of the 1948 forced displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the killing of thousands more during the creation of the Israeli state.

The documentary, set for UK-wide release from 5 June, explores how trauma, nationalism and militarisation have shaped Israeli society after October 7, 2023, and during the war on Gaza. Featuring interviews with historians, academics, former soldiers and everyday Israelis, the film arrives at a moment when old political certainties around Israel are fracturing — increasingly among Jewish and Israeli intellectuals, artists, rabbis and historians themselves.

“The media has not reported this,” the film’s director Gillian Mosely told Al Jazeera from her London home, days before the screening. “British Jews are being treated as a monolith, which I think is fuelling anti-Semitism.”... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/5/15/nakba-jewish-voices-are-challenging-the-stories-israel-tells-about-itself

Screenshot from Planet Israel, featuring historian Avi Shlaim discussing Israel and shifting public perceptions [Planet Israel] Historian Avi Shlaim, who is featured in Planet Israel, spoke of a rupture between Israel and Jewish communities around the world.

6 Things to Know About the Palestinian Nakba by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) - May 12, 2026

Palestine refugees sit inside their tent in the newly formed Ein El Hilweh refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, in this handout picture believed to be taken in 1948. (Cropped) Myrtle Winter Chaumeny (this link opens in a new window), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons {{PD-US}}

https://imeu.org/resources/the-nakba/6-things-to-know-about-the-palestinian-nakba/469

1. During the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Zionist militias and the new Israeli army ethnically cleansed approximately three quarters of all Palestinians from their homeland. Palestinians call this the Nakba (“catastrophe”).

About 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were violently forced from their homes and land during the founding of Israel. This mass expulsion of Palestinians was a deliberate, planned act of ethnic cleansing as part of Israel’s establishment as a Jewish-majority state in Palestine.
Ever since, Israel has prevented Palestinian refugees from returning home because they aren’t Jewish, denying their internationally recognized legal right of return. Today, about two-thirds of all Palestinians, more than 7 million people, are stateless refugees or internally displaced. Most languish in overcrowded, impoverished semi-permanent refugee camps in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, subject to brutal Israeli military rule, or in neighboring countries and elsewhere in the diaspora.

2. Zionist militants and Israeli soldiers committed dozens of massacres of Palestinian civilians during the Nakba.

Zionist militias and Israeli soldiers carried out several dozen massacres (this link opens in a new window) of Palestinians to terrorize them into fleeing. The most infamous took place in the village of Deir Yassin outside of Jerusalem on April 9, 1948, when more than 100 people, including dozens of children, women, and elderly people, were murdered by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang, which were led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, respectively.
The massacres that were perpetrated during the Nakba were a continuation of a more than decade-long campaign of terrorism waged by the Irun, Stern Gang, and other Zionist militias in their drive to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

3. Israel was literally built upon the destruction of Palestine.

After the new Israeli army finished expanding the state’s borders, Israel covered 78% of Palestine. (The Israeli military occupied the remaining 22%, consisting of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, in the June 1967 war.)
Between 1948 and 1950, Israel systematically destroyed more than 400 (this link opens in a new window) Palestinian cities and towns or repopulated them with Jewish Israelis. Entire communities, including homes, businesses, and houses of worship, were wiped out to prevent the return of their Palestinian owners.
In many cases, the Israelis who took their land and homes also took the personal possessions of Palestinians who were forced to flee on short notice, including clothing, books, children’s toys, furniture, and household items like dishes, pots and pans.

4. Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained inside what became Israel in 1948 were governed by brutal military rule for nearly two decades and today live as fourth-class citizens in their own homeland.

About 150,000 Palestinians survived the Nakba and remained inside the new state of Israel. They were granted Israeli citizenship but between 1949 and 1966 they were governed by repressive military rule (this link opens in a new window), forced into segregated “ghettos (this link opens in a new window),” had most of their land taken from them for the use of Jewish Israelis, and severe restrictions were imposed on their freedom of movement, speech, and ability to earn a living.
Military rule was lifted in 1966 but today Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up more than 20% of Israel’s population, continue to have their land and homes taken or destroyed by the state and face widespread, systematic discrimination affecting almost every aspect of their lives, including land ownership rights, housing, employment, and family reunification.

5. The Nakba didn’t end in 1948 but has continued ever since. This is known as the Ongoing Nakba.

Since 1948, Israel has continued to force Palestinian families out of their homes, including in places like Sheikh Jarrah (this link opens in a new window) in East Jerusalem and the Negev (Naqab) (this link opens in a new window) desert in southern Israel. It continues to steal Palestinian homes and land for illegal settlements. Israeli settlers are waging an intensifying (this link opens in a new window) campaign of terrorism backed by the government (this link opens in a new window), driving Palestinians out of their communities in the West Bank. Since 2023, the Israeli military has forcibly displaced nearly the entire population and systematically destroyed almost every home during its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

6. The Nakba and Ongoing Nakba, and the apartheid system Israel has imposed on Palestinians living under its control, are the root cause of all the violence in Palestine/Israel.

For more than a century, Zionist groups and successive Israeli governments have been dispossessing and oppressing the Palestinian people, denying millions of Palestinians their freedom and the most basic of rights. This is the root cause of the problem between Israelis and Palestinians.
There is a consensus among human rights organizations and other experts, including Amnesty International (this link opens in a new window), Human Rights Watch (this link opens in a new window), and Israeli rights groups like B’Tselem (this link opens in a new window) and Yesh Din (this link opens in a new window), that the discriminatory legal and political system that Israel has imposed on Palestinians amounts to apartheid.
As noted (this link opens in a new window) by Amnesty International: “Israel must dismantle the apartheid system and start treating Palestinians as human beings with equal rights and dignity. Until it does, peace and security will remain a distant prospect for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Go deeper

Quick Facts: The Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)
Timeline: The Palestinian Nakba & Establishment of Israeli Apartheid
Explainer: Plan Dalet & The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Explainer: The Deir Yassin Massacre
In Their Own Words: Israeli Leaders on the Expulsion of Palestinians During Israel’s Establishment
Quick Facts: Palestinian Refugees
Fact Sheet: Is Israel an Apartheid State?

ABOUT The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU)

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) works to increase and enhance the public’s understanding about Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian Americans through media. We do this by offering mainstream US media organizations and journalists access to facts, resources, analysis, and experts in order to help them cover key issues with accuracy and depth, and by creating and disseminating original articles, fact sheets, videos, photo essays, and other digital content.

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