When Israel completed the ethnic cleansing of half of Palestine’s population and destroyed half its villages and most of its towns in 1948, the international community stood by and watched in silence, not condemning its actions. 

Remember, this was just a few years after the end of the Second World War and at the tail end of the age of colonialism. Palestinians were not regarded as worthy of Western sympathy, and supporting the Zionist project absolved Europe from dealing profoundly with the Holocaust and its implications. 

Orientalism, Islamophobia, and colonialism all played their part in the denial of the Nakba in the following years. The crime committed against the Palestinian people was not reported, let alone condemned. The message to Israel was clear: ethnically cleansing the Palestinians will be tolerated by the West, and more importantly, by the United States.

Why denying the Nakba persists

The emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the beginning of the liberation effort, were quickly framed by the West as “terrorism”. Had the Nakba not been denied, this resistance could have been acknowledged as anti-colonial — a struggle by dispossessed people to redeem their homeland.

But since, officially, there was no Nakba, Palestinian armed resistance was unjustified and could only be defined as “terrorism” initiated by anti-Western forces, like Moscow before until 1987, and then Iran.

Within this international atmosphere, it was easy for Israel to continue incremental ethnic cleansing between 1948 and 1967, targeting the 1948 Arabs, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to pursue a more intensive campaign during the 1967 war and the years that followed. 

Throughout the long years of the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has continued to use the same method of ethnic cleansing that it began back in 1948. 

However, these methods did not succeed in breaking Palestinian resilience and resistance.

It was, unfortunately, only a matter of time before an even more ruthless strategy would be employed to impose Israel’s vision for the future of historical Palestine: a vision that at best confines Palestinians under an apartheid regime in enclaved mega-prisons, and at worst, seeks their complete removal.  

Thus, one reason for the continued denial of the Nakba in mainstream academia, media, and politics in the West is indifference to the ongoing project of Palestinian dispossession.

But there are also two other important reasons. One is the growing recognition that the Nakba is central to understanding the persistence of violence in historical Palestine and the failure of the so-called peace process. 

Once the Nakba is accepted as the formative event that triggered the so-called conflict, the next question inevitably arises: why did the Nakba occur? And the unavoidable answer is that it was a direct implementation of the Zionist ideology, strategy, and planning. 

Such a realisation would require a radically different Western attitude towards Israel and its policies. Indeed, it could even lead to direct confrontation with the Jewish state; something most Western politicians are unwilling, or afraid, to consider.

This fear is driven by the perceived, not necessarily real, power of the pro-Israeli lobby and its ability to destroy their political careers or cut ties with the financial and industrial elites. 

A further motive behind the intentional denial of the Nakba, is the apprehension that such a recognition would expose Western, especially European complicity in the crime committed against the Palestinians in 1948 and in the ongoing crime ever since.

Context is resistance

This is why official Europe, as well as the American establishment, fight tooth and nail against what they, along with Israel, call “context”.

Ever since Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, stated that the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack did not happen in a vacuum, but had a historical context, Israel and its European allies have persecuted anyone who adopted his approach, with Israel even demanding that the Secretary-General be sacked.

The relevant historical context necessary for understanding the events of the past 19 months begins with the Nakba. While Palestinians had already lived in Gaza before 1948, the area was drastically transformed during the Nakba, when Israel's military assault led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from central and southern Palestine. Many of them were forced into Gaza, turning it into a densely populated enclave of refugees—a condition that has defined much of its modern history.

The last wave of people expelled in 1948 to Gaza came from Palestinian villages on whose ruins some of the settlements that were attacked on October 7 were later built. And indeed, many of those villagers, alongside hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians from different parts of historical Palestine, now make up 70 percent of Gaza’s population. 

The historical context also exposes the ongoing relevance of the scholarly definition of Zionism as a settler-colonialism, a definition first offered by Palestinian scholars in the mid-1960s and later revived by Australian and American scholars in the 1990s. 

Like all settler-colonial projects, Zionism operates on a logic of the elimination of the native. Israel has used ethnic cleansing as the primary tool to reduce the native Palestinian population.

Remembering the Nakba is thus essential to understanding the eliminatory impulse of the Zionist movement and later the Israeli state. There is a direct line between the success of expelling half of Palestine’s population, or, put differently, the failure to expel the other half, which is what we are witnessing today in Gaza.

The world, and in particular the West and the UN, failed in its duty to protect the Palestinians in 1948 and ever since.

That duty remains sacred today, as we witness Israel’s attempt to complete the Nakba through genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank.

Acknowledging the Nakba and fighting against its denial is one essential step in the right direction.