A year ago, Palestinians began to experience new levels of their ongoing catastrophe, the Nakba, which started 76 years ago. In response to the attack that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and caused a major embarrassment to the Israeli army and intelligence, Israel unleashed an extermination campaign on Gaza, leveling entire residential blocks, destroying education and health institutions, eliminating the basic infrastructure needed to sustain a society, and burying entire families under the rubble.
In the West Bank, Israeli settlers set out to forcibly expel Palestinian rural communities and steal the lands of Palestinian towns and villages. The Israeli army ramped up its spree of raids on refugee camps, destroying their infrastructure, and systematically forcing inhabitants to live in a situation similar to the one lived in Gaza.
I have lived in Palestine almost all my life. The Nakba has always been part of my consciousness. Its continuity has been my reality. However, there are particular dimensions to the experience of living the Nakba that I had never known, except in the memories of those who lived in its early years. My father, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, always struggles to contain his tears when he describes the refugee families, expelled from West Jerusalem, Lydd, Ramleh, and their surrounding villages, and how they were still sleeping in stables and caves in our hometown in the late 1950s because all the houses were taken.
He would describe how they had lost all their possessions and were forced into underpaid labor in the fields to sustain themselves, how some of their children had bare floors for beds, and how they had gradually started to become part of the town’s social fabric. Some of them, with peasant origins, took their sick children to the church in our Christian town and, despite being Muslims, had them baptized out of simple religiosity, imploring the Virgin, the saints, and the prophet Muhammad to heal them because they couldn’t afford medical care.
