CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Fuel to My Revolutionary Optimism

Image by Allison Saeng.

As a Palestinian born in the 21st century, I am the generational product of Nakba survivors and the trauma that came with it. As distant as it may seem, I am only two generations removed from the 1948 Catastrophe of Palestine, where over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land, and thousands were massacred. Zionist militias backed by the British Empire razed Palestinian villages, killing, raping, displacing, and imprisoning anyone they could find, all to establish the brand new settler colonial project of Israel. This single day in Palestinian history would stain the soil with blood spilled and trauma gained for decades to come.

Both sets of my grandparents are older than the state of Israel, each born a few years before the Nakba. May 14th, 1948, was probably a rather normal day in my grandparents’ childhood. They would have been inside their homes with their families, or playing outside like any other day. The next day, everything changed. On May 15th, Zionist militias stormed their hometowns, slaughtered their neighbors, and destroyed entire villages. My grandparents’ childhoods were stripped away, and their entire lives uprooted.

After the Nakba, everything changed. The people of Palestine now live under the occupation of racists who despise and dehumanize them. These foreigners decided what rights they could and couldn’t have in their own homelands, and the threat of violence was always present. My great-grandfather was shot in the head by a settler. The Palestinian education system was dramatically defunded, leading my mother’s parents to leave for Europe for university. When they tried to come back home after the 1967 Naksa, foreign soldiers somehow had the authority to bar them from ever entering again. They had to move to Jordan and start a new life. They were only 2 hours away from their families, but they didn’t know if they’d ever be allowed to make the short trip back. My grandmother has only been to Palestine once since then, and my grandfather twice.

My other set of grandparents remained on the land, but now had to live a life of heavy restriction and limited movement. It’s hard for me to imagine what it was like to witness the plundering of our homeland by foreign invaders, but I can never truly understand the magnitude of seeing the gradual colonization that seemed to only get worse throughout the decades. I........

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