CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Nakba Never Stopped

“Arab residents being forced out of Haifa, by the armed Haganah men, April, 1948.” per Haaretz – Public Domain

My grandmother used to keep a rusted iron key in a small wooden box lined with faded velvet. As a child, I thought it was just a broken relic, but every time she held it, her eyes would grow distant. That key, she told me, once opened the front door of their family home that I have never seen in Beir Al Sabaa —  in a neighborhood now erased from every map but the one burned into our memory. When my grandparents were forced to leave in 1948, they carried that key, the clothes on their backs, and the unshakable conviction that they would return in a week or two. Seventy-eight years later, that key still sits in a box, and we are still waiting.

The Nakba — the catastrophe — did not end in 1948. It continued in different forms, deepening Palestinian suffering while also sharpening a new awareness: among Palestinians, yes, but also among a global generation that refuses to unsee what it has witnessed. What we do with that awareness, together, will determine whether this moment becomes a genuine turning point or just another chapter of outrage that fades.

For millions of Palestinians, May 15 is not an abstract date. It is a wound that never closed. The 1948 Nakba was the violent expulsion of over 750,000 people, the destruction of more than 500 villages, and a deliberate campaign of terror designed to erase a society. But as the Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani taught us through his analysis of the 1936–1939 revolt, the catastrophe did not come out of nowhere. It was prepared by years of colonial manipulation, internal division, and a reliance on outside forces that ultimately betrayed the struggle. The defeat of that revolt, Kanafani argued, was a blueprint for understanding how liberation movements fail — not from a lack of courage, but from a lack of unified strategy, self-reliance, and clear-eyed analysis. It is a lesson that applies not only to Palestinians but to every solidarity movement that wants to be more than a moment of moral feeling.

And the Nakba........

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