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Dr Ramzy Baroud: Gaza’s memory is stronger than Israel’s weapons

28 0
08.08.2026

The genocide unfolding in Gaza today is often framed in Western capitals as a sudden rupture — a war that began on a specific date, to be solved through temporary humanitarian pauses, tactical corridors, and endless, hollow diplomatic talks. But to understand Palestine, one must first reject this convenient delusion.

What we are witnessing is not a discrete military campaign or a tragic anomaly of modern geopolitics.

It is the raw, unmasked, and violent culmination of a continuous process: an ongoing genocide driven by the uninterrupted architecture of the Nakba.

For nearly eight decades, mainstream political discourse and Western media have treated the Nakba — the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine — as a closed historical event.

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It is routinely archived as a distant tragedy, a relic of mid-twentieth-century partitioning best left to historians or buried beneath decades of failed peace processes.

That framework is a lethal misdiagnosis. The Nakba was never a singular moment in 1948, nor was it completed when hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed. The Nakba is a living structure.

It is a permanent policy of settler-colonial dispossession, a continuous mechanism designed to render Palestinians absent from their ancestral homeland. When state violence escalates into industrial-scale slaughter, carpet bombing, deliberate starvation, and the systematic erasing of entire bloodlines, it is not a departure from that original logic. It is its ultimate, unrestrained expression.

My own family’s trajectory reflects this unbroken continuum of displacement and survival. In 1948, my parents were forced to flee our ancestral village of Beit Daras as it was engulfed in smoke, artillery fire, and explosions.

They sought what they believed would be temporary shelter in the neighbouring village of........

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