May 15, 1948 is marked by the Nakba, the “catastrophe” for the Palestinian people, which manifests in reality as a process of ethnic cleansing through which more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, by force [i], from their own lands to make way for the creation of the State of Israel. This historical event was not a mere conflict: it is the materialization of the Zionist colonial project, backed by the imperialist powers—Great Britain and, subsequently, the United States—that sought to establish an enclave of domination in the Middle East.
By Camilo Parada, Anti-Capitalist Movement
Today, while Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza—with more than 50,000 people killed—the Nakba is not a matter of the past: it is an ongoing and systematic crime aimed at continuing to massacre and displace the native populations of Palestine, preventing humanitarian aid from getting through, and destroying Palestinian infrastructure. In this sense, it is essential to begin naming things as they are: not content with carrying out genocide, the Israeli Zionist regime is also an apartheid regime. It conducts incessant campaigns to destroy Palestinian villages, grants impunity to the numerous racist attacks by Jewish settlers, sets up illegal settlements in occupied territories, and enforces laws such as the “Deportation of Families of Terrorists,” which allows the revocation of Israeli citizenship or residency in Jerusalem for relatives of people imprisoned for alleged “support for terrorism” or convicted of security crimes—a form of collective punishment; or the “Nationality and Entry into Israel Law,” which categorizes people based on their origin.
But it is not enough to remember. While the exercise of memory is indeed important, it must always project itself toward a combined linking of present and future, that is, toward avoiding the reduction of everything to defeatism. The forced displacements that define the Nakba, the massacres, the destruction of villages in order to create the State of Israel, were not an isolated or frozen event of 1948: they represent Zionism’s core strategy. The Nakba is not merely a historical event but an ongoing process of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and what the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls a “progressive genocide,” a systematic policy of the gradual elimination of the Palestinian people [ii].
Commemorating the Nakba is an act of resistance against the oblivion that Zionist historical revisionism seeks to impose. From our socialist perspective, it must also reaffirm the inalienable right to self-determination, the defense of the Palestinian people’s right to exist, and the search for an outcome based on one single, democratic, secular, and socialist Palestine, as our late internationalist comrade Pablo Vasco developed in multiple articles for the International Socialist League: a Palestine covering its historical territories [iii].
The construction of the Zionist narrative attempts to portray the creation of the State of Israel as a “miracle” for a people without land. It thus omits that this founding mythology is written in the blood of the Palestinian people, through the violent expulsion of the native population—through war crimes and the constant violation of human rights. In their research, Ilan Pappé (a Jewish historian [iv]) and Walid Khalidi (a Palestinian historian [v]) highlight that the Nakba was planned via military operations such as “Plan Dalet,” aiming to empty Palestine of its original Arab population.
Israel’s foundation took place between 1947 and 1948, when hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed. Examples like those of Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre are widely known, as is the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, in which Zionist militias killed more than 100 civilians, fostering terror to drive Palestinians toward exodus.
The Nakba did not end in 1948. Israel continues to pursue dispossession policies, which have sped up under Netanyahu’s far-right government (though not limited to this period): the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; the expansion of illegal settlements; discriminatory laws against Palestinian citizens of Israel; the permanent blockade of Gaza, effectively a giant open-air concentration camp; and so forth.
As Pappe indicates, “progressive genocide” involves not only mass killings but also an apartheid system that denies basic rights and erases Palestinian identity.
From the Anti-Capitalist Movement, the Chilean section of the International Socialist League, we defend the right of all oppressed peoples to resist. National liberation is inseparable from the class struggle. Israel is not merely a colonial state but also the armed wing of imperialism in the Middle East—an ally of the U.S., Europe, and NATO.
Palestinian self-determination cannot be reduced to some fragmented “state” in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli control. As the scholar Edward Said denounced, the Oslo Accords (1993) turned the Palestinian Authority into an administrator of the occupation, while Israel keeps colonizing land.
True self-determination requires:
• An end to the occupation and the dismantling of apartheid.
• The right of return for Palestinian refugees (UN Resolution 194).
• Decolonization of Palestinian territory.
• Freedom for all political prisoners held in Israeli dungeons.
• The dismantling of the State of Israel.
In light of the failure of “two separate states” and the ongoing apartheid, the solution must be a single, socialist, and democratic Palestinian state where Muslims, Jews, and Christians live with equal rights. This perspective was supported by the PLO at its inception, only to be later betrayed by the same organization with the Oslo Accords. Today, it resurfaces among movements that uphold the right of the Palestinian people to exist, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign [vi].
As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “The occupation divides peoples, but struggle unites the oppressed.”
The Nakba is not a matter of the past; it is the present. It concerns not only the Palestinian people but humanity as a whole and all peoples striving for emancipation. Every house demolished in East Jerusalem, every child killed in Gaza, every racist law in Israel constitutes a continuing Nakba.
Internationalist solidarity with Palestine must go beyond mere statements: it must involve boycotting Israeli apartheid, supporting popular resistance, and championing a revolutionary horizon: a free, democratic, secular, and socialist Palestine. It likewise requires that all revolutionary socialist organizations in their respective countries mobilize to press their governments to break with this genocidal state.
“We do not fight to die; we fight to live,” Leila Khaled teaches us.
The memory of the Nakba is a call for ongoing struggle against imperialism and for the liberation of all peoples worldwide.
[ii] https://claroscuro.unr.edu.ar/index.php/revista/article/view/16/9
[iv] https://www.observatori.org/paises/pais_53/documentos/E_PAPPE.pdf
[v] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1671353W/All_That_Remains
