The Nakba between hypocritical remembrance and oblivion

On the eve of the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the silence around the world speaks volumes about oblivion. At the UN, a brief program, so far tentative, lasting 2 and half hours, is what the international institution will dedicate to an ongoing rupture that escalated to genocide. The entire world has witnessed Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the Nakba is treated as less than a relic of the past.

At a time when Israel’s hasbara requires a $730 million boost, the international community should be reflecting on its own complicity. Even when Israel can barely sustain its narrative anymore, world leaders are preferring to render the Nakba insignificant. The UN, on the other hand, adorns its complicity with a perfunctory program that speaks for itself to itself.

Palestinians have repeatedly spoken of the Nakba as ongoing. The UN treats the Nakba as a single event. World leaders only emit silence. There is no discussion of the illegality woven into the 1947 Partition Plan, the annihilation of Palestinians’ self-determination, the ideology of Greater Israel which provided Zionism with the foundations for the Nakba, or the racism which served as the basic argument in favour of colonialism. The Palestinian people, far removed at the beginning of the catastrophe, are now even more far removed as perpetual refugees faced with genocide.

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In 1947, the Partition Plan garnered a majority of votes. In 1948, the world did not object to the massacres Zionism committed to establish Israel on colonised Palestinian territory. Seventy-eight years later, Israel faces no objection to either its violent origins or its genocide in Gaza. The occupied West Bank remains ensconced between illusory state-building and forced displacement, while Palestinians living in Israel are barely spoken about.

Not even the ICC arrest warrants can truly count as a step towards justice, since bureaucratic loopholes and the now forgotten diplomatic debate on Israel’s genocide hold more power than a true reckoning of colonialism’s crimes.

The latter is, of course, by design, in as much the same way as the 1947 Partition Plan was mean to pave the way for a violent colonial enterprise.

As Palestinians remember the Nakba, it is the world’s duty to at least observe the Palestinian people’s remembrance. Between Palestinian collective memory and the current reality, decades of Palestinian history buried under the humanitarian paradigm and Israel’s security narrative must be allowed the space to resurface in global consciousness. In the same way people around the world refuted Israel’s genocidal justifications, the international community’s justifications about the Nakba must also be refuted. It is no use looking to the UN for commemoration when its complicity in colonisation has been documented. It is also no use to refer to international law, when international law is a tool in the hands of former colonial powers providing impunity for Israel.

There is no justice in the UN’s hypocritical remembrance; it merely renders the Palestinian people as permanent refugees, while facilitating international oblivion about the Nakba.