Independence Day, Nakba Day, and the Starvation of Gaza

May 14 is celebrated in Israel as “Independence Day,” since it marks the end of British colonial rule over what had been the British Mandate of Palestine, and the proclamation of the new state of Israel. One day later, May 15, Palestinians commemorate the violent expulsion of around 850,000 Palestinians from their homeland, that started with the attack on Tiberias City on December 22, 1947. By January 3, 1949, 437 cities and villages had been destroyed and depopulated: 295 of them were obliterated through assaults or expulsion orders by Zionist troops,106 were depopulated in the midst of psychological warfare caused by the fall of neighboring villages or towns, and 36 fell victim to outright massacres committed by Zionist fighters. Many of the refugees fled to Gaza.

Palestinians refer to these 13 months as the beginning of the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe.” Every year since 1998, it has been commemorated on May 15 with the “Palestinian March of Return.” This year, however, the Association for the Defense of the Rights for the Internally Displaced Persons in Israel was forced to cancel the March. Organizers were informed that a crowd larger than 700 people or the presence of Palestinian flags would lead to “immediate police intervention.” Already since 2011, the “Nakba Law” made the commemoration ever harder, prohibiting the allocation of funds to all institutions that engaged in academic, cultural, artistic, or political activities that observe the Palestinian Nakba Day as a day of mourning. But things have become much worse.

After October 7, 2023, in May 2024, Sabreen Msarwi, a middle school teacher in Tayibe, was fired for participating in the March, and last April, in Tel Aviv, Meir Baruchin, a 62-year-old high school teacher who had been teaching history and civics for 35 years, was arrested for his Facebook posts that pleaded against the dehumanization of Palestinians: “For most Israelis, if you say Palestinian, they automatically think terrorists. They have no name, no face, no family, no hope, no plans—nothing.” For no other reason than refusing to engage in this multi-leveled erasure, for no other reason than defending Palestinian human and political rights, Baruchin was locked up for four days as a “high-risk detainee” in solitary confinement, while his apartment was ransacked by Israeli authorities.

As American citizens, whose tax dollars fund this moral abdication whether we consent to it or not, how do we face this reckoning?

It is particularly calamitous that the State of Israel, whose government claims to speak for all Jews worldwide, criminalizes remembrance, when, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his pathbreaking book Zakhor (Hebrew for “Remember!”) teaches us, remembrance is a religious commandment in the Torah, especially the remembrance of Exodus, the liberation from captivity and enslavement. Moreover, as the historian Enzo Traverso has argued, the “civil religion” of Holocaust memory has for decades “served as a paradigm for the remembrance of other genocides and crimes against humanity.” Traverso warns that if this “sacred and institutionalized memory serves only to support Israel and attack the defenders of the Palestinian cause on the pretext of antisemitism, our moral, political, and epistemological bearings will become unmoored, with devastating consequences.”

Yet, this is exactly what is happening. In a recent article, the renowned Israeli-American scholar of Holocaust studies Omer Bartov charges that the “memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.” How is it possible, he asks, “well into the 21st century, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again, that the state of Israel—seen and self-described as the answer to the genocide of the Jews—could have carried out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this ‘crime of crimes’?”

It is then not only the denial of “the right to remember, to speak and to mourn” that marks this year’s 77th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel and the onset of the Nakba. This year’s May 14 and May 15 will be remembered by a particularly horrendous proof that international law has been shattered: A state unconditionally supported by the most powerful Western country, the United States, and by other Western countries, is intentionally starving an entire population. As of this writing, at least 57 Palestinians have starved to death in Gaza as a direct consequence of Israel’s 10 weeks long brutal blockade of food, water, and any other critical aid to the Palestinian population. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, estimates that 66,000 children in Gaza are now suffering from “severe malnutrition” due to the total siege which Sean Carroll, the president and chief executive of the nonprofit group American Near East Refugee Aid, has condemned as an “engineered system of deprivation.” This is, Carroll writes, “the moment of moral reckoning […]. When we talk about peace, we must ask: What kind of future are we envisioning if an entire people is left to suffer starvation?”

As American citizens, whose tax dollars fund this moral abdication whether we consent to it or not, how do we face this reckoning? It is high time to pressure our government to vigorously work toward a solution in which Israelis and Palestinians have equal political rights and security, and to support a vision offered by Israeli-Palestinian civic groups like Zochrot, Salt of the Earth, Standing Together, and A Land for All.