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nakba
What Fuels My Revolutionary Optimism This Nakba Day
It's hard to think liberation is near when faced with so much death and destruction. But it's even harder to ignore the cracks in the facade of the US and Israeli machine.
May 15, 2026
As a Palestinian born in the 21st century, I am the generational product of Nakba survivors and the trauma that came with it. As distant as it may seem, I am only two generations removed from the 1948 Catastrophe of Palestine, where over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land, and thousands were massacred. Zionist militias backed by the British Empire razed Palestinian villages, killing, raping, displacing, and imprisoning anyone they could find, all to establish the brand new settler colonial project of Israel. This single day in Palestinian history would stain the soil with blood spilled and trauma gained for decades to come.
Both sets of my grandparents are older than the state of Israel, each born a few years before the Nakba. May 14, 1948, was probably a rather normal day in my grandparents' childhood. They would have been inside their homes with their families, or playing outside like any other day. The next day, everything changed. On May 15, Zionist militias stormed their hometowns, slaughtered their neighbors, and destroyed entire villages. My grandparents' childhoods were stripped away, and their entire lives uprooted.
After the Nakba, everything changed. The people of Palestine now live under the occupation of racists who despise and dehumanize them. These foreigners decided what rights they could and couldn't have in their own homelands, and the threat of violence was always present. My great-grandfather was shot in the head by a settler. The Palestinian education system was dramatically defunded, leading my mother's parents to leave for Europe for university. When they tried to come back home after the 1967 Naksa, foreign soldiers somehow had the authority to bar them from ever entering again. They had to move to Jordan and start a new life. They were only two hours away from their families, but they didn't know if they'd ever be allowed to make the short trip back. My grandmother has only been to Palestine once since then, and my grandfather twice.
My other set of grandparents remained on the land, but now had to live a life of heavy restriction and limited movement. It's hard for me to imagine what it was like to witness the plundering of our homeland by foreign invaders, but I can never truly understand the magnitude of seeing the gradual colonization that seemed to only get worse throughout the decades. I will never forget when my grandfather, who was a bus driver back in the day, told me that he was once able to drive to Beirut or Baghdad, and then return home on the same day. Now, such an idea is unfathomable.
In 1948, a time when news traveled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that "forever" territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide.
Ever since I was old enough to comprehend things, I knew Palestine was my homeland and that it was being hurt by something called Israel. Israel was the reason my mom was born in Jordan instead of Palestine, the driving force that led my parents to move to the US for better education and work. It is the thing that separates me from the rest of my extended family, preventing me from knowing them wholly and truly. Israel is why I only see my grandparents every few years, why I have to watch my younger cousins grow up through a phone screen. As a Palestinian who grew up in the States, I was immersed in Western culture and disconnected from my own, and Israel is the reason.
This was my norm, the reality I was born into. After a while, the daily reminders of being disenfranchised, the cruelty of it all, become something you just get used to. You begin to get settled with the unsettling feeling that this may be the fortune of a Palestinian in this world: a life of displacement and diaspora, with the occasional travesty, like the previous bombing campaigns of Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014. This process of desensitization is imprinted in my generational DNA; I was practically born already accustomed to the injustice of being Palestinian.
The brutal truth was that the Nakba never ended. We all instinctively knew this, but especially after the Oslo Accords' normalization efforts, a sense of false comfort plagued the Palestinian community for the two decades following its signing. The reality before October 2023 was the occasional protest and the occasional outrage, only to be quelled by half-hearted statements of sympathetic apathy by politicians. I became involved in student organizing for Palestine in 2021, and although we were constantly working, the landscape back then was much quieter and smaller.
Then, two and a half years ago, the current stage of genocide in Gaza began. I don't think I will ever experience life the way it happened that fall. I had gone to sleep on October 6, when everything was relatively "normal," then I woke up for my morning shift at 4:30 am to my phone practically blowing up with notifications. I remember going to my barista job with headphones in the whole time, watching Al Jazeera while I made coffee for people who had no idea what had just shifted in the world.
In the wake of October 7, the protests became consistent, the outrage became something so eternal that you felt like it could consume you and burn you to ash. What was once a few hundred people in the streets became thousands, and in some places, millions would turn out.
It was the beginning of a period of exhaustion, having something so important to organize for every single day, to the point that my studies didn't even matter anymore. It was tough, but what was happening to those in Gaza was far worse, and it became a matter of expending everything you have for those who have nothing. Millions felt the same all over the world, and this sparked the mass-education and mobilization of the Palestine solidarity movement we see today.
Since October 2023, the images out of Gaza resembling the Nakba have flooded our timelines. After nearly three years of the most inhumane, dehumanizing, genocidal campaign by the US and Israel, one might assume that a sense of hopelessness would take hold, as it did after the 1948 Nakba. But I see this moment as the catalyst for the exact opposite to happen.
Israel believes it can continue what it has always done. It can embark on an outright genocide with the intent of wiping Palestinians off the map, then agree to multiple ceasefires only to break every single one of them. After all, you cannot cease a genocide while the genocidal entity still operates with impunity. The difference this time around is that people around the world actually know what's going on. Israel, along with its benefactor, the US, has backed itself into a corner I doubt it will ever escape from.
And that's the fuel to my revolutionary optimism. Sometimes, it's hard to think liberation is near when faced with so much death and destruction. But it's even harder to ignore the cracks in the facade of the US and Israeli machine. They were both built on false foundations that were already rotten and cracked, and nothing built on the crushed livelihoods of millions will ever persevere. People are seeing the rot come up to the surface, and they are utterly disgusted with the state of our world that has perpetuated genocide, all held together by an ultra-wealthy ruling class, agonizing capitalism, and white supremacy.
When Israel was once known as the democracy of the Middle East, it's now the stain, the villain that has rained chaos, death, and destruction all over the region. When getting American Israel Pubic Affairs Committee money once meant you were a strong candidate, now it's a sure death sentence in local American elections. When American institutions like the American Medical Association once deemed it acceptable to stay silent on Palestine, they are now condemned for it. When our media and news outlets operated as tools of Israeli propaganda, they are now seen as tools of war and oppression. It is our work and dedication as activists that have changed the perception of all these things that were once deemed normal.
In 1948, a time when news traveled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that "forever" territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide. That's the difference: The struggle for Palestine was built on the sacrifice of our martyrs and revolutionaries, on principle, and on love for our land and people. It is a beautiful, rich foundation that can withstand whatever force attempts to tear it down.
Most of my family remains on the land, or near it in Jordan. I see this as a consistent win against the oppressor every day. As long as we keep our homes, livelihoods, and stories, the Palestinian identity will never die, and my family is fighting that battle every day. If desensitization has an imprint on my DNA, so does resilience and the steadfast faith that Palestine will be liberated soon.
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Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine Team Quits Over Blocked Report on Right of Return
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” said resigning staffer Omar Shakir.
Feb 03, 2026
Two Human Rights Watch employees—the group's entire Israel-Palestine team—resigned after senior staffers blocked a report calling Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees' right of return to their homeland a crime against humanity.
Jewish Currents' Alex Kane reported Tuesday that HRW Israel-Palestine team lead Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari are stepping down over leadership's decision to nix the report, which was scheduled for release on December 4. Shakir wrote in his resignation email that one senior HRW leader informed him that calling Israel's denial of Palestinian right of return would be seen as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” Shakir—who is also member of Jewish Currents' advisory board—wrote in his resignation letter. “As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.”
In an interview published Tuesday by Drop Site News, Shakir—who was deported from Israel in 2019 over his advocacy of Palestinian rights—said: “I’ve given every bit of myself to the work for a decade. I’ve defended the work in very, very difficult circumstances... The refugees I interviewed deserve to know why their stories aren’t being told."
Ansari said that "whatever justification" HRW leadership "had for pausing the report is not based on the law or facts."
The resignations underscored tensions among HRW staffers over how to navigate a potential political minefield while conducting legal analysis and reporting of Israeli policies and practices in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
As Kane reported:
The resignations have roiled one of the most prominent human rights groups in the world just as HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure. In a statement, HRW said that the report “raised complex and consequential issues. In our review process, we concluded that aspects of the research and the factual basis for our legal conclusions needed to be strengthened to meet Human Rights Watch’s high standards.” They said that “the publication of the report was paused pending further analysis and research,” and that the process was “ongoing.”
Kenneth Roth, a longtime former HRW executive director, defended the group's decision to block the report, asserting on social media that Bolopion "was right to suspend a report using a novel and unsupported legal theory to contend that denying the right to return to a locale is a crime against humanity."
However, Shakir countered that HRW "found in 2023 denial of a return to amount to a crime against humanity in Chagos."
"This is based on [International Criminal Court] precedent," he added. "Other reports echoed the analysis. Are you calling on HRW to retract a report for its first time ever, or it just different rules for Palestine?"
Polis Project founder Suchitra Vijayan said on X Tuesday that "the decision by Human Rights Watch’s leadership to pull a report on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, after it had cleared internal review, legal sign-off, and publication preparation, demands public reckoning."
"This was not a draft in dispute and the explanation offered so far evades the central issue of 'institutional independence' in the face of political pressure," added Vijayan, who is also a professor at Columbia and New York universities. "Why was the report stopped, and what does this decision signals for the future of its work and credibility on Palestine?"
Offering "solidarity to Omar and Milena" on social media, Medical Aid for Palestinians director of advocacy and campaigns Rohan Talbot said that "Palestinian rights are yet again exceptionalized, their suffering trivialized, and their pursuit of justice forestalled by people who care more about reputation and expediency than law and justice."
Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's former Middle East and North Africa director and currently executive director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, told Drop Site News on Tuesday that “We have once again run into Human Rights Watch’s systemic ‘Israel Exception,’ with work critical of Israel subjected to exceptional review and arbitrary processes that no other country work faces."
The modern state of Israel was established in 1948 largely through a more than decadelong campaign of terrorism against both the British occupiers of Palestine and Palestinian Arabs and the ethnic cleansing of the latter. More than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, sometimes via massacres or the threat thereof, in what Arabs call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or abandoned, and their denizens—some of whom still hold the keys to their stolen homes—have yet to return. Today, they and their descendants number more than 7 million, all of whom have been denied the right of return affirmed in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
Many Palestinians and experts around the world argue that the Nakba never ended—a position that has gained attention over the past 28 months, as Israel has faced mounting allegations of genocide for a war that's left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in the coastal strip and around 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Bolopion told Kane Tuesday that the controversy over the blocked report is “a genuine and good-faith disagreement among colleagues on complex legal and advocacy questions."
“HRW remains committed to the right of return for all Palestinians, as has been our policy for many years," he added.
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The World Must Act Now to Abort the Next Phase of Extermination in Gaza
Another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalized unless it is stopped.
Dec 31, 2025
Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale genocide in Gaza—a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly 80 years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.
If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the Nakba of 1948 was "merely" ethnic cleansing rather than genocide—ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilization—we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on October 7, 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it?
The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile ceasefire on October 10, Israel has killed over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like 8-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, froze to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable.
During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were murdered, accounting for a staggering 30% of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics.
In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world's "largest open-air prison."
The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real time, broadcast to every handheld screen on Earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians endure a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralyzed.
If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitize this criminal discourse.
The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly championed the "encouragement of migration" and demanded that "not an ounce of humanitarian aid" reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich argued that the starvation of 2 million people could be "just and moral" in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the refrain was the same: "Erase Gaza," "Leave no one there." When military leaders refer to an entire population as "human animals," they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination.
This was preceded by the hermetic siege—a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of "security," always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s "right to defend itself."
In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed, and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world's "largest open-air prison." Whether they utilized armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded "terrorists" and "militants" whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier.
Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the United Nations declared Gaza "uninhabitable." Its water was a toxin, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace.
This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of October 7, allowing Israel to weaponize its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly stripped Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanization of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened.
Tragically, the conditions that fueled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalized unless it is stopped.
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal vow to "liberate mankind from such an odious scourge." If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice—or our silence—will make the difference.
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