CATASTROPHE IN GAZA - THE NAKBA NEVER ENDED

 

THE NAKBA NEVER ENDED
Memory, resistance, and the enduring trauma of Palestinian displacement

By Kieran Beville

In Gaza today, the sky is filled not just with smoke, but with memory. Memory of homes erased. Memory of stories carried across generations. And memory of a catastrophe that never truly ended.

As the death toll surpasses 50,000 Palestinians—most of them non-combatants, many of them women and children—the world watches a tragedy unfold that is both current and historical. The ongoing assault on Gaza is not merely a response to the horrific acts of Hamas on October 7, 2023. It is part of a long continuum that began in 1948 with the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel.

Today, in refugee camps and shattered neighbourhoods, Palestinians are not just mourning the dead. They are mourning the continuity of a trauma that spans three-quarters of a century.

A Catastrophe with No End

The Nakba is often framed in Western discourse as a historical event—a grim milestone buried in the past. But for Palestinians, the Nakba never ended. It lives on in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. And most painfully, in the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Since October 2023, Israeli airstrikes have levelled entire neighbourhoods, reduced hospitals to ruins, and turned hundreds of thousands into the newly homeless. And yet this devastation does not occur in a vacuum. It is layered upon decades of dispossession, siege, and erasure. What is happening now is not a break from the past. It is its continuation.

Memory as Resistance

In Palestinian culture, memory is not passive. It is a weapon. In homes made of corrugated metal and crumbling cement, grandmothers tell of lost orchards, stolen olive presses, and the day soldiers came. These are not abstract stories. They are maps of belonging—carefully passed down to ensure that even a child born in exile knows where they come from.

This memory transmission is not just personal—it is political. Israel has long attempted to erase Palestinian memory through education policy, censorship, settlement expansion, and the physical destruction of villages. Yet each story told in a refugee tent, each song sung in a ruined courtyard, defies that erasure. Memory becomes a form of resistance—a refusal to let a people be turned into ghosts.

Cultural Genocide and the War on Identity

The war on Gaza is not only a military campaign—it is a cultural one. Libraries have been bombed. Mosques and churches targeted. Art galleries, theatres, universities, hospitals—all bear the scars of this campaign. This is cultural genocide, designed to strip Palestinians not only of their land but of their story.

In Israel itself, Palestinian citizens are subjected to a curriculum that omits their history. Nakba denial is enshrined in Israeli psyche. Arabic language signs are replaced. Palestinian place names are Hebraized. The attempt is not just to control land, but to dominate narrative.

This form of domination is not unfamiliar to Irish readers. For centuries, Irish culture, language, and memory were suppressed under British rule. Just as Irish schoolchildren once sat in classrooms where their own history was absent or twisted, so too do Palestinian children today.

Women: Guardians of Story and Soul

In the face of this erasure, Palestinian women have emerged as the unheralded chroniclers of their people's trauma and resilience. Mothers and grandmothers are often the first teachers of Palestinian history. In kitchens, over bread-making and coffee, they recount tales of life in the villages, the day the tanks rolled in, and what was lost.

These stories are more than recollections. They are living archives. They construct identity, instil dignity, and foster belonging. Children who have never seen their family’s ancestral home know the layout of its rooms, the scent of its fig trees, the rhythm of its harvest – all through the power of storytelling. This oral tradition ensures that the story of Palestine will not die, even when those who lived it pass on.

Poetry, Song, and the Spirit of Resistance

Art in Palestine is not separate from the struggle—it is the struggle. Poetry, music, painting, and performance all serve as vehicles for expressing pain, hope, and defiance. The works of poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan remain etched in the national consciousness, offering both balm and fire.

Palestinian folk songs—many of them composed in the aftermath of the Nakba—continue to evolve, incorporating new verses for each new atrocity. They are sung at funerals, weddings, and protests. They speak of land, of longing, of steadfastness. As in other colonised cultures, Palestinian art does not merely reflect life under occupation—it actively resists it.

The Emotional Architecture of Exile

Exile is not simply a matter of location. It is the rupture of a whole way of life. The destroyed Palestinian village is more than buildings; it is the heart of a community—the gathering place, the water well, the place where weddings were celebrated and harvests shared.

When such a village is erased, a part of the self is erased with it. This collective loss fractures not only geography but also the psyche. The trauma is not confined to one generation—it becomes intergenerational. Children inherit the wounds of exile just as they inherit their grandparents’ stories.

A People Refusing to Disappear

Despite unimaginable adversity, Palestinians continue to assert their presence. They teach their children Arabic, plant olive trees even as bulldozers approach, and commemorate the Nakba every May 15. Each act is a refusal to be erased.

Palestinians are often portrayed in the media as victims or militants, rarely as thinkers, teachers, artists, or historians. But the reality is richer, and more subversive. They are keeping memory alive not as nostalgia, but as political defiance. They are building lives amid the wreckage. They are asserting a right to exist—on their terms. Even in the ruins of Gaza, people are marrying, writing poetry, and singing lullabies. This is not resilience born of peace. It is resilience forged in struggle.

The War on Truth

One of the most insidious aspects of the conflict is the global war on Palestinian truth. Social media platforms silence Palestinian voices. Western governments, while invoking human rights elsewhere, parrot narratives that ignore or diminish Palestinian suffering. Journalists are killed. Academics are blacklisted. The attempt is not just to destroy homes, but to destroy the language to describe that destruction.

Yet the stories keep coming. From mobile phones, from diaspora communities, from the ruins of Nuseirat and Khan Younis, Palestinians continue to speak. Their words are raw, vivid, and necessary.

What the World Must Remember

The Nakba was never a single event. It is a process—a slow-motion displacement, now accelerated by the brutal assault on Gaza. And it is a moral wound on the conscience of the world.

To commemorate the Nakba is not merely to look back. It is to recognise the continuity of injustice. It is to understand that the Palestinian struggle is not for vengeance, but for return, for dignity, and for the right to live free on their own land.

To listen to Palestinian memory is not to choose a side in a political contest. It is to affirm a people’s right to remember, to resist, and to exist.

As the bombs fall and the bodies pile up, one thing becomes clear: Palestine is not a ghost. It lives in stories, in songs, in the stubborn refusal of a people to be erased. And until there is justice, the Nakba continues.