I Have Lived Through Two Nakbas

15 May 1948. 7 October 2023. The day the two Nakbas began. I lived through the first and am now helplessly watching the second.

Nakba One was bad enough. Roughly 65% of Palestine’s inhabitants were ethnically cleansed – the polite term for ‘expelled’ – from their homeland. Among them was my family, forced out of our Jerusalem home in April 1948.

We lost everything in Nakba One: my father’s promising career as a school inspector was cut short, my mother’s happy family life blighted, our childhood years brutally ended. Through military force, intimidation, and flight, most of our country was emptied to make room for the state of Israel to be created in our place.

We were told this was happening to us for a noble reason: because the Jewish immigrants flooding our shores needed a place of refuge. They were fleeing persecution in Europe, and although it was thousands of miles from Palestine and had nothing to do with us Palestinians, our country had been chosen to host them. It seemed our right to our homes and our land counted for nothing against the Jewish immigrants’ plight.

I remember how that injustice rankled with me, growing up in England, where my family sought refuge in 1949. We were surrounded by a nation that mostly supported the people who had taken over our homeland. Even the term Palestine slipped from people’s vocabulary early on, replaced by Israel, as if it had always been there. As a child in London, I faced almost universal denial of my identity. My life story was rejected as fantasy; I even remember wondering if they were right and if I’d been wrong when I insisted that Palestine was overwhelmingly Arab, not Jewish, before 1948. It took decades of intifadas, bombing campaigns and other calamities for the reality of Palestinian oppression to dawn on many British people.

Overwhelmed by trauma and unhappiness, I never thought in all the years after 1948 that the suffering I and so many others had endured in Nakba One would one day be surpassed and seem almost as nothing in comparison to the unending nightmare of what has become Nakba Two.

A year of catastrophe.

One year since Hamas burst out of the Gaza ghetto and attacked Israeli military and civilian targets on the other side, the consequences for the Palestinians have been catastrophic.

We knew Israel would retaliate against Hamas’s assault, but never dreamed we would witness such a genocidal frenzy against Gaza and its people – thousands of dead and wounded, orphans with no families left behind, wholesale destruction of infrastructure and the near extinction of 5,000 years of Gaza’s history.

By July this year, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza was estimated by The Lancet medical journal at more than 186,000, a staggering 7.9% of Gaza’s population. The true number is likely to be much higher. Two-thirds of the dead were women and children. In March, the UN reported that Israel’s army had killed more children in four months in Gaza than had been killed in all global conflicts in the preceding four years. Because of Israel’s blockade of the strip, currently, more than 10 children a day face amputations without anaesthetic, and at least 3,000 have lost one or more limbs.

Conditions in Gaza are beyond grim. Most buildings are reduced to rubble; few homes are left standing. Infrastructure damage has been immense; there are no proper medical facilities; schools have been destroyed, and all of the strip’s 12 universities have been demolished. The Israeli army constantly orders people to shift from place to place in search of safety in so-called safe zones. In reality, there is no safe zone anywhere in Gaza.

On 7 October, the people of Gaza will have been subjected to one year of unceasing violence, deliberate starvation, lack of clean water, epidemic disease and imprisonment, often with torture and rape. In addition, Israel has killed 1,151 Palestinian health workers, at least 220 UN staff and 116 journalists attempting to bear witness to the genocide.

Partly to shift attention away from its brutality against the Palestinians, Israel has now moved on to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria. On 19 September, a (still unadmitted) Israeli terror operation, using booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, killed at least 37 Lebanese, including at least four civilians, and injured more than 2,931 people. The sting was followed on 23 September by the Israeli bombing of civilian areas in southern Lebanon and Beirut, a campaign that has since killed 620 people and displaced an estimated half a million. The threat of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah is real.

The one thing all these Israeli activities have in common is their total impunity from retribution, guaranteed by western and particularly US support.

Western backing.

Arming Israel has been a top US priority for many years. In addition to its annual $3.5bn in aid for Israel, Congress voted in April for a further supplement of $14.5bn to maintain the flow of arms. And that is not all. A US-assembled naval task force has gone to the region as well as the largest US naval deployment since 1983; more US troops are being sent to defend Israel in case of war with Hezbollah or Iran.

Britain stands squarely with the US in its political, military and diplomatic support for Israel. Since 7 October, RAF reconnaissance flights over Gaza have provided Israel with up to 1,000 hours worth of footage of the strip and copious intelligence on Hamas. Meanwhile, Britain’s military base in Cyprus has been pivotal in arms transfers to Israel. Despite having recently suspended the approval of new arms export licences, Germany remains the second biggest arms supplier to Israel after the US.

Without such help, Israel would have succumbed by now, its army exhausted by nearly one year of unsuccessful fighting to subdue Hamas, and its economy battered. Yet, it shows no sign of stopping the war, and none of its allies seem prepared to halt the flow of arms which would do so.

Away from the battlefield, it is easy to get used to war. Over the months since last October, Israel’s genocide has become normalised. The sight of emaciated children and bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting no longer shocks as it once did. But this situation cannot continue, and we must ask where all this is heading. Even if the current crisis is resolved, the situation is unstable and the future unclear. Neither Israel nor its western partners can return to business as usual.

Before 7 October there was a status quo Israel and the west could live with. Israel was left alone to colonise Palestinian land undisturbed by serious challenges. It could build settlements, Judaise Jerusalem and suppress any Palestinian resistance that arose. Western and Arab states, which wanted a quiet life, were content not to interfere with Israel, and use the promise of the two-state solution like a soothing mantra without doing anything to bring it about.

The one condition for this international tranquillity to hold was that the Palestinians under occupation or besieged in Gaza, should go on enduring their fate in silence. The moment Hamas rejected that and broke out of its Gaza prison, the comfort the international community had learned to enjoy came to a crashing end.

A victor’s peace.

The only thing Israel and its allies know how to do in this new world is to try to return to the old one. That’s why we see Israel fighting to reassert its dominance over Hamas and the region, no matter the cost. Israel dreams of defeating Hezbollah and, with the US’s assistance, Iran. To that end, it has repeatedly provoked both into responding with an attack on Israel which would then precipitate a regional war.

Israel’s western backers, also anxious to regain the previous status quo, continue their all-out support for Israel, hoping the bad times will pass and ignoring the genocide in which they are complicit, which has led to Israel’s indictment at the International Court of Justice and to the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor bidding for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. The Arab states, unable to deal with Israel and compromised by their peace agreements with it, keep their heads down until “normality” returns.

How long that will take no one can predict. There are too many factors to take into account, and too many possible outcomes of this complex situation. But what is certain for me and all Palestinians is that Nakba Two, the worst we have experienced in the 76 years of Israel’s existence, will come to an end. And no matter when that is, it must be the last.

I never want to live through the terrible months since 7 October ever again: the constant anxiety about dear friends in Gaza and the West Bank, where my family comes from and where many of them still live, and the ever-present fear for the future of Palestine: will Israel finally succeed in expunging us all from the land of our forefathers?