Raja G. Khouri is the co-author of The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want To Know About Each Other.
This week, as Jews around the world celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, Palestinians everywhere will commemorate Nakba Day. This year, the marking of the disaster that befell the Palestinian people in 1948 is extremely fraught, as we watch the calamity unfolding in the Gaza Strip, particularly in Rafah.
It has been a long time since Nov. 2, 1917, when Lord Arthur Balfour, then the British foreign minister, issued a declaration that stated, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” where only less than 10 per cent of the population was Jewish, and the rest were Arab.
This declaration was, in the words of the late Palestinian-American philosopher and academic Edward Said, “made by a European power … about a non-European territory … in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory.” The British would soon begin facilitating the transfer of European Jews to Palestine, and, between 1922 and 1935, grew the Jewish population in Palestine to nearly 27 per cent of the total.
When the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 in 1947 that would divide Britain’s Palestine Mandate into Jewish and Arab states, Arab Palestinians rejected a plan which they viewed as grossly unfair. After a brief civil war between the Jewish and Arab communities, Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, and the Arab states joined the war. Israel won.
During these wars, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced out by Jewish militias, and none were allowed to return. Hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were demolished to ensure their inhabitants had no place to go back to. This destruction of Palestinian society became known as the Nakba (meaning “catastrophe,” in Arabic).
The Gaza Strip has been governed since 2007 by Hamas, a radical Islamist militant group. It has also been under a choking blockade by Israel since then, resulting in inhumane living conditions. Several wars between Israel and Hamas have taken place since, culminating in the current invasion that was triggered by Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7. At last count, estimates put the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza at more than 35,000, a majority of them civilians. Much of Gaza’s infrastructure – hospitals, schools, universities – has been demolished, and more than 70 per cent of homes have been damaged or destroyed.
Tens of thousands of people sheltering in Rafah are now on the move, fleeing an anticipated ground invasion by Israeli forces. Others in the city, which swelled to more than a million residents as people sought refuge during the war, are waiting anxiously. Palestinians around the world fear they will face a mass exodus similar to the one that took place in 1948. To Palestinians, the parallels to the Nakba of 1948 are indisputable.
There are key differences, though.
The black-and-white photos of the 1948 Palestinian exodus could not compare with the internet-powered citizen-to-citizen reporting of today. We have seen the march of Palestinians in Gaza from one unsafe location to another as it was happening, recorded by their own cameras, narrated by their own voices.
In 1948, most people would have received their news from printed newspapers, radio stations and film newsreels shown at movie theatres. There were no 24-hour news stations with live footage that would have shown, in real time, the bloodbath we have been witnessing in Gaza.
There were no social media and citizen journalists reporting live on their phones the moment their homes were blown up by an Israeli strike. There was no YouTube, where the world could see 15-year-old Palestinian singer MC Abdul’s videos of himself rapping in English while walking between the rubble of Gaza.
There was no X (formerly Twitter), where Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer would post his English poem If I Must Die, which went viral following an Israeli air strike in Gaza last December that killed him and several family members.
There was no TikTok, where you could watch twenty-something Palestinian storyteller and influencer Bisan Odwa, best known for her videos that document life during the war on Gaza. Last week, she won a 2024 Peabody Award for her Al Jazeera show, It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive. The student protesters on our university campuses are able to see Ms. Odwa’s heartfelt thank-you message, for “shouting for Palestine, dancing and singing for Palestine.”
We can only hope that these voices are heard, and that the daily atrocities end. The people of Gaza don’t have a day to spare.
Editor’s note: This article has been amended from an earlier version, which said that more than 70 per cent of homes in Gaza have been destroyed.