We commemorate the Nakba every year because it is not a passing event in Palestinian history, but a foundational moment. What happened after it, and what is happening today, cannot be understood without returning to it.
Those who fail to understand the events of 1948 will be unable to grasp the roots of the ongoing Palestinian tragedy, including the genocidal war on Gaza. It suffices to know that approximately 70 percent of Gaza's population are either refugees or descendants of refugees since the Nakba, to realize that the past here is not just the past, but an open-ended present that has not ended.
Commemorating the Nakba is not merely an annual ritual or a rhetorical occasion; it is a vital safeguard against forgetting, erasure, and the passage of time. New Palestinian generations need to remain connected to their past and roots, because if memory is lost, identity is shaken, and if identity is shaken, a people becomes more vulnerable to fragmentation and displacement once again. Therefore, commemorating the Nakba is a defense of Palestinian national memory before it is simply a return to a historical event.
This commemoration also carries a unifying national significance, for it brings together Palestinians in the homeland and the diaspora around the core issue: the displacement and the right of return. There are those who seek to push Palestinians toward forgetting, or to transform the Nakba into a distant memory, or a humanitarian issue detached from its political and legal essence. But the Nakba, in its true nature, is the open wound of displacement, and it is also the clearest expression of the right of return, a right that does not expire with time.
But talking about the Nakba should not confine Palestine to the year 1948 alone. Palestine is bigger than this number, broader than its Nakba, and deeper than its image as merely a destroyed country or a displaced people.
Therefore, it is always necessary to return to pre-Nakba Palestine: to the features of life in cities and rural areas, to science and work, general culture, transportation, markets, joys and sorrows, and even the small daily details.
These small details are not marginal; they are pieces of a larger mosaic. Through them, we can protect ourselves from loss, oblivion, erasure, and ignorance. Restoring the living image of Palestine, not just the lost Palestine, is part of resisting the Nakba itself.
All of this is available, but it needs someone to go and find it, and disseminate it. This is where the role of journalists, the press, writers, and intellectuals comes in: to reconnect people with their collective memory, and to make the small details a means of preserving the larger narrative.
Al-Quds Al-Arabi commemorates this anniversary with coverage that reviews the outcomes of the Palestinian cause and the predicament it is experiencing today in light of the Israeli war of extermination and the occupation’s attack on Palestinians inside Israel and in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.
