Palestine After 78 Years of the NakbaWhen Erasure Becomes a World Orderby Bisan GA Edwan

“When we returned to the outskirts of the village weeks after our displacement, I didn’t know the way to our house. The trees remained, but the houses had disappeared. I walked across the place as if I were walking over a large grave.” — Testimony of a survivor from the village of Tantura, Institute for Palestine Studies Archives.

More than seventy years after that testimony, a Palestinian mother in Gaza was searching among the rubble for her child’s hand so she could bury him. She wasn’t looking for a complete body, but for a small piece of evidence to prove that the child had actually existed, and that he hadn’t become just another statistic in the news reports. Between these two scenes, time doesn’t stand still as a historical divide, but rather as a witness to the continuity of the same structure: the structure of uprooting, erasure, and the management of Palestinian death.

What happened in 1948 was not merely a war that ended with the displacement of a people from their land, but the establishment of a settler-colonial system that continues to reproduce itself to this day in increasingly violent and modern forms. Therefore, the Nakba does not appear as a closed event in the past, but rather as an ongoing process of reshaping Palestinian geography, demography, and memory. The uprooting targeted not only the Palestinian as an individual, but also the very possibility of their historical existence: their right to the land, to the narrative, and to the future.

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