Ongoing Nakba, Ongoing Return

How Have the Marches of Return Resisted the Ongoing Nakba?

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Stop the Wall || Every year on May 15, Palestinians mark Nakba Day. The Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe) marks the start of the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 to create the state of Israel as a settler colonial project on Palestinian land. 

The Nakba is not a memory but rather an ongoing process that has not stopped for 78 years.  This is the reality behind the continual settler-colonial violence waged against the Palestinians in their own land. The Nakba is a part of Palestine’s present, not its past.

The large majority of the Palestinian people today are refugees and displaced persons and the struggle for the right to return to their original homes from which they were displaced, as well as reparation and restitution, is the core element of the Palestinian cause.

• Israel continues to displace Palestinians through various means such as apartheid, land and property confiscation, settlement construction, Judaization, house demolitions, denial of natural resources, ongoing repression, and other policies.
• The international community has failed to provide comprehensive international protection for refugees, including guaranteeing their safety and security, protecting their rights and property, and providing them with basic needs that ensure their dignity until they are able to exercise their rights, foremost among them their right to return to their original homes.
• Palestinian refugees have been repeatedly displaced in host countries, which have failed to treat them in accordance with applicable international conventions.

Marches of Return as Resistance to Nakba

On Land Day, March 30, 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began what is now known as the “Great March of Return”. It sent a message to the world that Palestinians are still longing to return to the homes and lands that Zionist forces occupied in 1948. 

The message was an unambiguous affirmation of the Right of Return. Hundreds of thousands amassed at the borders, so close to the lands their ancestors once inhabited. They weren’t going to wait around for someone to give it to them, they were going to exercise it themselves.

On September 14, 2023, and before the start of Israel’s genocide, Palestinians in Gaza turned up to protest at Gaza’s militarized border, many of whom were participants in the Great March of Return, and several of them are still bearing the scars and injuries that they sustained during those days of protest. The organizers, “The Revolutionary Youth” were a group of younger Gazans incensed at the news of settler attacks in the occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the crackdown of Israeli authorities on the Palestinian prisoners’ movement.

During the genocide, on January 27, 2025,300,000 forcibly displaced Palestinians returned to Gaza City and northern Gaza for the first time since the start of Israel’s genocidal war, despite the destruction of their homes. Another historic march of return happened again in October 2025.

That time they marched from the south to the north of Gaza but the ultimate aim was their homes and lands they were expelled from in 1948. The direction stays the same – Return. As Bisan Owda, a Gazan journalist who is living and documenting the genocide, describes it: “[…] I have never seen or heard about a people who returned twice in one year, but the Palestinian people…We will return. Gazans, no single one should live this, but if we have to we would live it just as it must  be. Returning. Our heads are up, ready for whatever is coming. Returning back. Our holy return, Returning to the city, returning to the heart.” 

For years, every May 15, Stop the Wall and the Land Defense Coalition together with Palestinian movements inside the Green Line marked the Tantoura massacre. They came together in that village where Israeli forces brutally massacred the Palestinian population in 1948 to renew their commitment to return. 

For two years now, Israeli policy prohibited the annual Nakba Day March organized by Palestinians inside the Green Line.

Palestinians did not stop: Throughout the week they  marked each year with the slogan “Their independence is our Nakba”, hundreds made their own way to the sites of destroyed villages. Instead of a central march, the return saw families set off towards their depopulated villages in various parts of the country, and the elders, witnesses of the Nakba, sat telling stories, while the sons and grandsons listened, picking up the oral narrative as a trust that must be preserved. The return is no longer just a march, but a living moment.

Approximately 20 to 25% of Palestinians within 48 territories are internally displaced, They were displaced from their villages, but did not leave the area controlled by Israel. They are citizens without rights of the State of Israel and are prevented from returning to their villages.

Since its inception, Israel’s colonial project has aimed at ethnically cleansing the indigenous Palestinians from their land. The Nakba, the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, continues from the River to the Sea. Take Action to end the Nakba!

https://www.palestinepod.com/episodes/episode-042-the-tantura-massacre