The Meanings of a Second Nakba

Nadim Khoury

Introduction

It did not take long after 7 October for Palestinian human rights organizations to warn of a second Nakba.Footnote1 The term, meaning catastrophe in Arabic, was first coined to mark the defeat of Arab states following Israel's creation in 1948 and the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians, the destruction of hundreds of villages, and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Since 2023, it has been pivotal in wrestling with the genocide in Gaza. Displaced Palestinians decried their predicament as a repetition of the Nakba.Footnote2 Historians framed Israel's war as a "new stage" in an ongoing Nakba.Footnote3 International lawyers made the case for genocide in 2023-2025 by tracing Israel's actions back to 1947-1949.Footnote4 Finally, a global solidarity movement mobilized around the Nakba as it demonstrated in streets, supported boycotts, built encampments, sent flotillas, and sabotaged weapon factories. On 17 May 2025 in London, half a million people gathered to mark the 77th anniversary of the Nakba.Footnote5

Even Israeli leaders have been using the term. Soon after Hamas' attack on 7 October 2023 that killed 828 civilians, 373 security forces, and took 251 hostages, the Israeli Minister of Agriculture proclaimed that the Israeli army was "rolling out the Gaza Nakba." Ariel Kallner, an Israeli member of the Knesset, went even further: "Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join."Footnote6 Since the unity intifada of 2021, Israeli leaders have been threatening Palestinians with a new Nakba. Now, they were making good on their promise, with their soldiers spray-painting "Nakba 2023" on the buildings they were destroying.Footnote7 The widespread use of a second Nakba in Israeli politics is surprising, given the systematic denial of the first Nakba. The standard Israeli narrative holds Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states responsible for the fate of Palestinian refugees in 1948. Israel even issued memory laws pulling public funding from organizations that commemorate the Nakba in 2011. Now, its top leadership, news pundits, and military were loudly proclaiming a second Nakba to justify and glorify its genocidal war.

While the Israeli use of the Nakba is surprising, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian invocations of it are expected. The genocide of 2023-2025 matches and surpasses the ethnic cleansing of 1947-1949 in scale and magnitude. The historical comparison is unavoidable. "Not even the 1948 Nakba, with its brutal killings, forced displacement, and uprooting (…) can compare to the magnitude of destruction and bloodshed that Gaza is experiencing today" notes the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in its report on Israel's genocide.Footnote8 Framing the genocide as a second Nakba, moreover, follows directly from the Nakba's role as a Palestinian "foundational past" - a focal point through which Palestinians make sense of their plight and history, be it of events prior to 1948 (e.g. Balfour declaration 1917) and those after (e.g. the war of 1967, the massacres of Sabra and Shatila 1982).Footnote9 As a foundational moment of trauma and loss, the Nakba stands in the Palestinian national imaginary as a deep and unhealed wound.Footnote10 With every threat to Palestinian existence, the wound opens. When the threat turns genocidal, it gushes.

Nonetheless, one should not underestimate the significance of Palestinians calling the genocide in Gaza a second Nakba. There has been a second intifada, a second, third, fourth, and fifth war on Gaza, but there has never been a second Nakba until now.Footnote11 Foundational pasts rarely occur twice. When they do, it is important to ask why and under what conditions. Furthermore, the quick, systematic, simultaneous, and global invocation of the Nakba - by Palestinians, global solidarity movements, and even Israeli officials - is unique in the history of Palestine/Israel. Without a doubt, the Nakba of 1948 was historically defining. However, it became a Palestinian foundational past through laborious memory work, which has evolved at different rhythms, scales, and in the face of different forms of historical erasure.

It is this evolution and its potential future transformations that I want to address here. How have the different meanings of the Nakba evolved prior to the ongoing genocide in Gaza? How will they evolve following this latest catastrophe? Answering the latter can only be done by addressing the former. We cannot predict the future meanings of the Nakba, especially as we find ourselves amid a second one. Understanding its evolution up to now, however, can provide some clues to its coming transformations. In the pages below, I trace key moments in the Nakba's evolution: its initial emergence as an Arab catastrophe in 1948, its transformation into a specifically Palestinian tragedy after 1967, its broader resonance from the 1990s (indirectly spurred by the Oslo peace process and its collapse), and its circulation in the Israeli public sphere. This genealogy is complex, and it is beyond the scope of this piece to examine it in detail.Footnote12 I will focus instead on some of its broad strokes to understand how they shaped understandings of the 2023-2025 war on Gaza and to outline potential evolutions moving forward. One visible trend, I conclude, is the globalization of the Nakba that has been spurred by the genocide in Gaza and its growing recognition as such.

The Meaning of the Nakba in 1948: An Arab Catastrophe

The term Nakba was famously coined by the Syrian intellectual Constantine Zurayq to refer to the defeat of the Arab states at the hands of Israel in 1948. In the opening paragraph of The Meaning of the Nakba, Zurayq offers his diagnosis of the loss of 78 per cent of historical Palestine to Zionist forces:

The Arab defeat in Palestine is neither a mere setback nor a simple passing evil. It is a catastrophe (Nakba) in every sense of the word, and a calamity that is greater than any other that has afflicted the Arabs in their long calamity and tragedy ridden history.Footnote13

Despite its naturalistic connotations, this catastrophe did not befall the Arabs like an earthquake. It was man-made. As such, it required introspection ("Why and how did this happen?") and prescriptions ("What can be done to reverse it?"). For Zurayq, the defeat exposed a political, ideational, civilizational, and scientific crisis. Only a revolution, he concluded, could reverse this condition - through modernization, industrialization, militarization, separation of state and religion, scientific training, and Arab unity. While Zurayq coined the term, his meaning of the Nakba is not the one we typically associate withtoday. As a Pan-Arabist, he understood the Nakba as an Arab catastrophe, one that was plotted in a longer history of Arab civilization, its clashes with modernity, colonialism, and Zionism. Palestine is where the catastrophe played out, but the Nakba was not specifically Palestinian. The military defeat of Arab armies, moreover, was the primary manifestation of this catastrophe - the symptom of a civilizational malaise whose causes needed to be addressed. The forced expulsion of Palestinians was merely a consequence.. In fact, what would later be called the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was not complete by the time Zurayq published The Meaning of the Nakba. The book refers only to the 400,000 Palestinian refugees, a number that would double by 1949.

For Palestinian survivors of the Nakba, on the other hand, the catastrophe of 1948 was experienced as an immediate and existential crisis, not a civilizational one. Overnight, the word Palestine disappeared from the map. Seventy eight per cent of Mandatory Palestine became Israel, and the remaining twenty two per cent of the territory came under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. Eighty eight per cent of Palestinians became refugees, and the remaining twelve per cent were transformed into a minority of "Israeli Arabs." On top of displacement and partition, the refugee crisis reframed the entire question of Palestine. What had been an issue of national self-determination was now recast as a humanitarian crisis in need of humanitarian solutions.Footnote14 According to UNGA resolution 194, Palestinian refugees had the individual right to "return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours" or to receive compensation for property if they decided not to, but theirs was no longer a question of self-determination.

In the context of dispersal and political erasure, Palestinian refugees struggled to make sense of this catastrophe. The urgent demands of their present condition left little space for narrating what was yet to be the past. Their prior history, moreover, offered no guidance. Before 1948, their belonging to the land was never questioned. In less than a year, "the validity and endurance of their physical and cultural environment" turned out to be "the most insecure."Footnote15 As refugees outside of Palestine and as a newly created minority within it, Palestinians were treated as a security threat and their permission to narrate withheld. Israel sought to erase the Nakba by destroying, renaming, or repopulating villages and towns.Footnote16 The Palestinians that remained were not allowed to mark the Nakba, only Israeli Independence Day. Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt also lived in highly securitized environments. Testimonies of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, for example, recount how tanks would surround Palestinian refugee camps on 15 May (when Israel was created) to block demonstrations marking the Nakba.Footnote17

In the shadow of dispersal and loss, Palestinians generated a memory of the Nakba, though this memory remained local, fragmented, and vernacular - embodied in the figure of the Palestinian refugee, crystallized in objects (keys to homes left behind), and narrated in stories, village books, and poetry.Footnote18 And when it was articulated in newspapers and literature, it was in response to a new fragmented reality. The "literature of the Nakba" that emerged in the West Bank (under Jordanian rule), in the Gaza strip (under Egyptian rule), and in what became Israel did not share the same political horizon and therefore did not coalesce into one national narrative.Footnote19

The role of this literature, however, should not be understated in overcoming this fragmentation. Before 1948, there was already a distinct Palestinian poetry of resistance that emerged during the Mandate period against British imperialism and Zionist immigration, represented by the likes of Ibrahim Tuqan. This poetry would prefigure a literature of the Nakba after 1948, especially among a new generation of Palestinians who remained in what became Israel, such as Rashid Hussein, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Salim Jubran, Tawfiq Zayyad, and Emile Habibi.

Despite the heavy censorship and political persecution imposed by Israel's military rule, these literary figures managed to make use of the few outlets available to them, such as the Arabic newspaper of the Israeli Communist party al-Ittihad and its literary supplement al-Jadid to articulate the plight of the Palestinians in the face of Israeli land seizure, historical erasure, imprisonment, and political fragmentation. This literature would later become part of an oral national discourse transmitted across generations. It would also inspire and lay the symbolic groundwork for what Ghassan Kanafani would call the "resistance literature" after 1967, which was an integral part of a revolutionary Palestinian ethos that grew in the shadow of the Naksa.

The Meaning of the Nakba After 1967: A Palestinian Catastrophe

In 1967, the Nakba was eclipsed by an even more humiliating defeat: Israel's victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria leading to its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Like in 1948, this cataclysmic event generated extensive debates across the Arab world, pondering its reasons and its larger meaning. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser euphemistically called the defeat a Naksa (setback in Arabic), admitting its gravity but framing it as a temporary setback for Pan-Arabism.

Other critics gave a bleaker picture. In Self-Critique After the Defeat, the Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm echoed and amplified Constantine Zurayq's diagnosis of 1948. Footnote20 This was not simply a military defeat, but a symptom of a much wider problem. The Arabs, he claimed, entered the war with an antiquated and positional understanding of war, whereas the Israelis approached it in a modern dynamic way. The different strategies were indicative of a greater economic, cultural, scientific chasm between the Arab nations and Israel. It is this civilizational gap that explain the military defeat and the lack of self-criticism in its wake. While directly linking 1967 with 1948, al-Azm rejected the term Nakba, because it connoted "much of the logic of exoneration and evasion of responsibility and accountability."Footnote21 Instead, the defeat should be a moment of severe self-criticism to pave the way for complete change.

In Palestinian political thought, the Naksa was experienced in even more "radical, physical, and epistemic terms."Footnote22 This was not only about a severe military defeat, it was existential. Israel now occupied all historical Palestine and it expelled a new round of 250,000 refugees. The fear of political, geographic and historical erasure, jolted a new Palestinian discourse "centered around questions of origins, genealogy, and beginnings."Footnote23This was championed by a resurrected Palestinian nationalism that emerged from the refugee camps and the diaspora. After 1967, movements like Fatah (1957), the PFLP (1967), and the Palestine Liberation Organization (1964) concluded that the Palestinian question required distinct Palestinian leadership and goals, while remaining Arab in scope. Like their third world counterparts, these Palestinian movements understood that the denial of Palestinian self-determination translated into a denial and erasure of its history. To counter both, they engaged in their own form of memory work. They celebrated Palestinian heritage, memorialized its battles (e.g. the Karameh battle of 1968) and Israeli massacres (e.g. Sabra and Shatila), and placed them within a longer history of Palestinian struggle. They also set up research institutions and opened an archive in Lebanon (that would later be looted).Footnote24

The Nakba played a key role in this phase of Palestinian nationalism that set the liberation of Palestine as its main goal and armed struggle as its primary means. Its intellectuals, specifically, would highlight the Nakba in literature, journalism, and social sciences. This occurred in the Arab world, but also beyond, in growing solidarity movements in the West and amidst a larger third-world internationalism. It is important to note, however, that this meaning of the Nakba was shaped by a revolutionary discourse whose primary focus was a liberated future. While the Nakba was constitutive of this Palestinian narrative, it was subsumed by the thawra (revolution) that sought to solve and overcome it. "With revolution" stated Fatah in one of its tracts, "we put an end to this bitter surrender, this terrifying reality that the children of the Catastrophe [of 1948] experience everywhere."Footnote25 As the PLO abandoned armed struggle and shifted towards diplomacy in the 1990s, however, the revolutionary discursive universe of the Nakba would be replaced by a state-building one, leading the meanings of the Nakba to change, vary, and multiply.Footnote26

The Nakba and the Oslo Peace Process

From the 1990s onwards, awareness of the Nakba grew exponentially. Several factors explain this development, but the Oslo peace process (1993-2001) was chief among them. This was a paradoxical development as the peace process compromised the Nakba at the negotiating table. On paper, the Oslo agreements deferred the Palestinian refugee issue to final status negotiations, which Israel and the PLO would address after a transitionary period of five years. What was presented as a strategy of delaying one of the thorniest issues for the sake of an incremental peace process was, in fact, its opposite. The Oslo Accords were not meant to solve the refugee problem but to dissolve it: to undermine the framework that had made it a problem in the first place.Footnote27

The very formula of the Oslo peace was partly responsible for this dissolution. By adopting the land for peace formula and the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations, the Oslo Accords imposed their own temporality on the question of Palestine. Only the land conquered in 1967, and the history that followed were open to negotiations. Everything before 1967 was deemed off limits, and thus off memory.Footnote28 Israeli negotiators could now demand that Palestinians forget the Nakba, this time in the name of peace rather than war. In the negotiation process, moreover, the refugee issue was reduced to a humanitarian one, contributing further to its dissolution. Israeli negotiators systematically insisted on this humanitarian approach. When they accepted the return of a limited number of refugees at the Camp David Summit in 2000 and then again in Taba in 2001, they did so solely on humanitarian grounds (family reunification), not reparatory ones (historical injustice). When they debated compensation, moreover, they proposed an international fund rather than an Israeli one, maintaining that since Israel bore no responsibility, it owed no reparations - whether in the form of apologies, restitution, return, or direct compensation.Footnote29

While some Palestinians accused the PLO of forfeiting the Nakba at the negotiating table, the newly created Palestinian Authority would repurpose its commemoration, not for the liberation of all land, but for state-building within the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The most significant display of this transformed memory politics came on the 50th year of the Nakba, 15 May 1998. The Palestinian Authority officially established the day as Nakba Day in its political calendar. It organized a "march of a million" where Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish delivered public speeches. The event was broadcast live on newly created Palestinian radio stations, television networks, and newspapers.Footnote30

The creation of Palestinian autonomous areas in the 1990s also opened new spaces for civil society to commemorate the Nakba. Prior, Israeli military authorities tightly controlled these spaces and criminalized any expression of Palestinian nationalism. This securitization was partially relaxed after the Oslo Accords, and cultural institutions like the Khalil Sakakini Culture Center in Ramallah and universities in Bethlehem, Gaza, and Birzeit launched oral history projects to record survivors' testimonies.Footnote31

While these projects, and many others that emerged during this time, harkened back to the same past, they did not always mobilize it for the same purpose. Some aligned with the Palestinian Authority's official memory, while others challenged it. Some actively voiced the plight of refugees, while others inadvertently diminished their role "into that of folkloric remnants (…) neglecting their present agency and participation in the political and historical process."Footnote32 Memorialization of the Nakba was therefore politicized against the peace process, politicized through it, or depoliticized because of it - a form of middle-class cultural activism that substituted commemoration for concrete political strategies to end Israel's occupation.

Not surprisingly, the period sparked intense debates among Palestinian intellectuals about memory in the post-Oslo era. Scholars like Musa Budeiri, Salim Tamari, Rema Hammami, Mourid Barghouti, and Edward Said brought critical perspectives, challenging the PA's monopolization of memory and rejecting the peace process' imposed forgetting. Their work highlighted vernacular and subaltern memories of the Nakba, emphasizing class, geographic, and gender dimensions while critiquing nostalgic commemorations of pre-1948 Palestine that lacked historical context. Footnote33

The same period saw increased mobilization around the Nakba outside of the West Bank and Gaza, jolted by the same Oslo peace process and its failure to uphold the right of return of 1948 refugees. In Syria, for example, a younger generation of Palestinian refugees established the Right of Return Movement to assert their rights and "undermine the agenda of the PLO and the Oslo-created Palestinian Authority."Footnote34 Within Israel, the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID) mobilized for similar reasons and organized marches of return on Israel's independence day with the motto "Your Independence Day is our Nakba Day." While these began as family-centred marches in the early 1990s, they were formalized and grew yearly after ADRID was established in 2000.Footnote35 I will return to the specific case of Palestinians in Israel below, as their engagement with Nakba memory intersects uniquely with the Israeli public discourse about the Nakba.

Al Nakba al Mustamirra: The Nakba as Present

The crystallization of the Nakba as a foundational past for Palestinians in Israel, in the occupied territories, and the diaspora mentioned above did not occur under a single Palestinian political agenda. Third generation Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon, Palestinians in Israel, Bedouins in the Negev, the Palestinian Authority and its political opponents (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP) all mobilized the Nakba as a common Palestinian signifier, but this mobilization was driven by different experiences, shaped by different realities, and directed by different, sometimes conflicting political goals.

While the peace process is partly to blame for this fragmentation, the failures of the peace process would contribute to bringing some of these experiences and understandings closer together. The reasons for this failure lie beyond the scope of this piece, but its effects on the ground were clear: a threefold increase in Israeli colonization of the West Bank, the creation of Palestinian Bantustans, further dispossession through home demolitions, more fragmentation, and the normalization of mass violence against Palestinians. These effects accelerated during the Second Intifada and subsequent Israeli wars on Gaza. Concerns with the pastness of the Nakba, significant during the mid-1990s and 2000s, were now replaced with its presentness. Palestinians increasingly began speaking of the Nakba as ongoing - al nakba al mustamirra.

"The Nakba is not only a memory," argued Elias Khoury, "it is a continuous reality that has not stopped since 1948 (…) Memory can be a trap, and the Nakba as only a memory is the biggest trap that can mislead rational analysis of the Palestinian present."Footnote36 The idea resonated across Palestinian communities, transcending their political fragmentation into separate categories - a minority in Israel, refugees in Arab states, and autonomous areas in the West Bank and Gaza, later divided by the Hamas-Fatah split.

The most vivid manifestation of this ongoing Nakba was the blockade of Gaza and the numerous wars inflicted on the Strip. Not surprisingly, attempts to break the blockade harkened back to the Nakba. This was specifically the case of the Great March of Return, a series of weekly demonstrations held near the Gaza-Israel border in 2018 and 2019. Originally, these demonstrations were organized by independent activists such as Ahmed Abu Artima and Muthana al-Najjar, who sought nonviolent means to break Israel's blockade. Later, they were endorsed by other Palestinian political parties, especially Hamas that controlled the Gaza Strip.

The symbolism of the Nakba permeated the Great March of Return. The weekly marches to the border were originally set to begin on 30 March 2018 (Land Day) up to 15 May 2018 (Nakba Day), although they ended up extending beyond. More fundamentally, 70 per cent of the population in Gaza are descendants of the 1948 Nakba. Reclaiming their right to movement came hand in hand with reclaiming their right of return to their original homes. Israel's response to both was uncompromising: 223 Palestinians were shot dead, and 10,000 were wounded.

The Nakba in the Israeli Public Sphere: Memory Activism, History, and Backlash From the 1990s onwards, the Nakba also entered the Israeli public sphere. It did so through many channels, beginning with the activism of Palestinians in Israel. I already mentioned the marches of return organized by ADRID. But these marches were part of a larger phenomenon among Palestinians in Israel who began taking their memory of the Nakba into a public sphere that had typically excluded them.Footnote37

When Israel was created in 1948, it erased the remnants of Palestinian history and imposed close surveillance of its Arab minority. It also isolated this minority from the rest of the Arab world and, thus, from Arab and Palestinian nationalism that championed the Nakba. And while this Palestinian minority would acquire Israeli citizenship, this citizenship was premised on the negation of their Palestinian identity. The limited political spaces available to them as citizens - such as the Israeli Communist Party - focused on advocating for equal rights within Israel, and supporting a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, not addressing the trauma of 1948.Footnote38 These factors confined the memory of the Nakba mostly to family stories, the silent testimony of ruins, with the exception of poetry and literature that went beyond the confines of the Palestinian minority in Israel (as discussed earlier).

This would change at the turn of the twenty first century. From 1990 to 2003, for example, the number of newspaper articles discussing the Nakba quadrupled.Footnote39 In the decade that followed, demonstrations marking Nakba Day tripled.Footnote40 Nadim Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh Khoury have labelled this phenomenon a "return of history," where "a dormant past is reconstituted and becomes a constitutive force in present collective consciousness and in envisioning the political future."Footnote41 A fringe of Israeli Jews would eventually join Palestinian memory activism. Most notably, the Israeli NGO Zochrot, founded in 2002, promoted awareness of the Palestinian Nakba through walking tours, digital applications (iNakba), citizen-organized truth commissions, and joint commemorations.

Awareness of the Nakba amongst a minority of Israeli Jews, however, did not come about from the activism of Palestinians but from the work of the new Israeli historians in the 1990s who challenged the traditional Israeli narrative about Israel's founding in 1948.Footnote42 Drawing on Israeli military archives declassified in the 1980s, they documented evidence of forced displacement, massacres, mass looting, and rape. From this evidence, however, they drew different conclusions. Benny Morris, most notably, insisted that there was no plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and that the displacement was a consequence of the war itself.Footnote43 He would even go on to justify the forced migration of Palestinians, claiming that Israeli leaders should have "finished the job" of 1948.Footnote44 Ilan Pappe, on the other hand, concluded that there was a plan to forcibly displace Palestinians (Plan Dalet) and that the war was a means, rather than a cause, of ethnic cleansing.Footnote45 As a result, Israel should be held accountable for its crimes and decolonize.

While Palestinian refugees and Palestinian historians, had long maintained claims about the forced migration of 1948, their articulation by Israeli scholars brought them increased (albeit limited) recognition in the Israeli public sphere in the 1990s, moving the debates from the academy, to the media,Footnote46 popular culture,Footnote47 and even to the negotiating table.Footnote48 The work of the new Israeli historians would also contribute to Western academic recognition of the Nakba. As Anaheed al-Hardan pointedly observes, "the Nakba of 1948 became plausible in English only after it was articulated by the colonizer."Footnote49 This is not to diminish the crucial contributions of Palestinian and Arab scholars in the West like Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, Fayez Sayigh, and Elias Sanbar. Instead, it is to highlight Western academia's epistemological biases: accepting the Nakba only after Israeli historians documented it.Footnote50

The increased presence of the Nakba in Israeli public discourse and beyond, unthinkable until then, quickly triggered a backlash, leading the Israeli right to appropriate the term. The right-wing NGO Im Tirtzu, most notably, launched a "Nakba bullshit" (Nakba harta) campaign in 2011 to counter the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba.Footnote51 Other NGOs would inverse the language of the Nakba to accuse Palestinians of a "Jewish Nakba," applying the term to Arab Jewish refugees from the Middle East who migrated or fled to Israel after 1948.Footnote52 While the strategy of pitting the latter against Palestinian refugees from 1948 is old, packaging it in the language of Nakba is new and indicative of a growing trend amongst right-wing NGOs to mirror and invert the very language used by Palestinians.Footnote53

The Israeli state quickly institutionalized this backlash through legislation. In 2009, the Israeli Education Ministry prohibited the use of the word Nakba in textbooks for Palestinian children. In 2011, it issued a "Nakba Law" that blocked public funding to institutions that commemorate the Nakba and question the Zionist narrative of 1948. While these campaigns did have a chilling effect, they also had the unintended consequence of further pushing the Nakba into the Israeli public sphere. As Yehuda Shenhav-Shahrabani noted, the Israeli right has kept the Nakba more visible by denying it than the extreme left has by calling for its recognition.Footnote54 This use and abuse of the Nakba amongst the Israeli right partially explains the calls for a second Nakba. The government was addressing itself to its base in a term it had co-opted, mirrored, and inverted. The second Nakba was thus part of a larger repertoire of incitement to genocide, along with calls to fully erase Gaza, burn it to the ground, spare none, and destroy Amalek.

But the notion of a second Nakba also points to a specific development: the use of the Nakba as a colonial term. In one sense, this use is expected. Colonial and settler colonial powers have and continue to issue threats of mass destruction when faced with large-scale attacks such as Hamas's attack on 7 October. The difference here is that such threats are issued in a context when the Nakba has been documented, debated, and sometimes even decried. The threat of a second Nakba then coexists with a host of other registers: Nakba acknowledgment (e.g. Zochrot), denial ("there is no Nakba"), mockery (Nakba harta), and inversion ("a Jewish Nakba"). In such a context, the proclamation of a second Nakba is paradoxical: Israel simultaneously denies and acknowledges the Nakba.

The paradox serves a dual purpose. Israel wants to revive the haunting memories of 1948 but also criminalize its narration as resistance. It wants Palestinians to remember the Nakba but not to commemorate it.Footnote55 It wants to assert its past and current impunity: its license to inflict one, two, and more Nakbas. The timing of the paradox, and the conditions under which it is invoked, are worth pondering, even if tentatively. By way of comparison, it is inconceivable, for example, that American politicians would threaten the Cherokee and other Native tribes with a second Trail of Tears. The current stage of American settler colonialism makes such threats unnecessary: the settlers have long won, the indigenous are dispossessed, and their collective memory largely domesticated. While the Israeli invocation of a second Nakba might exhibit similar expressions of complete victory, it could also betray the exact opposite: an expression of deep insecurity.

Hamas' attack on 7 October is the deadliest Palestinian-led attack on Israel in its history. When Israelis speak of the trauma it left in its wake, it is an expression of this insecurity. Furthermore, the global solidarity movement that emerged in response to Israel's genocide centred the question of Palestine at its origins. Its motto "from the river to the sea" did not only have geographic reach, but it also had a temporal one, delving back into Israel's founding violence. In the face of such insecurity, Nakba amnesia, denial, and mockery no longer suffice. Instead, Israel fully acknowledges the devastation of the Nakba to re-enact it: "Yes, we did it before, and we'll do it again."

The Globalization of the Nakba After Genocide

In the sections above, I provided an overview of the discursive evolutions of the Nakba. The overview was schematic, but it points to some important trends. The first is the many meanings of the Nakba that have grown exponentially since 1948. The Nakba was articulated as an Arab catastrophe, then as a distinctively Palestine one. Different political horizons have informed its narration and resolution - armed struggle, Arab unity, a liberated Palestinian state (secular or religious), a two-state solution, and a one-state solution. The Nakba is studied as history, debated as memory, and ongoing as dispossession, siege, ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, and ghettoization in the present. This plurality, one could argue, is a feature of any site of memory (lieu de mémoire), especially one so foundational. In the case of Palestinians, it is amplified because Palestinians are a colonized, fragmented, and occupied people. The question of Palestine, moreover, remains unresolved. The Nakba is ongoing, and genocide is its latest manifestation.

Despite this plurality, the Nakba has crystallized into a focal point of the Palestinian narrative. In a quote mistakenly attributed to David Ben Gurion but illustrative of his thinking, the old generation of Palestinian refugees will die, and the younger generation will forget. The exact opposite has transpired, on both sides of the divide. The Nakba has become more pronounced, better documented, and more meaningful with every generation. The vernacular memory of Palestinian refugees has since been recorded in oral history projects, documented in archives, debated by historians, and now shared on social media applications the world over. This crystallization partially explains why the awareness of the Nakba was so prevalent during the genocidal war on Gaza - how 1948 became the prism through which to understand the mass killings, displacements, destruction, starvation, and brutalization of Gaza post 2023. The Nakba also evolved in Israeli discourse. From an event that was systematically erased, the Nakba remade its way into the public sphere through the activism of its Palestinian minority, the research of the new historians, and public denials of right-wing NGOs. With time, the Nakba became a colonial term, used by its perpetrators and their descendants who inverted, co-opted, and finally weaponized it as incitement to genocide.

Considering this evolution, how will the memorialization and mobilization of the Nakba evolve after the war on Gaza? I ponder this question as the genocidal war is ongoing, fully aware of the epistemological, ethical, and psychological difficulties in answering it. The trends I identified above, however, point to a potential evolution that I want to examine in more detail, namely the globalization of the Nakba. The globalization of memory refers to how a historical event is commemorated and becomes meaningful outside the boundaries of the victim's (and the perpetrator's) national identity. At the basic level, this is an issue of scope. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, most notably, coined the term cosmopolitan memory to refer to the ways the memory of the Holocaust was transcending ethnic and national boundaries.Footnote56 At a deeper level, this is an issue of substance. For Levy and Sznaider, a cosmopolitan memory acted as a cultural foundation "for a global human rights politics." Never again was its mantra, a mantra that faltered in Gaza, as Western states allowed Israel to wage war with total impunity, providing it with military, political, and diplomatic support despite issuing calls for caution.

While the scope of Nakba commemoration cannot be compared with that of the Holocaust, it has widened considerably after 2023. The trend began before 7 October 2023, with the Nakba being marked internationally by solidarity movements. In some cases, like in Germany, Nakba commemorations were even banned following the unity intifada of 2021.Footnote57 Official recognition also gained momentum. In November 2022, the United Nations General Assembly voted to mark the Nakba yearly on the 15th of May. In 2024, American-Palestinian congresswoman Rashida Tlaib introduced a House resolution recognizing the Nakba and directly tying it to the war in Gaza. "The Nakba never ended," she stated, "today we are witnessing the Israeli apartheid government carry out genocide in Gaza. A campaign to erase Palestinians from existence."Footnote58 Tlaib's resolution was rejected and deemed antisemitic.

The increased commemoration, politicization, and criminalization of the Nakba speak to its growing global presence that will likely intensify after the war on Gaza. A potential driver of this growth is South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, where Israel is accused of genocide. The charge is met with categorical resistance from Israel and its Western allies, but it is increasingly supported by other states, NGOs, international lawyers, and genocide scholars. The relationship between international law and the globalization of memory is not straightforward. It is difficult to relate international law's abstract and technical nature with the specific and context-bound dimension of collective memory. However, in cases of large-scale violations of human rights, legal frameworks play an important role by making mass violence legible to global audiences. They link mass atrocities in the present to recognized mass atrocities in the past. To put it differently, it is when Gaza echoes Bosnia or Hiroshima that its criminality becomes legible to a global audience. The opposite, of course, is also true. Because Gaza is not Auschwitz, and Jenin is not Soweto, some argue, there is no genocide and no apartheid in Palestine.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe points to this relationship between globalized memory and international law. "The ethnic cleansing of 1948 has been eradicated (…) from the collective global memory and erased from the world's conscience," he writes. Applying the category of ethnic cleansing that emerged with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s to the Nakba of 1948 is a way of countering this erasure:

I want to make the case for the paradigm of ethnic cleansing and use it to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948. I have no doubt that the absence so far of the paradigm of ethnic cleansing is part of the reason why the denial of the catastrophe has been able to go on for so long.Footnote59

The point is this: to recognize the Nakba, it must be made recognizable, and the category of ethnic cleansing does exactly that. Not only does it reframe the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1947-1949 as ethnic cleansing (rather than war), but it also makes it legible as a mass atrocity and crime against humanity. What ethnic cleansing sought to achieve for the 1947-1949 Nakba, the framework of apartheid would seek for the ongoing Nakba. In its report on Israeli apartheid, the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq makes the connection between the two explicit:

It is the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people that motivates this report and forms the basis of our understanding of Zionist settler colonialism and Israeli apartheid as structures of Palestinian dispersal, dispossession, discrimination, and domination.Footnote60

Taking this juridical trajectory beyond established crimes, some legal scholars even suggest that the Nakba become its own legal category. In an article entitled Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept, Rabea Eghbariah points to the limits of occupation, apartheid, and genocide as legal categories to capture the Palestinian predicament.Footnote61 He suggests that these three interact in a specific way in the Palestinian case, prompting him to develop a crime of its own that he calls Nakba. The crime is abstracted from the Palestinian context, he argues, but it could prove useful to other contexts. The growing recognition of the second Nakba in Gaza as genocide will only accelerate this trend, quantitatively but also qualitatively. In the hierarchy of crimes, genocide is considered the "crime of crimes," ranking above ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Despite its flaws, this hierarchy is well entrenched in political, academic, and mnemonic discourse. As the Palestinian Nakbas climb the hierarchy of mass crimes, so will their significance for global memory. But the climb is steep. Not only is the recognition of genocide arduous, but on top of this hierarchy sits the legacy of Holocaust that has become deeply associated with the state of Israel, the very state perpetrating the genocide in Gaza.

The climb, however, has been accelerated by modern forms of communication. The war on Gaza has been dubbed the first live-streamed genocide because it was broadcast on social media networks in real time. Not only were Palestinian killing, displacement, and starvation available on people's smartphones the world over, but so were Israeli war crimes and incitement. The full extent of the destruction of Gaza will surely require years of research, but the lack of temporal disjuncture between the war and its documentation, the immediate recognition of the first Nakba in the second, and the simultaneous, rather than retrospective, categorization of the crime as genocide all play an important role in this process of globalization of the Nakba.

Moving forward, this globalization can take two forms. In one highly unlikely scenario, the genocide in Gaza is recognized, which connects the Nakba to other global historical traumas, transforming it from a specifically Palestinian catastrophe into a symbol of broader patterns of mass violence. In a fictionalized and widely circulated video published a year after 7 October, we are presented with this scenario.Footnote62 The video projects a set of commemorations in 2040 (the "16th year of Israel's genocide"): a memorial in Berlin, a film projection in Paris, and a museum in South Korea. As the audience looks back in horror at images of bombed hospitals, starved children, and mass graves, children ask their parents: "what were you doing during this genocide? Did you know? It was happening in front of you?" The parents remain silent, expressing shame and regret. "The genocide committed by Israel is killing Palestinians," the video concludes, later switching the word "Palestinians" to "humanity."

In this fictional scenario, the genocide is brought into the fold of a global memory. It is global in scope: commemorated in Germany, France, South Korea, and other countries. It is global in substance: grounded in a common humanity united in its commitment against genocide and large-scale violations of human rights. Finally, it is globalized in form: stylized according to standardized commemorative aesthetics and practices set by Holocaust remembrance.Footnote63 In another, much more likely scenario, the genocide is denied, together with its link to an ongoing Nakba. There are no official memorials or museums, only digital archives, online videos, and memory activism calling for recognition. This scenario, however, will serve to globalize the memory of the Nakba in a different way. The genocide in Gaza has alienated the global south from the global north, revealing fundamental cracks in the international system and society. This divide is visible at the International Court of Justice and in international debates, media coverage, and public discourse. Never again, many concluded, depended on where you came from and the colour of your skin, an observation that took on new meaning and urgency after the genocide in Gaza.

These deeper structural tensions between the global north and south mark a crucial step in the evolution of the Nakba discussed in this piece. Without a doubt, the Gaza genocide will reshape Palestinian understanding of the Nakba and mark yet another step in its evolution. At the same time, it may also transform global memory itself. If the foundation of this global memory was a supposed universal culture of human rights, the globalization of the Nakba exposes its double standards, unevenness, and selective amnesia.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Hilde Restad, Dirk Moses, Bahaa Eleyan, Ana Luisa Sanchez Laws, Amira Benali, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback. Any errors remain my own.

Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information
Nadim Khoury is associate professor at the department of Law, Philosophy, and International Studies at the University of Inland Norway.

Notes

1 Palestinian Center for Human Rights, "Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Condemn the Renewed Israeli Military Attacks on Gaza and Warn of a Second Nakba," 1 December 2023, https://pchrgaza.org/palestinian-human-rights-organizations-condemn-the-renewed-israeli-military-attacks-on-gaza-and-warn-of-a-second-nakba/. UNRWA would issue a similar warning in 2025, see "Gaza: A Second Nakba," statement by Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, 9 July 2025, https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/unrwa-commissioner-general-gaza-second-nakba.

2 For example, B'Tselem's report on Israel's genocide includes the following testimony by Olfat al-Kurd that explicitly makes the connection: "Seventy-five years ago my grandparents were forced to leave their village, Majdal, which was on the western shore of Lake Kinneret. They became refugees in the Gaza Strip, and my grandmother used to tell me about the pain of abandoning the village and the harsh winter they experienced that year in the Strip in a tent she shared with my grandfather and his sisters … Now, living with my family in a tent made of plastic and cloth in the southern Gaza Strip, I don't stop thinking about her. I'm sure that she never imagined that her granddaughter would also have to live in a displaced persons camp." B'Tselem, "Our Genocide," July 2025, https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide, 45. See also Mahmoud Mushtaha, "A Second Nakba: Israeli Attacks Are Erasing Entire Families from Gaza's Civil Registry," The New Arab, 31 October 2023, https://www.newarab.com/features/gaza-entire-families-being-wiped-out-civil-registry.

3 Rashid Khalidi, "A New Abyss: Gaza and the Hundred Years War on Palestine," The Guardian, 11 April 2024.

4 South Africa v. Israel, Application instituting proceedings and request for the indication of provisional measures, International Court of Justice, 29 December 2023, https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203394. Francesca Albanese, Anatomy of a Genocide - Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2024), https://docs.un.org/en/A/79/384.

5 Middle East Monitor, "Half a Million Join 'Nakba 77' National Demonstration in London to Demand an End to the Genocide in Gaza," 17 May 2025, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250517-half-a-million-join-nakba-77-national-demonstration-in-london-to-demand-an-end-to-the-genocide-in-gaza/

6 Chantal Da Silva, "Israel Right-Wing Ministers' Comments Add Fuel to Palestinian Fears," NBC News, 13 November 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-right-palestinian-fears-hamas-war-rcna123909.

7 Amnesty International, "You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza," 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/, 266.

8 Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, "Voices of the Genocide," August 2025, https://pchrgaza.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Voices-of-the-Genocide-EN-1.pdf, 7.

9 On the notion of a foundational past, see Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the Nakba as a foundational past, see Ahmad Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

10 Rema Hammami, "Gender, Nakba, and Nation: Palestinian Women's Presence and Absence in the Narration of 1948 Memories," in Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, ed. Jamil Hilal and Ilan Pappe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 239.

11 It is important to note that the term "second Nakba" (al-Nakba al-thaniya) is not commonly used in Arabic. This is unlike "the second intifada" (al-intifada al-thaniya) that refers to the armed uprising of 2000-2005 that followed the first intifada (1987-1993). The more common terms for the ongoing genocide are al-?Udwan ?ala Ghazza (the Aggression on Gaza), al-?arb al-Ibadiyya (The Genocidal War), and others. The reasons why intifadas (uprisings) can be sequential, whereas nabkas (catastrophes) cannot is something I will leave for linguists to solve. It is possible that when applied to a tragedy of such a scale, al-thaniya (the second) might connote "secondary," which lessens the gravity of the second Nakba vis-à-vis the first.

12 For more on the genealogy of the Nakba, see Anaheed Al-Hardan, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books, 2012); Sa'di and Abu-Lughod, Nakba.

13 Constantine Zurayq, The Meaning of the Disaster (Beirut: Khayat's College Book Cooperative, 1956), 2.

14 The humanitarian framing diluted the question of Palestine to a point of political absence. It is against this backdrop that a new wave of Palestinian nationalism would emerge, seeking to transform refugees in need of humanitarian assistance into revolutionaries fighting for self-determination. This Palestinian nationalism, which I will discuss below, would reject the humanitarian framing because it de-politicized and erased the question of Palestine. But the humanitarian framework paradoxically brought the Palestinian Nakba to a global scale. It depoliticized it as a national and colonial problem but repoliticized it as an international one by incorporating it within an emerging international refugee regime. This set in motion a trend I identify below, namely the globalization of the Nakba, though this process would require, as I show below, decades of repoliticization. On the Palestinian refugees and the emerging international refugee regime, see Francesca P. Albanese and Lex Takkenberg, Palestinian Refugees in International Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 76-83.

15 Ahmad H. Sa'di, "The Politics of 'Collaboration': Israel's Control of a National Minority and Indigenous Resistance," Holy Land Studies 4, no. 2 (2005): 8.

16 Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld Publications, 2006); Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory; Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002).

17 Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 1979), 111.

18 Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Jihane Sfeir, "Le Désastre et l'exode, al-Nakba/al-Hijra," in Territoires Palestiniens de Mémoire, ed. Nadine Picaudou (Paris, Beirut: Karthala, IFPO, 2006), 37-59.

19 For an account of this Nakba literature post 1948 in what became Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, see Refqa Abu-Remaileh's excellent digital-born project, Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature, hosted by Stanford University Press, specifically the entry "Literature under Triple Occupation Post-Nakba 1948-1967" available at: https://countryofwords.supdigital.org/periods/literature-under-triple-occupation-post-nakba/

20 Sadik al-Azm, Self-Criticism After the Defeat (London: Saqi Books, 2011).

21 Sadik al-Azm, Self-Criticism After the Defeat, 32.

22 Manar H. Makhoul, "Dispossession and Discontinuity: The Impact of the 1967 War on Palestinian Thought," Critical Inquiry 48, no. 3 (2022): 551.

23 Makhoul, Dispossession and Discontinuity, 551.

24 For more on the memory work of the PLO in its revolutionary phase, see Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

25 Cited in Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 88.

26 On the evolution of collective memory and the PLO's "discursive universes," see Al-Hardan, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities, and Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine.

27 Rosemary Sayigh, "Dis/Solving the Refugee Problem," Middle East Report 207 (1998): 19-23; Nur Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (London: Pluto Press, 2003).

28 Ilan Pappe, "Historophobia or the Enslavement of History: The Role of the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing in the Contemporary Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process," in Partisan Histories: The Past In Contemporary Global Politics, ed. Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Yehouda Shenhav, Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). Nadim Khoury, "National Narratives and the Oslo Peace Process: How Peacebuilding Paradigms Affect Conflicts over History," Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 3 (2016): 465-83.

29 Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai, Compensation to Palestinian Refugees and the Search for Palestinian-Israeli Peace (London: Pluto Press, 2013); Shahira Samy, Reparations to Palestinian Refugees: A Comparative Perspective (Oxon: Routledge, 2010); Nadim Khoury, "Transitional Justice in Palestine/Israel: Whose Justice? Which Transition?" in Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization beyond Partition (University of California Press, 2021), 153-172.

30 For an account of the commemoration of the Nakba in Palestinian media after Oslo, see Grace Wermenbol, A Tale of Two Narratives: The Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Israeli-Palestinian Battle of Memories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

31 It should be noted that some of these projects started in the 1980s. This is the case of Birzeit University's series on destroyed Palestinian villages. On the different attempts to record the testimonies of Palestinian refugees since 1948, see Rosemary Sayigh, "Oral History, Colonialist Dispossession, and the State: The Palestinian Case," Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2014): 193-204.

32 Randa Farah, "Palestinian Refugees: Dethroning the Nation at the Crowning of the 'Statelet'?" Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 2 (2006): 240.

33 For a good summary of the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, see Tom Hill, Historicity and the Nakba Commemorations of 1998, Working Paper (2005), https://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/3768; Tom Hill, "1948 After Oslo: Truth and Reconciliation in Palestinian Discourse," Mediterranean Politics 13, no. 2 (2008): 151-70.

34 Al-Hardan, Palestinians in Syria, 11.

35 The "Internally Displaced" refer to Palestinians that were forcibly expelled in 1948 but that remained within what became Israel. As such, they were "internally" rather than "externally" displaced, like their kin in Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. In the Kafkaesque legal system of the Israeli state, they are called "present absentees" because they were present in Israel but absent from their villages and towns of origin. On the internally displaced and their activism, see Wakim Wakim, "Seeking Return within One's Own Land" Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 32-38.

36 Elias Khoury, "Rethinking the Nakba," Critical Inquiry 38, no. 2 (2012): 263.

37 On the exclusion of Palestinians citizens of Israel from the Israeli public sphere, see Amal Jamal, The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

38 Nadim Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, "Memory and the Return of History in Settler-Colonial Context: The Case of the Palestinians in Israel," Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 1 (2019): 527-50.

39 Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury, "Memory and the Return of History": 18.

40 Tamir Sorek, Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendars, Monuments & Martyrs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 7. On the memory activism around the Nakba within Israel, see also Yifat Gutman, Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2017).

41 Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury, "Memory and the Return of History in Settler-Colonial Context": 2.

42 The literature on Israeli new historians is extensive, for a summary of the academic debates see Ilan Pappe, "Post-Zionist Critique on Israel and the Palestinians. Part I: The Academic Debate," Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 2 (1997): 29-41.

43 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

44 Ari Shavit, "Survival of the Fittest," Haaretz, 8 January 2004.

45 Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

46 Ilan Pappe, "Post-Zionist Critique on Israel and the Palestinians Part II: The Media," Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 3 (1997): 37-43.

47 Ilan Pappe, "Post-Zionist Critique on Israel and the Palestinians Part III: Popular Culture," Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 4 (1997): 60-69.

48 Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, "From Taboo to the Negotiable: The Israeli New Historians and the Changing Representation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem," Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 2 (2007): 241-58.

49 Anaheed al-Hardan, Palestinians in Syria, 46.

50 Once established in Western discourse, however, the concept would evolve further. Most notably, the emergence of settler colonial studies would contribute to reconceptualizing the Nakba as an ongoing structure rather than a singular event, capturing the different dynamics of Israeli settler colonialism from 1948 onwards. With the genocide in Gaza, frameworks such as settler colonialism would transcend university seminars to become part and parcel of pro-Palestine encampments and protests.

51 Erez Tadmor and Eral Segal, "Nakba Nonsense: The Booklet That Fights for the Truth," 2011, https://imti.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Nakba-Nonsense-complete-booklet.pdf.

52 Jpost Editorial, "The Jewish Nakba," The Jerusalem Post, 9 December 2015.

53 For an analysis of these strategies and especially the co-optation of the human rights discourse, see Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

54 Yehuda Shenhav-Shahrabani, "Ironically, It's the Israeli Right That's Acknowledging the Palestinian Nakba," Haaretz, 13 December 2021.

55 This paradox is well captured by Neve Gordon, "Israel Denies the Nakba While Perpetuating It," Al Jazeera, 13 May 2023.

56 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006). For a further discussion of the Holocaust and global memory, see Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan, eds., Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015).

57 Omar Shakir, "Berlin Bans Nakba Day Demonstrations: Undue Interference with Rights to Free Expression and Assembly," Human Rights Watch, 20 May 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/20/berlin-bans-nakba-day-demonstrations.

58 Rashida Tlaib, "Tlaib Introduces Resolution Recognizing 76 Years of the Nakba," Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib 12th District Strong, 15 May 2024, https://tlaib.house.gov/posts/tlaib-introduces-resolution-recognizing-76-years-of-the-nakba.

59 Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, xvi.

60 Al-Haq, "The Legal Architecture of Apartheid," https://aardi.org/2021/04/02/the-legal-architecture-of-apartheid-by-dr-susan-powers-al-haq/, 4. It should be noted that some NGOs reject the connection between the Nakba and apartheid, limiting the latter geographically to the occupied territories. This is the case of the apartheid reports by Israeli NGOs such Yesh Din and B'tselem, for example.

61 Rabea Eghbariah, "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept," Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (2024): 887-992.

62 Brett Wilkins, "Video From 2040 Begs This Question of Gaza Genocide in 2024: 'What Did You Do to Stop It?'" Common Dreams, 5 February 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-genocide-in-the-future.

63 On the standardization of memory, see Lea David, "Against Standardization of Memory," Human Rights Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2017): 296-318.