As a Palestinian born in the 21st century, I am the generational product of Nakba survivors and the trauma that came with it. As distant as it may seem, I am only two generations removed from the 1948 Catastrophe of Palestine, where over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land, and thousands were massacred. Zionist militias backed by the British Empire razed Palestinian villages, killing, raping, displacing, and imprisoning anyone they could find, all to establish the brand new settler colonial project of Israel. This single day in Palestinian history would stain the soil with blood spilled and trauma gained for decades to come.

Both sets of my grandparents are older than the state of Israel, each born a few years before the Nakba. May 14, 1948, was probably a rather normal day in my grandparents' childhood. They would have been inside their homes with their families, or playing outside like any other day. The next day, everything changed. On May 15, Zionist militias stormed their hometowns, slaughtered their neighbors, and destroyed entire villages. My grandparents' childhoods were stripped away, and their entire lives uprooted.

After the Nakba, everything changed. The people of Palestine now live under the occupation of racists who despise and dehumanize them. These foreigners decided what rights they could and couldn't have in their own homelands, and the threat of violence was always present. My great-grandfather was shot in the head by a settler. The Palestinian education system was dramatically defunded, leading my mother's parents to leave for Europe for university. When they tried to come back home after the 1967 Naksa, foreign soldiers somehow had the authority to bar them from ever entering again. They had to move to Jordan and start a new life. They were only two hours away from their families, but they didn't know if they'd ever be allowed to make the short trip back. My grandmother has only been to Palestine once since then, and my grandfather twice.

My other set of grandparents remained on the land, but now had to live a life of heavy restriction and limited movement. It's hard for me to imagine what it was like to witness the plundering of our homeland by foreign invaders, but I can never truly understand the magnitude of seeing the gradual colonization that seemed to only get worse throughout the decades. I will never forget when my grandfather, who was a bus driver back in the day, told me that he was once able to drive to Beirut or Baghdad, and then return home on the same day. Now, such an idea is unfathomable.

In 1948, a time when news traveled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that "forever" territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide.

Ever since I was old enough to comprehend things, I knew Palestine was my homeland and that it was being hurt by something called Israel. Israel was the reason my mom was born in Jordan instead of Palestine, the driving force that led my parents to move to the US for better education and work. It is the thing that separates me from the rest of my extended family, preventing me from knowing them wholly and truly. Israel is why I only see my grandparents every few years, why I have to watch my younger cousins grow up through a phone screen. As a Palestinian who grew up in the States, I was immersed in Western culture and disconnected from my own, and Israel is the reason.

This was my norm, the reality I was born into. After a while, the daily reminders of being disenfranchised, the cruelty of it all, become something you just get used to. You begin to get settled with the unsettling feeling that this may be the fortune of a Palestinian in this world: a life of displacement and diaspora, with the occasional travesty, like the previous bombing campaigns of Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014. This process of desensitization is imprinted in my generational DNA; I was practically born already accustomed to the injustice of being Palestinian.

The brutal truth was that the Nakba never ended. We all instinctively knew this, but especially after the Oslo Accords' normalization efforts, a sense of false comfort plagued the Palestinian community for the two decades following its signing. The reality before October 2023 was the occasional protest and the occasional outrage, only to be quelled by half-hearted statements of sympathetic apathy by politicians. I became involved in student organizing for Palestine in 2021, and although we were constantly working, the landscape back then was much........

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