The Nakba Was Not a Setback. It Was a Blueprint. And It Never Ended. |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
The Nakba Was Not a Setback. It Was a Blueprint. And It Never Ended.
Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
I was seven years old in Amman, Jordan, when the Naksa broke through our television screen. I had just finished second grade. I didn’t yet have the words — occupation, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing — but I had my grandparents’ stories. The forced departure of 1948. The iron key to a house they never saw again. The certainty, unshakeable as faith, that they would return in a week. A week became 78 years.
That is the first thing you need to understand about the Naksa: it did not come from nowhere, and it did not end in 1967. It was the second chapter of a catastrophe that began in 1948 and has never stopped accelerating. Today, as we mark 59 years since the June War, we are watching its latest chapter unfold in real time — not through grainy newsreel footage, but in live streams, percentage points, and body counts that the world has learned to scroll past.
We cannot afford to scroll past.
What the Naksa Actually Was
The Six-Day War gave Israel control over the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights — roughly 20,000 square kilometers, three times what it controlled after 1948. For the Israeli state, this was military triumph. For Palestinians, it was a land theft with body counts attached.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics puts Arab casualties between 15,000 and 25,000 killed, 45,000 injured, and 300,000 Palestinians displaced — most of them pushed into Jordan. Israeli losses: 650–800 killed, 2,000 injured. That asymmetry is not a footnote. It is the story. One side had a modern military and an expansionist project. The other side was a population being removed from its land.¹
East Jerusalem was occupied and annexed in everything but official language. For the first time, Israel controlled what it calls ‘Greater Jerusalem.’ From that moment, the settlement enterprise launched — first in the West Bank and Gaza, then everywhere, consuming land, water, and the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian life.
Do not call it a setback. Call it what it was: a deepening of the Nakba, executed in six days, still unfolding now.
The Occupation Did Not Freeze. It Compounded.
The timeline of ‘peace processes’ that followed the Naksa is, on inspection, a timeline of Palestinian losses wearing the costume of diplomacy. The 1979 withdrawal from Sinai happened not because Israel developed a conscience, but because Egypt’s military made continued occupation expensive. The 1994 Wadi Araba treaty with Jordan normalized relations while solving nothing for Palestinians. The 2005 ‘withdrawal’ from Gaza kept every border, airspace corridor, and sea lane under Israeli control. That was not liberation. That was the transformation of occupation into a siege.
The numbers speak without euphemism. By the end of 2020, there were 471 Israeli colonial sites and military bases in the West Bank — 151 settlements, 150 outposts, 170 other installations — housing 712,815 settlers growing at 3.6 percent annually. For every 100 Palestinians in the West Bank, there are 23 settlers. In Jerusalem: 71 settlers per 100 Palestinians.²
Israel directly controls 76 percent of........