CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

On the Fifty-Ninth Year of the Naksa

Israeli soldiers expelling the residents of Imwas – Public Domain

On June 5, 1967, over six days, some three hundred thousand Palestinians were driven from the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. For roughly half of them it was a second expulsion in under twenty years. The official account calls it a war Israel had no choice but to fight. Menachem Begin admitted otherwise: the Egyptian troop movements, he said, “do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us,” and Israel chose to strike first. What the war secured was the territory Israel still occupies today. Palestinians called that June the Naksa, the setback. Fifty-nine years later, it is not something we look back on but something we still live inside — what Mahmoud Darwish called an extended present.

We write as Palestinian mental health professionals, in Palestine and in the shatāt. We know from our work that dispossession is never only a matter of borders and demography. It is a wound to the psyche, to a person’s sense of who they are and where they belong. Forced displacement does not end when the trucks stop. It lives on in the body, in the family, and in the children of the people it first uprooted.

And the harm is deliberate. What the Zionist entity pursues is not only land but the murder of the Palestinian soul, the slow unmaking of a people’s inner life. In the prisons, the United Nations Secretary-General’s report on conflict-related sexual violence verified rape and genital violence against Palestinian men, women, and children in Israeli custody, and for the first time listed Israel’s forces among those credibly suspected of such crimes. Inside the lands taken in 1948, Palestinian citizens of Israel face the same logic: Bedouin homes demolished by the thousand in the Naqab, people arrested over a post or a protest, grief and solidarity treated as offenses. To live through all of this and then be told your suffering cannot even be spoken is an injury in itself. Our profession has no right to watch it in silence.

The setback that has not ended

This week the clearest case is Lebanon. Israel signed a ceasefire and then used it as cover for war. After thousands of violations of the November 2024 truce, it opened a new assault in late February that has killed more than three thousand four hundred people and emptied cities across the south. Its forces have crossed the Litani, taken Beaufort Castle, and pushed north, and the bombing continues as we write. Many of those under the bombs are the refugees of 1948 and 1967 living in the camps of the south, displaced once more from the very places they had fled to. One of our sister networks works there,........

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