Today we mark the Nakba, the ‘catastrophe’, and remember the more than 750,000 Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homeland in 1948, some 530 villages destroyed and the families forced to live in an exile that has never ended. For many families, their only ties to home and hope of return are now their house keys, which they hold on to.
Seventy-eight years later, almost six million Palestinians remain registered as refugees. The Nakba was never a single date in history. It is a continuing reality, sustained through occupation, siege and the denial of return.
We mark this day amid profound grief. In Gaza, the Israeli government has killed over 72,000 Palestinians in what we and the overwhelming body of international opinion recognise as an ongoing genocide. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settler attacks have reached their highest levels in two decades, driving Palestinian families from land they have owned and farmed for generations. The catastrophe of 1948 and the catastrophe of today are the same story, told without interruption.
We stand with Palestinians and advocates for Palestine rights and freedoms globally who are suffering an array of attacks, and particularly with our 71 members across the Occupied Palestinian Territory, individuals and organisations who are carrying on the work of civil society under conditions few others will ever face.
Palestinian civil society is among the most besieged in the world. The CIVICUS Monitor, our research partnership that tracks the conditions for civil society around the world, rates civic space in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as closed, its lowest category, and last year downgraded Israel to repressed. Palestinians live under an entrenched system of apartheid: a new death penalty law in practice only applies to them, while restrictive NGO registration rules, limits on the most basic financial transactions and much more have all been built to shut Palestinian civil society down. For 78 years of resistance, Palestinians have kept civil society alive in defiance.
As the CIVICUS Monitor records Israel’s regression, and as global opinion turns against its wars, we pause to remember the Palestinians who have lost, and continue to lose, everything, and whose humanity is still often denied. To remember the Nakba is to insist that this history be acknowledged honestly, and that the rights of those displaced, including the right of return under international law, are respected and fulfilled.
Remembrance alone is not enough. We call on governments to uphold international law, protect Palestinian civil society from the laws designed to silence it and end the impunity that has allowed Israeli policies of apartheid and displacement to continue for 78 years. And we ask everyone who believes in that work to join us. CIVICUS membership is free and open to all who are committed to civil society, and every member strengthens a global alliance that stands with Palestinians and with all who defend civic space. Stand alongside our 71 members in Palestine by becoming one of us.
We remember. We will continue to remember and advocate for justice.
