On May 14, around 300 Israelis and Palestinians gathered in the West Bank town of Beit Jala, along with thousands who joined online, for the sixth annual Joint Israeli-Palestinian Nakba Remembrance Ceremony, organized by Combatants for Peace.

Featuring personal testimonies and musical performances, the ceremony commemorated the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias and the nascent Israeli army expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, destroyed or depopulated over 500 Palestinian villages and urban communities, and killed at least 15,000 people, including women and children.

Photos of Palestinian refugees displayed at the entrance to the Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony in Beit Jala, the West Bank, May 14, 2025. (Combatants for Peace)

Forbidden from ever returning to their ancestral villages, Palestinians around the world began marking Nakba Day on May 15 as early as 1949. Yet in Israel, authorities suppressed any acknowledgment of the Palestinian catastrophe since the earliest days of the state — banning the term in schools, passing laws to defund institutions that commemorate it, and erasing historical records from state archives.

Over the past few years, initiatives like this ceremony have challenged that silence, in an attempt to force Jewish Israelis to confront the foundational trauma of Palestinian displacement in 1948 as the root of the ongoing injustice.

This year’s commemoration of the Nakba carries particular weight. In Gaza, Israel’s ongoing genocidal war has killed over 53,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.9 million since October 2023. In the West Bank, Palestinians are experiencing record levels of state-backed settler violence as official annexation efforts accelerate. And inside Israel, authorities have intensified the suppression of Palestinian dissent — arresting hundreds for voicing anti-war views and restricting virtually any expression of Palestinian national identity.

 ‘A departure with no return’

“I still remember the day we left our village,” said 84-year-old Abd Al-Aziz Ghatash, a Palestinian refugee from the depopulated village of Beit Jibrin, to the audience in a recorded video. “We fled through Bir Wadi al-Zanar, past [the town of] Ethna. I swear I saw it with my own eyes — bombs falling from planes, blasting ancient olive trees clean out of the earth, sending them flying through the air.”

Currently residing in the Al-Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, Ghatash described the experience of his family being expelled from their land, where his father owned 100 dunams of wheat, corn and barley fields. “Bullets flew over my head as I fled alone, after being separated from my mother and father, ” he recalled.

Ghatash soon found his parents, and they continued towards Hebron. “Along the road, I asked my father, may he rest in peace, ‘Dad, aren’t we going back?’ He said, ‘My son, this is a departure with no return,’ and he began to weep. We, the children, cried with him.

“From the very first day we left, my dream was to return to Beit Jibrin, but wherever we went, my father would say, ‘We’ll settle here, we’ll build.’ People asked him, ‘What do you mean, build? In a month or so you’ll be back in your village.’ But here we are, more than 75 years later, and they still say we’ll return to the village.

“Imagine your hometown, your homeland,” Ghatash implored, his voice wavering. “I’d pay 2000 dinars just to stand on that land and see it once again.”

84-year-old Abd Al-Aziz Ghatash addresses the crowd in a recorded video at the Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony in Beit Jala, the West Bank, May 14, 2025. (Combatants for Peace)

 ‘My conscience allowed me no other choice’

Nineteen-year-old Sophia Orr, who spent 85 days in military jail after refusing to enlist in the Israeli army, read an excerpt from “Independence 48-92” — a short essay by Israeli author S. Yizhar that details the capture and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian village of Al-Maghar, which he witnessed as a soldier in 1948.

In the 1992 essay, Yizhar describes standing on a hilltop overlooking the village he and his fellow soldiers seized, as a convoy of hundreds of Palestinians who they forced out of their homes passed before them. “One after another they moved, in a strange and overwhelming silence, bearing bundles, heading westward into the distance. Every so often, the machine gun would send a chilling burst above their heads; a crackling, unmistakable lash of a whip.

“The expulsion solved nothing — no expulsion ever does,” wrote Yizhar. “Here they are, and here we are — the expelled and the expellers.” How to resolve this situation has remained, for Yitzhar, “the most pressing question” since the day the state was founded.

For Orr, refusal to enlist in the military is part of the answer — alongside an insistence that no one will disappear from the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. “My conscience allowed me no other choice. Not before October 7, and not after,” she said. “I refused because I would not be part of a system that occupies, oppresses, and kills on a daily basis. I refused as an act of protest and resistance to this violent reality — as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people, a refusal to shut my eyes and harden my heart.”

 ‘I am a child from Gaza, and I love life’

The next speaker, appearing via video recording from Gaza, was by far the youngest: 14-year-old Dima Al-Helou. She and her family of five had lived in Gaza City’s Shuja’iiya neighborhood before the war, but have since been displaced 11 times, now sheltering in a displaced people’s camp in Al-Rimal.

In the video, Al-Helou and her father are seen rummaging through the ruins of their home, occasionally retrieving fragments of their former life, like a tattered t-shirt or a notebook. “Our house was full of peace and simplicity,” she recalled. “I loved every detail — the view from the windows, sitting in the garden, my room, the living room, the kitchen, the family gatherings.” Her words dissolved into tears. “Now, it’s all gone.”

14-year-old Dima Al-Helou from Gaza addresses the crowd in a recorded video, at the Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony in Beit Jala, the West Bank, May 14, 2025. (Combatants for Peace)

She reminisced about her life before the war. “I would wake up, get ready, and go to school to learn. I dreamed of becoming an engineer. But now, there are no schools or universities for us to study in. Everything has been destroyed.”

The night before October 7, Al-Helou and her family went to the beach, in what was to be their last peaceful moment. “That was the last time I saw the sea of Gaza.

“I want to tell you: we are here to stay, holding on to our land, ‘the land of steadfastness,’” Al-Helou told the audience. “And to children everywhere, I want to say: we are just like you. We want to live our lives. We love life. We want to play. But the Zionist occupation denies us these rights.

“I love you all, remember me,” she added. “I am a child from Gaza, and I love life.”

 ‘We must not give in to despair’

“The war [in Gaza] reminds us that the Nakba, which we commemorate here today, is not a closed chapter. It is an ongoing process of erasure, of displacement, of denial of existence,” said Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai in his opening remarks. “Every bomb that falls on a home in Gaza, every terse evacuation notice, every satellite image showing the destruction of the Strip and the moving tent cities within it echo that same process.”

For nearly a year and a half, Mordechai has been compiling an ever-growing database of evidence documenting the war crimes Israel is openly and proudly committing in Gaza. Yet despite these horrors, Mordechai insisted that “we must choose to act and not give in to despair.” This, he said, “is what the people of Gaza teach us through their human insistence on clinging to life.

Historian Lee Mordechai addresses the crowd at the Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony in Beit Jala, the West Bank, May 14, 2025. (Combatants for Peace)

“The doctors who insist on staying in bombed hospitals to do good for their patients; the paramedics and civil defense teams, who continue to serve their communities despite the dangers, rescuing and aiding the wounded and those buried beneath the rubble; the journalists who continue to document and share their reality with the world, even though so many of their colleagues have already been killed; and the children of Gaza, who have been forced to endure terrible experiences of destruction and loss but still play, dance, and sing.”

Mordechai closed his remarks by quoting Palestinian doctor Ezzideen Shehab, who currently shelters in Jabalia, north of Gaza City, and continues to treat those in need.

“So why do I write?

I write because silence is a slow erasure.

I write to stitch our stories into the fabric of time.

I write because somewhere, someone had everything — security, peace, the mundane luxuries of a future — and someone else, through no fault of their own, had nothing.

I write to remind you that life is not always fair, but you can be.

And maybe one day, in the future, you will find yourself in a position of power.

And you will remember.

Not our sorrow, but our memory.

That is all I ask.

That you remember.”

Israelis and Palestinians attend the 6^th annual Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony in Beit Jala, the West Bank, May 14, 2025. (Combatants for Peace)

 ‘Now it is my turn to witness the Nakba of my people’

The final speaker at the ceremony was the scholar and activist Dr. Thaabet Abu Rass, who formerly directed the “Abraham Initiatives,” an NGO dedicated to fostering Jewish-Arab equality and partnership. A Palestinian citizen of Israel, Abu Rass told the audience how his mother hid his family’s ties to Gaza from them. In 1945, as a young bride, she had left her village of Hirbiya in northern Gaza to marry Abu Rass’s father in Qalansuwa in central Israel, where they lived under military rule until 1966, raising 14 children.

After Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, Abu Rass’s family traveled there in hope of reuniting with their relatives. What they found was devastating: his mother’s parents and three brothers had died during the fighting in 1948, and his uncle Hussein was killed a few months after the family’s displacement while trying to return to Hirbiya to retrieve some of their belongings. On that trip, Abu Rass’s mother stood amid the ruins of her village, now erased, replaced by the Israeli Kibbutzim of Zikim and Karmia.

“Since 1956, Israel has attacked and occupied Gaza 11 times, but this time is the worst of all,” Abu Rass said. “My 84-year-old aunt, Umm Fayez, witnessed the first Nakba in 1948. She is witnessing it again now.”

Fayez, who is ill, was forced to flee from her home in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza to Khan Younis in the south. She was able to briefly return home during the ceasefire in January, only to find her family’s homes reduced to rubble.

“Now it is my turn, after my mother, to witness the Nakba of my people,” Abu Rass, who lost 31 family members in the war so far, told the audience. “I am a man of fractured identity, Palestinian-Israeli, watching from a distance — just an hour and fifteen away from my aunt — unable to provide her even a bag of flour.”

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman

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