On May 15, we mark the Nakba, the catastrophe that was inflicted upon the Palestinian people by Zionist militias and the nascent Israeli army. Over 750,000 people were violently expelled and forced to flee from their lands, over 530 villages were destroyed, and entire communities were massacred and destroyed by Zionists.
That catastrophe has resulted in 77 years of ongoing ethnic cleansing, dispossession and dehumanization, and now 19 months of genocide.
From its inception, Zionism has been a settler-colonial project premised on the erasure of Palestinians.
In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, who would later become Israel’s first Prime Minister, wrote, “We must expel Arabs and take their places.” Three years later, Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund declared, “There is no room for both peoples in this country… not one village, not one tribe should be left.”
These statements reflect a core belief of Zionist ideology: that Palestinians must be expelled from their ancestral lands, in order to make way for colonial occupation.
The violence that began in 1947-48 has never stopped. It continues in the mass starvation and bombardment of Gaza. In the armed settler violence and military incursions in the West Bank.
Since October 2023, at least 62,600 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 17,800 children. Half a million now face what the World Health Organization calls “catastrophic hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness, and death.” Since Israel began blocking aid to Gaza in March, at least 57 children have died of starvation, a number expected to continue rising.
In the midst of all this, Canada refuses to take any meaningful action, maintaining trade as well as military and diplomatic support for Israel.
As Israel commits genocide in full view of the entire world, Canada’s complicity is undeniable—and unforgivable.
Yet, resistance endures. For 77 years, Palestinians have refused to be erased by Zionism.
In the face of settler violence and forced displacement, Palestine survives. It lives with those surviving genocide in Gaza, resisting settler encroachment in the West Bank, in the defiance of students demanding justice, in the relentless organizing of diasporic communities, in the heartbreak and hope of every refugee who remembers the name of their village.
This Nakba Day, as Israel celebrates its “independence,” we remember the truth: that Israel’s existence was born through violent dispossession and is maintained today through overwhelming military violence. That a lie about “a land without a people for a people without a land” was used to justify a catastrophe that never ended.
This Nakba Day, we remember. We mourn, and we resist. We demand an end to genocide, apartheid, and the ongoing catastrophes of Zionism.