The Nakba is ongoing

Posted: 24th April 2026

“What is happening today has a direct connection with what happened then, and it is an ongoing Nakba. And people are continuing to be displaced, dispossessed and essentially murdered for the same reasons that they were back in 1948.” Aimee Shalan, Chair of British Palestinian Committee

Please watch and share Aimee’s story, in the video linked below.

The 1948 Nakba is central to modern Palestinian history but as Aimee Shalan points out, it is not remote or separate from the struggle for freedom and justice today – it is an integral part of the present trauma.  

On May 15 each year we observe Nakba Day. In Arabic it is called ذكرى النكبة, or Ḏikrā an-Nakba, which means ‘Memory of the Catastrophe’. Holding onto that memory is not just symbolic or passive, it is crucial to both understanding the Palestinian cause and acting in solidarity with it.  

That’s why over the last few years we’ve produced short videos called “Nakba Stories” featuring British Palestinians recounting their experiences of the Nakba. Of course, in this brief form we are just scratching the surface of these lifetime events, but even so they have great value in helping a wider audience understand and feel something of this immense historic disruption to the lives of Palestinians.

The first Nakba Story we made was with Ghada Karmi, the prominent academic, physician and author.

As a young child living in Jerusalem, Ghada directly experienced the events of 1948. She remembers the day a big hotel in the road behind her family home was blown up by Jewish militias, killing many people.  She describes the random and increasing violence that threatened her family and created “a climate of not only fear, but terror!” By April 1948 they were forced to flee for their lives. Hearing her vivid testimony transports us back in time but also has searing echoes of the present persecution of Palestinians across historic Palestine. As she says,  

“Israel behaved in a way which was inhumane, which was extremely cruel, and stole a country from its rightful owners.”

Aimee Shalan’s father was 17 in 1948. He was forced to flee to Lebanon before coming to London in the 1950s to work for the BBC Arabic service. Even as an Anglophile and successful broadcaster, he still carried the trauma of the Nakba. As Aimee says,  

“Nobody recovers from not being able to return to their homeland. That’s a deep, destructive wrench that has happened to that generation but has also passed its way down through families ..that have lived their entire lives in exile.”

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the renowned surgeon, gave us our third Nakba Story.  He says  

“I think very little of the decisions that I made about my life, both personal and professional, were not in some way related to that event.”

His father was forced to flee his village of Ma’in Abu Sitta in 1948 and found refuge in Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His father qualified as a doctor in Egypt before returning to Khan Younis to practice in the UNWRA clinic. Ghassan too went to Gaza to provide medical assistance at the outset of the genocide in October 2023. He was working at Al-Ahli hospital when it was first attacked by the Israeli military, a harbinger of the blatant attempt to destroy the entire health service that came after. He says,

“Now that we’re witnessing this evolution of the Nakba from elimination by exclusion, deportation, ethnic cleansing, separation into elimination through genocide, it’s almost that we’re re-living that Nakba and that what .. is happening now is a continuum that started in ’48.”

It is 78 years since the Nakba, but it is also 78 years of Nakba. Now more than ever we see that the history of Israel is one of ever-increasing colonisation, a refusal to accept the humanity and equal rights of Palestinians, and a willingness to eradicate those that refuse to be subjugated. The Palestinian slogan of “Exist, resist, return” speaks to this moment, as it has done since 1948. As Ghada Karmi says,

“No I don’t accept that I will never return. I don’t. Palestinians in general have the same view. Because if we believe that, then it means we’ve given up on our history, we’ve given up on fighting injustice. We can’t possibly do that.”  

We in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign can also never give up. History can and will bend towards justice for Palestine if we can apply enough pressure over enough time. I’ll see you on the streets in London on Saturday May 16. Free Palestine!

In solidarity,  

Bhavesh Hindocha,

PSC Media Officer

P.S. As part of our Nakba commemoration week, join us on Thursday 14 May at the Troxy in London with Health Workers for Palestine and Marsm. It will be an inspiring music evening of music, comedy and culture centring Palestinian artists.

Don’t miss what will be an important night to celebrate Palestinian cultural resistance - get your tickets early today.