Nakba Day

Nakba Day falls on 15 May, the day after the date on which Israel declared its establishment in 1948. Palestinians had marked it informally since 1949, but it became a national observance for the fiftieth anniversary. The clearest contemporary record of that moment is not a proclamation but a letter: on 15 May 1998 the chairman of the Arab Group at the United Nations wrote to the Secretary-General and the President of the Security Council to report that “today, 15 May 1998, the Arab world commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of al-nakba (the catastrophe), the dispossession of the Palestinian people and the uprooting of over 750,000 Palestinians from their land and homes.” The same letter records what happened during that first mass commemoration: nine Palestinians killed by the Israeli army, and hundreds injured. The document is filed as A/52/906–S/1998/400.

Inside Israel the day is kept by walking. Each year the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced Persons organises the March of Return to the site of a different Palestinian village depopulated in 1948, timed to Israel’s Independence Day. In 2004 — the seventh of these marches — the destination was Endor, southeast of Nazareth, where all that remains are the walls of seventy-five houses; the village had some 620 Palestinian inhabitants who owned 10,414 dunums of land. BADIL, the Bethlehem-based resource centre for refugee and residency rights, notes the figure that gives the march its constituency: more than 260,000 internally displaced Palestinians and their descendants live inside Israel as citizens, unable to return to villages a short drive away. More than five hundred Palestinian villages and towns were emptied in 1948.

The observance reached the United Nations itself in 2022. General Assembly resolution 77/23, adopted on 30 November of that year, mandated a commemoration of the Nakba — the first in the organisation’s history. It was held at UN Headquarters in New York on 15 May 2023, presided over by the chair of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Ambassador Cheikh Niang, with a keynote by the President of the State of Palestine. In the evening the General Assembly Hall itself was given over to a commemorative event built from music, photographs and personal testimony, including a performance by the Palestinian singer Sanaa Moussa and a composition on the Nakba by the cellist Naseem Alatrash with the New York Arabic Orchestra.

What is actually done on the day is small and repetitive, which is the point. Names of villages are read. Keys are carried — the keys of return that families kept when they locked their doors in 1948 expecting to be back within weeks. Elderly people are recorded while there is still time to record them. The commemoration is not a memorial in the ordinary sense, because a memorial marks something concluded; the Nakba is treated by Palestinians as a process that did not stop in 1949, and the day is the annual audit of it. The archive’s account of the events themselves is at the Nakba.

Sources

• Identical letters dated 15 May 1998 from the Permanent Representative of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations, A/52/906–S/1998/400 — UN Question of Palestine
• Commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba at UN Headquarters in New York — UN Question of Palestine
• Internally displaced Palestinians commemorate 1948 Nakba by visit to destroyed village with 3,000-year history — BADIL Resource Center, 20 April 2004