AS Israel marks its 78th anniversary on 14th May, Palestinians across the world will mourn 78 years of the Nakba the catastrophe that began on 15th May 1948 with the mass displacement of their people. The painful symbolism is impossible to ignore: Israel’s Independence Day and the Palestinian Nakba are two sides of the same historical moment. For one people, it signifies statehood and national rebirth. For the other, it marks dispossession, exile, and an unfinished struggle for justice. It marked the displacement of over 700,000 people and the loss of their homeland.
The coincidence of these anniversaries is not accidental. The creation of Israel in 1948 was inseparable from the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and the forced displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians. Historical records show that over 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated or destroyed during the war surrounding Israel’s establishment. Palestinians who fled or were expelled were never allowed to return, despite repeated United Nations resolutions affirming their rights.
Back then, the United Nations, very much a colonial construct had unjustly divided the land under pressure under Western pressure. Approximately 55–56% of the land (about 15,264 sq. km) went to Israel. Arab State (Palestine) was allotted 42–44% of the land (about 11,592 sq. km). An International Zone – The remaining 1% (comprising Jerusalem and Bethlehem) was to be placed under international administration. The ongoing Nakba cannot be understood without acknowledging this foundational wound.
In November 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, proposing the partition of Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Although Jewish leaders accepted the plan, Arab leaders rejected it, arguing that it unfairly allocated a majority of the land to the Jewish population, which was then a demographic minority. The subsequent war transformed partition into a catastrophe. By 1949, Israel controlled far more territory than originally allocated under the UN plan.
What Palestinians call the Nakba did not end in 1948. It evolved into a continuous process of occupation, settlement expansion, displacement, and fragmentation that continues today.
Over the last 78 years, Palestinians have endured repeated wars, uprisings, invasions, sieges, and military operations. Major conflicts include the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the First and Second Intifadas, and multiple devastating wars on the Gaza Strip in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and most catastrophically since October 2023.
The human cost has been staggering.
Historians estimate that tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed in the early decades of the conflict between 1948 and the late 20th century. Since 2000 alone, the death toll has sharply escalated. During the Second Intifada, thousands of Palestinians and Israelis lost their lives. In Gaza, repeated Israeli military offensives have killed large numbers of civilians, including women and children, while devastating infrastructure and displacing entire communities.
The current war in Gaza has produced destruction on a scale unprecedented in modern Palestinian history. International agencies and humanitarian organizations estimate that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, with many more injured, displaced, or missing beneath the rubble. Entire neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, refugee camps, universities, and civilian infrastructure have been destroyed. Hunger and disease now stalk much of Gaza’s population.
Behind these horrifying numbers lies a broader political reality: Gaza itself became a symbol of confinement long before the current war.
In 2005, Israel withdrew its settlements and military bases from Gaza under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan. Many internationally hoped this would open the path toward Palestinian self-governance and eventual peace. Instead, after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel – with Egyptian cooperation on parts of the border – imposed a sweeping blockade on the territory.
Since then, Gaza has often been described by human rights observers as an “open-air prison” or “caged enclave.” More than two million Palestinians have lived under severe restrictions on movement, trade, fishing zones, imports, exports, electricity, and access to essential services. Generations of young Palestinians grew up isolated from the outside world, trapped between blockade, poverty, unemployment, and recurring bombardment.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli settlements expanded relentlessly. Large areas of Palestinian land were confiscated for settlements, bypass roads, military zones, and infrastructure projects. International law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, considers these settlements illegal, though successive Israeli governments have continued to support or tolerate their growth.
For many Palestinians, the issue is no longer merely occupation, but the steady erosion of the possibility of a viable Palestinian state.
This concern has intensified under the current Israeli leadership. Critics argue that policies pursued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition increasingly align with visions associated with the “Greater Israel” project — an ideological aspiration envisioning Israeli sovereignty over extensive biblical territories. While interpretations vary, Palestinians and many regional observers see settlement expansion, de facto annexation of West Bank territory, and permanent military control as evidence that the occupation is becoming irreversible.
Some extremist currents within Israeli politics openly advocate annexation of all or large parts of the West Bank, rejection of Palestinian statehood, and demographic engineering favouring permanent Jewish supremacy over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The war has also spread beyond Palestine itself. Israeli military operations and strikes in southern Lebanon have intensified tensions with Hezbollah, raising fears of wider regional escalation. Lebanon, which already endured devastating Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982, again faces instability and destruction along its southern border.
At the same time, Israel insists that its actions are driven by security imperatives — particularly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, which killed Israeli civilians and shattered public confidence in national security. Israeli society remains deeply shaped by historical trauma, especially the Holocaust and decades of regional hostility. These fears are real and cannot simply be dismissed.
Yet security cannot indefinitely substitute for justice.
No military power, however technologically advanced, can permanently extinguish a people’s national aspirations. The continued occupation, blockade, settlement expansion, and repeated wars have not produced peace or stability. Instead, they have deepened cycles of fear, hatred, radicalisation, and grief on all sides.
Seventy-eight years later, Israel remains militarily powerful but politically unsettled. Palestinians remain dispossessed yet unbroken in their demand for dignity and self-determination.
The tragedy of this conflict is that two peoples remain imprisoned by competing historical traumas — one shaped by centuries of antisemitic persecution culminating in the Holocaust, the other by dispossession, occupation, and statelessness.
But history also teaches that peace built on permanent inequality rarely endures. No one else puts it as powerfully as Edward Said:“Humanism is the only, and I would go so far as saying the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
The coincidence of Israel’s 78th birthday and Palestine’s 78 years of Nakba is therefore more than symbolic. It is a reminder that the birth of one nation remains inseparable from the unresolved suffering of another. Until both peoples can live with equal dignity, rights, freedom, and security, the conflict will continue to haunt not only the region but the conscience of the world.
The path forward cannot lie in fantasies of permanent domination or territorial expansion. The idea of a “Greater Israel” – whether pursued openly through annexation or incrementally through settlements, military occupation, and demographic control — offers neither peace nor long-term security. Empires and expansionist projects may achieve temporary victories through force, but history repeatedly shows that they eventually collapse under the weight of resistance, moral contradiction, and international isolation.
If Israel truly seeks legitimacy, security, and acceptance within the region, it must abandon any vision rooted in endless expansion and supremacy over other people. Peace cannot emerge from the permanent subjugation of Palestinians, nor from reducing an entire population to displacement, siege, and fragmented enclaves.
Likewise, the international community must stop treating Palestinian rights as negotiable or secondary to geopolitical convenience. Justice cannot remain selective. Human rights cannot apply differently depending on who violates them.
Seventy-eight years after the Nakba began, the choice facing the region is becoming starkly clear: coexistence based on equality and international law, or perpetual war sustained by occupation and fear.
The future will not be secured by a Greater Israel. It will only be secured when Israelis and Palestinians alike can live as equals – with dignity, freedom, and humanity recognised on both sides of history.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
