05/15/2026
Today marks the 78th commemoration of the Nakba.
The Nakba was not simply “displacement.” It was a campaign of dispossession, expulsion, village destruction, and massacres carried out to remove Palestinians from their land.
Deir Yassin was not an exception. It became one of the clearest names attached to the violence of 1948, alongside other massacres and expulsions that emptied Palestinian towns and villages. Palestinians were killed, driven out, and prevented from returning. The United Nations describes the Nakba as the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 war.
And the Nakba did not end in 1948.
It continues through occupation, siege, settlement expansion, home demolitions, forced displacement, imprisonment, exile, and the denial of return.
But Palestinians were never erased.
They carried the names of their villages.
They kept the keys.
They preserved the deeds.
They stitched the patterns.
They planted again.
They taught their children where they came from.
They wore the kufiya as memory, identity, and refusal.
To commemorate the Nakba is not only to mourn what was taken.
It is to name the massacres.
It is to name the ethnic cleansing.
It is to name the ongoing theft of land.
It is to stand with the living resistance of a people who refuse disappearance.
Palestine is not a memory.
Palestine is a homeland.
Return is not a dream.
Return is a right.
We remember. We resist. We return.
