Nakba

A groundbreaking, urgent, and twice-censored argument for the adoption of nakba as a legal term to fully comprehend the crimes wrought on Palestine

The act of naming has always been an indispensable tool to make injustice visible. Our lexicon has continually evolved to reflect the gravest crimes of our time. Genocide, apartheid. But there is still no single, analytically precise, and internationally recognized term to describe the Palestinian condition under Zionism. We apply existing language. We call it occupation, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing. These are all accurate, but they describe fragments of a crime left unnamed.

Palestinians have a name for their experience: nakba. Meaning catastrophe, the term nakba had circulated in Arabic for generations as a signifier for all kinds of devastation, from earthquakes to massacres. But after 1948—when Zionist militias uprooted Palestinians from more than 530 cities, towns, and villages through a campaign of mass expulsion and killing—the word became a proper noun: the Nakba.

Tracing the history of Palestine from the birth of Zionism to the present, legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah argues that the Nakba is neither a single event nor merely a historical process. It is an ongoing crime, sustained through dispersal and fragmentation, and carried out in order to dispossess a people of their homeland and replace them with a settler society. It is by establishing comprehensive language for this particular injustice, by naming the crime of nakba, that we might open the door to redress.