Nakba Quotes

“Just as the ripples of a stone thrown into a pond will spread further and further away from the source, so the ripples of the disaster in 1948 hit my parents first and then spread to us and to our children long afterwards. Seeing only the ripples, it was easy to confuse the original cause with its effects.”
― Ghada Karmi, Return: A Palestinian Memoir

“The single most important thread of Palestinian identity and collective memory is the nakba—the tragedy that happened to the Palestinians with the birth of Israel. Keeping the memory of pre-1948 Palestine has been the fuel that crystalized Palestinians into a nation.”
― Gershon Baskin, In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine

“The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings.”
― I. Pappe

“But beyond numbers, it is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case of Palestine. It is indeed hard to understand, and for that matter to explain, why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present, should have been so totally ignored.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Everybody shivered. All over the camp, the emaciated dogs died. Every day had a thousand and one wrinkles and a thousand and one knots. The men looked for employment, for food. They avoided the police, who were implicating Palestinians in everything from inflation and communist plots to cold spells. And once every month they lined up, as if in a funeral procession, to receive their UNRWA rations of flour, powdered milk, and dates. The rations lasted a week. Then people ate words. The words led to orange groves in Jaffa, to olive trees in Tershiha, to cloudless summers in Haifa. And back again to Bourj el Barajneh.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“Besides their trauma, the deepest form of frustration for Palestinians has been that the criminal act these men were responsible for has been so thoroughly denied, and that Palestinian suffering has been so totally ignored, ever since 1948.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Imagine that not so long ago, in any given country you are familiar with, half of the entire population had been forcibly expelled within a year, half of its villages and towns wiped out, leaving behind only rubble and stones. Imagine now the possibility that somehow this act will never make it into the history books and that all diplomatic efforts to solve the conflict that erupted in that country will totally sideline, if not ignore, this catastrophic event.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“This is perhaps the ultimate key to interpreting the consent of Western countries to the obliteration of Gaza: atonement by proxy for their participation in the genocide of European Jews, even if it means allowing a second Nakba to be inflicted on a population whose sacrifice the world had already accepted.”
― Didier Fassin, Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza