When European Jewish settlers embarked on brutal ethnic cleansing to establish Israel in 1948, they thought the Palestinian population would be the least of their problems. In fact, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion believed that “the refugee problem would resolve itself”.
There was deep-seated conviction among Zionists that the Palestinians lacked an identity, and they would just flee to neighbouring Arab countries and assimilate. They would not come back to claim their stolen land.
But what happened was the exact opposite.
Decade after decade, the Palestinian national cause grew stronger. Today, few survivors of the Nakba of 1948 remain, but the national commitment to Palestinian rights and historical justice is as strong as ever. That is because the older generations did not teach the younger ones to forget the trauma and move on; they taught them to remember and to keep the keys to their ancestral homes in their minds.
The “refugee problem” did not “resolve itself” not just because of Palestinian determination and resilience, but also because the Israeli policies of violence and dispossession backfired.
Israel’s theft of land and resources and violent displacement of Palestinians was the starting point for every Palestinian generation to reject and resist occupation.
As Israel succeeded in usurping more and more Palestinian land, it failed miserably in controlling the Palestinian consciousness.
Despite continuous Israeli efforts to turn refugee camps into isolated enclaves, recruit agents and collaborators to undermine unity, and introduce international bodies to redefine the refugee issue as a purely humanitarian one, it failed to dismantle the Palestinian national cause.
Those who were dispossessed and violated – the Palestinian refugees – became the most ardent carriers of the idea of resistance. Refugee camps became the centres of peaceful and armed struggle. These camps gave birth to prominent Palestinian thinkers, doctors, educators and leaders, who spread one message: the rejection of the Israeli occupation and the insistence on Palestinian rights.
Palestinian refugees were the drivers of the first Intifada of 1987 and the second Intifada of 2000. They were at the centre of any subsequent mobilisation to resist the Israeli occupation.
The colonial project saw no option but to ratchet up its brutality. Repeated massacres, mass imprisonment and relentless efforts to uproot communities did not achieve subjugation. This approach failed and the Gaza Strip – where 80 percent of the population are refugees – stands as the clearest evidence of that failure.
After the launch of its genocidal assault on Gaza in October 2023, the Israeli government repeatedly described the war as “existential”. If Israel itself acknowledges today that the fourth generation of Palestinians, the descendants of the survivors of the Nakba, represent a threat to its existence, then this is in itself an admission of the collapse of Ben-Gurion’s prediction and the strategic failure of the Israeli project to eliminate the Palestinian people.
But Israel has not just failed, it has also become trapped. It is stuck in the paradox of the futility of its own brutal power. The more violence, mass killings and displacement it carries out and the more it reproduces the Nakba, the more determined the Palestinian people become to resist. Repression is not uprooting Palestine, it is helping it take deeper root.
The Gaza genocide is perhaps the best illustration of this deadly paradox. More than 72,000 Palestinians have been massacred, more than 170,000 injured, and 1.9 million displaced. Most homes have been damaged or destroyed.
What is the result of all this? When a Palestinian child is born today in a tent and grows up without most of his family, without a school, a playground, proper healthcare, or a home, he or she won’t need a complex historical narrative to understand who is responsible for this and what needs to be done to achieve justice.
But the self-defeating impact of Israeli brutality is not limited to Palestine alone. Israel’s genocide has backfired on a global scale. It has allowed the Palestinian cause to grow beyond the confines of a marginal, left-wing issue into one that increasingly attracts attention across the political spectrum in the West but also elsewhere in the world.
Activists and ordinary citizens of different political convictions now stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Many do so, despite facing retribution, arrest and prosecution for their support of Palestinian rights.
The Palestinian cause has also become an influential factor in local elections in many countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, where support for the Israeli occupation and genocide can cost candidates an electoral win.
As a result, the Palestinian issue has grown beyond a regional struggle to become a defining moral question for people across the world.
This has left the occupation locked in a permanent confrontation with what cannot be defeated: memory. The more it tries to erase the Palestinian cause, the more it is etched in the Palestinian and global consciousness.
If he had been alive today, Ben-Gurion would have been dismayed to learn that Zionism secured its own defeat the moment it embarked on the Nakba.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
