Nakba is Arabic for ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster’. 77 years ago the state of Israel was proclaimed and the massive expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the Palestine mandate area came to a peak – it will be commemorated worldwide annually on 15 May. Zionist militias chased 750,000 Palestinians from their territory between 1947 and 1949, and wiped hundreds of villages off the map. The Nakba was also commemorated in the Netherlands on Thursday, in the packed Dominicus church in Amsterdam, and on Domplein in Utrecht.
“Who already knew the word Nakba ten years ago?” Asks journalist and writer Naeeda Aurangzeb to the public in the church. Only half of the fingers goes up. While Aurangzeb speaks, but also when it is the turn of the other speakers, and when music is played, the names of Palestinians that have been killed since October 2023 sound through the space. A man with a keffiyeh around his neck reads the names from the altar. “Do you also find it so uncomfortable that those names will continue?” Aurangzeb asks the public. “While we stand here, there are dead in Gaza. Seconde after second, minute after minute.”
Is the word commemorating actually in its place? That is the common thread because of the lectures in the church that evening. “The Nakba has never stopped,” says theologian Janneke Stegeman. “We were unable to stop the genocide.” Earlier this week, Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema spoke about “genocidal violence” in Gaza. She did this as a result of the director of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which said the same in the same week earlier NRC. On Thursday, a group of prominent genocide researchers in this newspaper spoke unanimously about “genocide in Israel”.
Before the war in Gaza, in 2023, Nakba commemorations in the Netherlands were scarce and small. National media, including NRChardly paid any attention to it. On Thursday, the church bulged and the press section was full.
Khan Younis
The story of the journalist Amal Helles who fled from Khan Younis makes tangible how absurd commemoration is now. Her grandfather has kept the key of the house from which he was driven out, she says in the church. She and her husband built a house in Khan Younis, “and we believed that we would stay here forever, that the Nakba was still.” Now she also fled, while her husband, her parents and the rest of her family are stuck in Gaza. Just like her grandfather, Helles is still wearing the key to her house. But that house no longer exists. “There is only debris.”
Helles wonders how much suffering the Gazans still have to endure before the world comes to the rescue. “You have seen us die of hunger, from the thirst, of the bombs. In how many ways do we still die before it becomes clear that history is not over?”
Watermelon
In Utrecht, on Domplein, that same evening is a commemoration in the open air, followed by a march. Amina Ahmed (29) has a sign in her hand with the text ‘The Children of Gaza Are Part of Who We Are“. She is here for the children and” the people of Gaza, because it has actually been far too long enough “. Earlier she sometimes went to Palestine protests at Utrecht Central, but only recently she knows what the Nakba is.
Lucas (20, he doesn’t want his last name in the newspaper) walks over the Domplein with a large Palestinavlag. He is more often present at protests, but this year for the first time also at the Nakba commemoration. Lucas makes no illusions, his presence on a commemoration in the Netherlands will not make the difference. “I just hope that here I can give my little bit of support as a privileged white Dutchman to the people there. If they see this, on social media, they know that there are people in such a distant country.”
A little further on is a man with a keppeltje with a watermelon motif, a symbol for the Palestinian battle. In addition, there is an old couple who holds each other’s hands. Lucas thinks “the best thing there is”: the diversity of people who come to the commemoration. “Whatever you look like, whoever you are, we are all here at the end of the day with the same purpose.”