When my grandmother, Khadija Ammar, left her her home in Beit Daras for the last time in May 1948, she embarked on a lonely trip. Even if it was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – also forced to leave behind their dear houses and their land to escape the horror unleashed by Zionist militias – there was nobody in the world looking. They were together, but totally alone. And there was no word to describe their painful experience.
Over time, the Palestinians came to refer to the events of May 1948 such as the Nakba, or the disaster. The use of the word Nakba in this context invokes the memory of another “disaster”, the holocaust. The Palestinians said it in the world: only three years after the disaster that struck the Jewish people in Europe, a new disaster – very different, but no less painful – takes place in our homeland, Palestine.
Tragically, our disaster has never ended. Seventy-seven years after the expulsion of my grandmother, we are always driven, punished and killed, for trying to live on our land with dignity or demanding that we are allowed to come back.
Because it has never really ended, commemorating the Nakba as a historical event has always been difficult. But today, a new challenge faces us when we try to understand, discuss or commemorate the Nakba: it has entered a new terrifying phase. It was no longer just a continuation of horror that started 77 years ago.
Today, the Nakba has changed in what Amnesty International described as a “live genocide”, its violence is no longer hidden in the archives or buried in the memories of the survivors. Pain, blood, fear and hunger are all visible on the screens of our devices.
As such, the word “nakba” is not appropriate or sufficient to describe what is done in my people and my homeland today. There is a need for a new language – a new terminology that describes with precision the reality of this new phase of the Palestinian disaster. We need a new word that could, hopefully, help concentrate the eyes avoided of the world on Palestine.
Many terms have been proposed for this purpose – and I have used several in my writing. These include democide, medical insurance, ecocide, culture, spacio-cide, gas-acid and scholasticide. Each of these terms undoubtedly defines an important aspect of what is happening today in Palestine.
A term that I find particularly powerful as an agademic is scholasticide. He underlines the current and systematic erasure of Palestinian knowledge. Each Gaza University has been destroyed. Ninety percent of schools have been reduced to rubble. Cultural centers and flattened museums. Teachers and students killed. The term scholasticide, invented by the brilliant academic Karma Nabulsi, describes not only the physical destruction of Palestinian educational establishments, but also the war waged on memory, imagination and the indigenous intellect itself.
Another term that I find evocative and significant is gasacid. Popularized by Ramzy Baroud, he refers to a campaign of erasure, displacement and genocide of a century targeting this specific corner of historical Palestine. The strength of this term lies in its ability to locate crime both historically and geographically, directly appointing Gaza as a central site of genocidal violence.
Although each of these terms is powerful and significant, they are too specific and therefore unable to fully capture the entire Palestinian experience in recent years. Gazacid, for example, does not include the lived realities of the Palestinians in the West Bank and in occupying Jerusalem, or those of the refugee camps in the region. Scholasticide, on the other hand, does not deal with the Israeli determination apparent to make Palestinian land habitable by their indigenous population. And none of the above -mentioned words deals with the declared intentions of Israel for Gaza: complete destruction. On May 6, the Israeli Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, said: “Gaza will be completely destroyed … and from there (civilians) will start to go in large numbers in third countries.”
As such, I offer a new term – al -Ibādah or destruction – to define this last phase of the NAKBA. The term reflects the horrible rhetoric used by Smotrich and many other Zionist fascist leaders and captures complete and systematic erasure not only in Gaza, but through historical Palestine. Al-Ibādah is sufficiently spacious to encompass several forms of targeted annihilation, including democide, doctor, ecocide, scholasticide, culture and others.
In Arabic, the expression of genocide, “al-Ibādah jamāʿiyyah” meaning “the annihilation of everyone and everything” has the word al-Ibādah as root. The term proposed al-Ibādah intentionally truncates this sentence, transforming it into a concept which means a permanent and definitive condition of destruction. Although it does not attribute a specific geographical location, it draws the conceptual force of the work of Pankaj Mishra (the world after Gaza), which maintains that the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza represents a form qualitatively distinct from genocidal violence. According to Mishra, Gaza is the first line of Western neocolonial and neoliberal projects, which seek to consolidate the world order around the ideology of white supremacy. By joining the article defined with the name, Al -Ibādah affirms this condition as a historical rupture – a moment which requires recognition as a turning point in the Palestinian experience and the global conscience.
Today, with regard to Palestine, the word “destruction” is no longer whispered. From military commanders to politicians, journalists to academics, large segments of the Israeli public now openly embrace the complete destruction of the Palestinian people as their ultimate objective.
Whole families are wiped out. Journalists, doctors, intellectuals and civil society leaders are deliberately targeted. Forced famine is used as a weapon. Parents carry their children’s body to the camera, to document the massacre. Journalists are killed in the middle of the breakage. We become the martyrs, the wounded, the witness, the chroniclers of our own destruction.
My grandmother survived the Nakba of 1948. Today, her children and more than two million Palestinians in Gaza live through even darker days: days of destruction.
My pregnant cousin Heba and his family, as well as nine of their neighbors, were killed on October 13, 2023. At that time, only a few days after October 7, dozens of families had already been erased in their entirety: the Shehab, Baroud, Abu al-Rish, Al Agha, Al Najjar, Halawa, Abu Mudain, Al-Azaize.
On October 26, 2023, 46 members of my own extended family were killed in a strike. Last summer, this issue went to 400. Then I stopped counting.
My cousin Mohammed tells me that they avoid sleep, terrified, they will not be awake in time to pull the children from the rubble. “We remain awake not because we want it, but because we must be ready to dig.” Last month, Mohammed was injured in an air strike that killed our cousin Ziyad, a social worker from UNRWA and a sister-in-law of Ziyad. Fifteen children under the age of 15 were injured in the same attack. That night, as he had done countless times in the past 18 months, Mohammed dug through the rubble to recover their bodies. He tells me that the faces of the dead visit him every night – family, friends, neighbors. During the day, he crosses an old photo album, but each image now holds a void. Not a single image remains intact by loss. At night, they come back to him – sometimes in tender dreams, but more often in nightmares.
This month, on May 7, Israeli strikes on a crowded restaurant and a market in the same street in Gaza City killed dozens of people in a few minutes. Among them, journalist Yahya Subeih, whose first child, a little girl, was born in the morning. He went to the market to obtain supplies for his wife and never returned. Her daughter will grow up her birthday the same day as her father was killed – a terrible memory engraved in a life rightly so. Noor Abdo, another journalist, has compiled a list of parents killed in this war. He sent the list to an organization of human rights on May 6. On May 7, he was added himself.
A restaurant worker who was struck spoke of an order of pizza placed by two girls. He said he had heard their conversation. “It’s expensive, very expensive,” one girl told the other. “It’s good,” she replied. “Let’s realize our dream and eat pizza before dying. No one knows. ” They laughed and ordered. Shortly after the arrival of their order, the restaurant was bombed and one of the girls was killed. The worker does not know the fate of the other. However, he said that he noticed that a single slice of their pizza had been eaten. We can only hope that the one who was killed was able to taste him.
This, all this, is al-Ibādah. It is destruction.
Faced with global inaction, we are almost helpless.
Our protests, our tears, our cries all fell into the ears of a deaf.
But we always end up with our words. And speech has power. In the Irish Play translations, which documents the linguistic destruction of the Irish language by the British army in the early 1800s, the playwright Brian Friel explains how by naming something that we give him power, we “make real”. Thus, in a last act of despair, that the commemoration of Nakba of this year is the moment when we name this thing and makes it real: al-Ibādah, destruction.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.