Join the demonstration in Manchester on Saturday 16th May at 12pm, Piccadilly Gardens, to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Nakba.
This week marks 78 years since the Nakba, which translates to the “catastrophe”. On 15th May 1948, settler-colonial Israel conducted a violent mass expulsion of over 750,000 of Palestinians from their lands.
The political putridity of Zionism since its inception in the late 19th century has led calculatedly to the Nakba and the atrocities of the present day. To shredded corpses and mangled limbs, to 948 days of genocide in Gaza amongst 78 years of ethnic cleansing, to over a century of foreign colonisation.
Palestinians have endured unfathomable suffering. Over 75,000 documented martyrs have been murdered since October 2023 in Gaza. Almost 10,000 Palestinians remain detained as political prisoners in Israeli cells. Millions of Palestinians remain in the diaspora, denied the right of return to their homeland.
Above all, however, what we have seen time and time again, is defiance. Resistance moulded and fortified from within the fire which burns within Palestinians who have sacrificed and continue to sacrifice in the name of liberation.
Here in Britain, our recognition and remembrance of Palestinian days of catastrophe brings with it an air of colonial disregard, of an imperialist system that protects and preserves only those which lines its pockets.
Ghassan Kanafani described the colonisation of Palestine not as an isolated event, but an imperialist project. One which concerns all of us, and every revolutionary, wherever they may be. If there were ever a time to be revolutionary, it is now. Palestinians have long been engaged in revolution, and are calling upon us to strike imperialism whenever and wherever we can. Israel’s colonial regime must be damaged and dismantled, be it in the camps of Jenin, the rubbled roads of Gaza, or here on the streets of Britain.
78 years of Nakba is 78 years too long. As long as mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide continues, the people will, and must, keep rising up for Palestine.
Join the demonstration on Saturday 16th May, 12pm, Piccadilly Gardens!
