Osman Softić || 19 May 2025
As the world marked the 77th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe) on Thursday, May 15, 2025, Palestinians across the globe mourned not only a historical trauma but the ongoing tragedy. On the same day, the Israeli occupation forces killed at least 115 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in a wave of brutal bombardment across the Gaza Strip, in plain sight of the entire world, including Arab and Muslim states that silently and shamelessly observe the genocide in Gaza.
Even more tragically, this occurs while the wealthiest Arab states compete between themselves which one will more lavishly impress the U.S. President Donald Trump, whose country is the primary protector, sponsor, and enabler of the perpetrators of genocide in Palestine.
Arab monarchs, currying favor with the American president, went out their usual ways to ingratiate themselves with a new emperor, showering him with tributes and promising “extortion” and often futile investments ranging from hundreds of billions to a trillion dollars in U.S. economy to secure his pleasure and favor, support and protection from their own peoples, so as to comfortably prolong their autocratic and hereditary rule assured that they will not be held responsible for any missteps occasionally invoked by human right organizations in the west.
The Genocide
Meanwhile, less than a thousand miles away to their north in Palestine, Israel unabashedly continues to carry out genocide (now in its second year) against their brothers and sisters. Billions of dollars in Arab investments and tributary gifts to the modern day American emperor seem to have no effect in changing the fate of the Palestinian plight whatsoever compared with the mere $100 million donated by Miriam Adelson, the widow of Israeli-American gambling magnate and ardent Zionist Sheldon Adelson, to protect the Israeli leader Netanyahu, a war criminal, and his crises-ridden regime in its bloodthirsty campaign of killing Palestinian children, women, and the elderly in Gaza and inducing their starvation in order to resolve the demographic problem Israel has always had with Palestine.
It is not the Hamas Israel is fighting, that is only the most convenient excuse and pretext to annihilate the ” Amalek”. While Arab monarchs shower the overseer of the modern-day live broadcast genocide, with gifts and investment deals, numerous Palestinian, Islamic, Christian and even Jewish non-governmental organizations worldwide, along with students and courageous civil activists (at least those outside the Arab world), keep staging protests and vigils, issuing statements and appeals to the world’s conscience appealing to powers that were with messages calling for an end to genocide. They urge their governments to demand a halt to the Palestinian Nakba and advocate for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
On May 15, 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled and displaced from their homes when the state of Israel was established. Its leaders immediately betrayed the good will of the United Nations and, through deception and brutal force and terrorist militias expanded the territory allocated to them while expelling the Arab population to the point where only 20 percent were, miraculously allowed to remain in the newly proclaimed state. This was done to present to the world the narrative that Palestinians left voluntarily.
In a short time, over 530 villages were erased and levelled, entire communities were destroyed and the indigenous Palestinian Arab people, native to that land, were left stateless overnight. For Palestinians the Nakba has never ended over the past 77 years. It has only continued in different forms and with varying intensity.
The Blockade
Today, as bombs keep falling on Gaza’s remaining ruins and while hunger stalks the children of Gaza, the echoes of 1948 grow louder, bloodier, and more desperate. On May 15, 2025, the Nakba Day, Israel, using American bombs, killed at least 115 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in a wave of attacks across the Gaza Strip. Since October 2023, over 61,700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Media Office. More than 119,000 have been injured.
The world has largely watched in silence as Israel intensified its blockade, hermetically sealing Gaza and preventing the entry of food, fuel, water, medicine, and medical equipment.
The World food program has now confirmed that its warehouses are empty, bakeries are closed and 1.1 million children are at risk of starvation. In Gaza, 57 Palestinians, mostly children, have already died of hunger. Palestinians outside Gaza too have endured decades of an apartheid system, now compounded by genocide that has claimed over 60,000 lives.
In the West, numerous organizations persistently call on their governments to officially recognize May 15 as Nakba Day as the UN did and to stop ignoring the apartheid and genocide being committed against Palestinians. They demand an end to arms sales to Israel and the imposition of a complete embargo on the Zionist regime.
There is a call for adherence to international law, including the right of return and an end to the expansion of illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. All moral and courageous people of clear conscience raise their voices against oppression, injustice, occupation, and apartheid, except European bureaucrats in Brussels and their respective governments and the American administration.
An-Nakba Day
Numerous Islamic organizations and representative bodies of Muslims in countries where Muslims are minorities, such as Australia, UK, the US and others, commemorated the Nakba Day by drawing a direct parallel between the violent creation of Israel and the ongoing genocide in Gaza today. What we witness today in Gaza is not a new crisis. It is, in fact, the boiling point of 77 years of injustice.
Muslim and non-Muslim activists alike, openly and persistently demand sanctions against Israeli officials and an end to their governments’ military cooperation with Israel. They call on their governments to support the recognition of Palestine at the UN, if they have not already done so, and to back international legal mechanisms for accountability for the crime of genocide. The global justice pro-Palestinian campaign concludes that the Nakba has never ended.
Today in Gaza, we witnessed the displacement of over 2 million people. The death toll could reach 77,000. The root cause of the Nakba’s continuity is the colonial nature of Israeli policy, backed by the so-called liberal and civilized Europe and America. “The Nakba cannot and will not stop without support for the arrest of Israeli leaders by the International Criminal Court. The deployment of international protective forces in Gaza is essential”, asserts Mohamed Ainullah for Australian Muslim Times.
Yet, despite the seemingly hopeless situation, optimists believe that Palestinian liberation from Israel’s Zionist oppression is today closer than ever before. “Seventy-seven years after the beginning of Nakba, its legacy persists, visible in every demolished Palestinian home, every starving child and every displaced family.
Equally, Palestinian resistance, culture, and unwavering hope are stronger than ever”, Ainullah writes, echoing voices of millions across the globe. Commemorating the Nakba means insisting on its end. It means refusing to accept or normalize genocide. It means demanding that justice in Palestine be served, for silence in the face of crimes against Palestinians is complicity in genocide. European governments, the American administration, and Arab and many other non-Arab Muslim and non-Muslim regimes are complicit in this crime.
Such a world cannot claim civilized values, such a world and its values must be rejected and fought against with all available legal means. The platitudes of fearful and opportunistic political leaders, and sometimes even religious ones, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, about the “civilized world” reveal their own incivility, misery, selfishness and foolishness.
From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free
Therefore, there is nothing controversial or antisemitic about the phrase “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free.” Not because Zionists see it as an offensive slogan, for it is not, but because justice demands nothing less. That will be the ultimate fate of Palestine: a life in peace with equal rights for all its citizens, peoples, and faiths in Palestine—for all Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others for whom Palestine is a legitimate and only home.
This may not be witnessed by our generation, but it is the only possible and just future for Palestine, regardless of what the Israeli regime, its European and American enablers, or opportunistic Arab kings may think. Palestine is older and more resilient than all of them combined. Palestine will outlive them all and history will judge them harshly for shamelessly standing aside and doing nothing when it was their duty to stop or at least mitigate genocide, even if, symbolically, they cut diplomatic relations with Israel, cancel trading ties, or urge their publics to protest.
The Arab and Muslim leaders did the opposite. At least Arab dictators of the past, as much as they may have used the Palestine question opportunistically to bolster their image and legitimacy at home, they did correctly recognize the Palestinian question as a rallying point for Arab unity and resolve.
The current Arab leaderships have done all they possibly could to silence pro-Palestine voices among their citizens while continuing to assist Israel in committing genocide not only by their continued silence but by tacit approval and collaboration with the Israeli regime. At the same time, the aging Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the once proud PLO and the Palestinian authority (PA) – a collaborative arm of occupation enabled by the 1993 Oslo Accords, who is supposed to lead his people’s resistance against the occupation of Palestine (even if by peaceful means), chose the opposite path, that of collaboration with Israelis, as it is clearly demonstrated by the continued the so called “security coordination” with Tel Aviv, which now further extends to disarmament of the Palestinian factions in the camps in Syria and Lebanon.
Abbas, in order to quash resistance of his own people, both in Palestine and its neighboring Arab countries, all at the behest of Israel and wealthy Arab monarchies who have always viewed the Palestinians as the major obstacle to their “normalization” of relations with the occupying state, was unable to secure support, let alone approval, neither from Mustafa Barghouti’s increasingly popular Palestinian Initiative nor from the two traditional leftist and nationalist traditional PLO factions (PFLP and DFLP) both of which remain adamant that the resistance to occupation is the Palestinian people’s right according to international law.
Better to die on your feet than live on your knees
Normalization with Israel which Gulf Arab regimes strive to achieve is nothing but subservience and servitude. Palestinian people reject it in the name of justice, freedom and pride, even at the time they are faced with extermination.
Better to die fighting for freedom than to live enslaved.
Osman Softić is a Research Fellow at the Islamic Renaissance Front. He holds a BA degree in Islamic Studies from the Faculty of Islamic Studies of the University of Sarajevo and has a Master degree in International Relations from the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He contributed commentaries on Middle Eastern and Islamic Affairs for the web portal Al Jazeera Balkans, Online Opinion, Engage and Open Democracy. Osman holds dual Bosnian and Australian citizenship.
