This article was automatically translated from the original Turkish version.
Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, “The Catastrophe”) refers to a profound destruction that deeply shook the historical, social, and geographical existence of Palestinian society in the second half of the 20th century and left lasting consequences. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, hundreds of villages were erased from maps, and a deep trauma was embedded in the collective memory of Arab communities, placing this concept at the center of modern Middle Eastern history. For Palestinians, Nakba is also understood as a crisis of knowledge, identity and memory.
According to Khalid al-Awaisi, limiting Nakba to the territorial occupation of 1948 constitutes an incomplete reading. He argues that the occupation of Palestine began fundamentally with the British entry into Jerusalem in 1917 and progressed through a form of consciousness distortion he terms the “intellectual Nakba.” The mental occupation waged by Western powers, promoting nationalism and Western-oriented modernity within Arab societies, manipulated local identities, blurred distinctions between enemy and ally, and engineered a profound redirection that led many to perceive British occupation as “liberation.”
For al-Awaisi, this “occupation of minds” facilitated the seizure of Palestinian land and created a foundation to legitimize colonial objectives. With control over knowledge production and narrative dominance falling into Zionist hands, not only were lands occupied but meanings themselves were colonized.
Documentary About Nekbe (Al Jazeera Türk)
The term “Nakba” was first used in the 1940s by the Egyptian poet Ahmad Muhammed to describe the loss of Palestinian land. However, it was the Syrian intellectual Konstantin Zerik who anchored the concept within a historical and theoretical framework. In his 1948 work Ma‘na’n-Nakba (The Meaning of Nakba), Zerik defined Nakba not merely as a political or military defeat but as a cultural and intellectual collapse.
According to Zerik’s analysis, this crisis reflected the scientific, intellectual and social weaknesses of the Arab world. Indeed, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Zerik published another work titled Ma‘na’n-Nakba Müceddiden (The Meaning of Nakba Revisited), arguing that the crisis of 1948 had not been overcome and had, in fact, deepened.
Palestinians have expressed the processes of dispossession and statelessness initiated by Nakba through a central symbol: the right of return to their ancestral homelands.
Video Explaining the Key Symbolism of Palestinians (TRT News)
For Palestinians, Nakba is not merely the loss of land. It is also the name of displacement, dispossession and rootlessness. According to Selim Öztürk’s research, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes after the 1948 War, and the majority of this population was forced to migrate to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries. Yet this wave of forced migration also brought about a political, social and psychological devastation.
The refugee camps established during this period — such as Sabra, Shatila and Burj el-Barajneh — became not merely temporary shelters but spaces of diasporic identity and collective memory. Palestinian refugees found themselves targeted not only by Israeli policies but also, at times, by the repressive policies of their host Arab countries, experiencing a second displacement during events such as “Black September” in 1970.
Isa Abidoglu argues that Israel has constructed its collective memory through a “politics of victimhood.” He contends that the trauma of the Holocaust in Jewish history has been instrumentalized to consolidate Israel’s national identity while rendering Palestinian victimhood invisible. In contrast, the Palestinian narrative has been marginalized in Western media and criminalized through the discourse of “terrorism.”
Israel’s ideologically centered victimhood framework suppresses Palestinian collective memory and renders the Other invisible through spatial and symbolic violence. This dynamic can be read through Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: Israel maintains the position of “master,” while Palestinians, as the “Other,” are rendered invisible yet continue to wage a struggle for identity.
According to Ömer Kısaoğlu, Nakba is a crisis of memory and identity that resonates across cultural domains such as cinema. Palestinian filmmakers in the diaspora use this memory as both a medium of resistance and narration; particularly within the context of “accented cinema,” voices from under occupation transform into the cries of the silenced.
Farha, films such as The Promised Land, demonstrate that Nakba has not ended and that the existential struggle of Palestinians continues. Thus, Nakba is more than a historical event; it is an ongoing crisis, an occupation of minds and a field of identity struggle. Every child born today in Palestinian refugee camps is a living witness and carrier of this catastrophe.
Farha Film Telling the Story of Nekbe at the International Film Festival (AA)
Various awareness campaigns are conducted in different countries to ensure Nakba is not forgotten. Films depicting Nakba are screened at international film festivals, marches and protests are held on the anniversary of Nakba, and academic studies are published.
The Occupation of Minds and the Intellectual Dimension of Nakba
The Origin and Conceptualization of the Term
1948: Social Destruction and the Refugee Reality
Memory, Victimhood and Identity Construction
The Ongoing Nakba
Never Forgetting Nakba