56 years of occupation: Explaining the Palestinian ‘Naksa’
Palestine refugees flee across over the Jordan river on the damaged Allenby bridge during the 1967 Arab Israeli war – from the UNRWA archive
Yumna Patel writes in Mondoweiss on 5 June 2023:
Today Palestinians are marking 56 years of Israeli military occupation. More commonly known as the Naksa, ‘setback’ or ‘defeat’ in Arabic, June 5th marks the first day of the six-day war, which culminated in Israel occupying the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.
The Naksa took place in 1967, just nineteen years after the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, when Israel was established on the lands of Palestine. During the Nakba, more than 750,000 Palestinians became refugees, and the new Jewish state had taken over an estimated 78% of the lands of historic Palestine. What was left of Palestine after the Nakba fell under Egyptian and Jordanian administration.
But following the six-day war, Israel took over control of the remaining 22% of Palestinian territory, enforcing a military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, in a move that was never recognized by the international community.
If the Nakba was the catastrophe that laid the foundation for Israel’s settler colonial state, the Naksa was the defeat that finished the job, setting off a chain of events that has come to define the reality on the ground in occupied Palestine over the past 56 years.
The lead up
To this day, the six-day war, or the ‘June war’, is celebrated by Israel and remembered by the West as a “David vs. Goliath” type of narrative. As the story goes, Israel, against all odds, defeated its aggressive Arab neighbors who were operating under the singular motive of trying to stamp out the young Jewish state. …. …. ….
Decades later, this narrative has continued to be perpetuated in the media, and even film and the arts. While the mainstream media, Israel, and the West still largely rely on this narrative, the lead up to the war paints a different picture.