The UN's recent resolution to recognize Nakba Day on May 15, to mark the anniversary of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948, helps to acknowledge past traumas. Although it offers little in terms of solutions, it may help to grow the current narrative about Palestine.
The UN’s recent resolution to recognize Nakba Day on May 15, to mark the anniversary of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948, helps to acknowledge past traumas but does the resolution have other implications?
On this week’s episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we meet up with M. Muhannad Ayyash, professor of sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary to help unpack some of the meanings behind this resolution.
Seventy-five years ago, starting on May 15, Palestinians were driven off their lands. This event is what Palestinians have come to refer to as the Nakba.
In Arabic, Nakba means Catastrophe.
At that time, approximately 750,000 people were violently forced from their homes. In the decades after, tens of thousands of others were murdered and displaced. And millions of Palestinians became refugees.
Recently, the United Nations passed a resolution to finally acknowledge that day of catastrophe.
The Palestinian UN envoy, Riyad Mansour, said the significance of the UN resolution lies in the General Assembly’s acknowledgement of the historical “injustice that befell the Palestinian people.”
Why has the UN resolved to acknowledge this history now? Could it be tied to the recent surge in violence in the region?
Does the recognition impact anything? Does it change how the conflict is viewed by western powers, like Canada and the United States who actually voted against the UN resolution?
You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts. We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and use #DontCallMeResilient.
“When will the settler colonial siege of the Gaza Strip end?” by M. Muhannad Ayyash (Al-Jazeera)
“Palestinians have no choice but to continue the struggle” by Noura Erakat (The Washington Post)
“The Deir Yassin massacre: Why it still matters 75 years later” (Al-Jazeera)
“From Turtle Island to Gaza” by David A. Groulx (Athabasca University Press)
“A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return” by Peter Beinart (The Guardian)
Unedited transcript
Vinita: [00:00:00] From The Conversation this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vinita Srivastava.
Muhannad: Nobody's going anywhere. So we need to really imagine this life, social, and political life on this land beyond the Euro-American colonial ideology, of which Zionism is a part.
Vinita: 75 years ago on May 15th, Palestinians were driven off their land to create the state of Israel and what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba in Arabic. Nakba means catastrophe.
About 750,000 people were violently forced from their homes [starting] that day, and in the decades after tens of thousands of others were murdered. And displaced. Recently, the United Nations passed a resolution to commemorate that day of catastrophe on May 15th.[00:01:00]
Muhannad: Today, this general assembly will finally acknowledge the historical injustice that befell the Palestinian people adopting a resolution that decides to commemorate in this general assembly hall, the 75th anniversary of the Nakba.
Our people deserve recognition of their plight, justice for the victims, reparation for their loss and fulfillment of their rights.
Vinita: Why has the UN resolved to acknowledge this history now?
Could it be tied to the recent surge in violence in the region? And does the recognition impact anything? Does it change how the conflict is viewed by Western powers like Canada and the United States? Who actually voted against the UN resolution. [00:02:00] Joining me today to help unpack the meanings behind this resolution is Muhannad Ayassh, professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
He specializes in settler colonial studies and Palestinian social movements.
Thank you so much for taking the time for this discussion today, Muhannad.
Muhannad: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Vinita: What did you think when you first heard about the UN's general assembly passing of this resolution to commemorate the Nakba.
Muhannad: My first reaction, of course, is to welcome it. Any time that the narrative of Palestinian dispossession is platformed, it's a welcome change because it is so rare for Palestinians to be able to talk about their experiences of expulsion and displacement openly and honestly in an international, [00:03:00] arena.
Vinita: As a Palestinian yourself, how did you feel about it?
Muhannad: It's a welcome change, but as a Palestinian, you also immediately come to the question of, well, what does that change? That's inevitably the question that haunts all Palestinians. What is going to be done about our predicaments here and about our suffering?
Are we closer to our aspirations for freedom and human political rights? This decision does not, in fact, change things on the ground for us in the immediate term, and I really here want to contextualize why it is that Palestinians will feel that way. The committee that drove this recent decision was created in 1975 by the UN General Assembly.
It expresses, and I quote here, it's grave concern that no progress has been achieved towards a) the exercise by the Palestinian people of its inalienable rights in Palestine, including the right to self-determination without external [00:04:00] interference and the right to national independence in sovereignty.
And point b) the exercise by Palestinians of their inalienable rights to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted. Let me go back to the first two words. It expresses grave concern that no progress has been achieved in 1975. There was, it was already a grave situation in 1975.
Things are so much worse now. In 2023.
Vinita: 50 years have gone by since 1975, approximately, and you're saying things have actually gotten worse.
Muhannad: Worse, we're further removed from all those, those two goals that they mentioned. There's no movement whatsoever on the Palestinian right of return. In fact, there's more public discussion about how those refugees should just forget about it.
Even the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which was [00:05:00] created to deal with the Palestinian refugees, that it should be defunded and completely outright removed. You know, Netanyahu himself is saying these things so we're even further removed from that right to return of the Palestinians, and there's even less chance of a Palestinian statehood and sovereignty.
Vinita: Given what you're saying, which is that things have gotten worse in the 50 years and that this committee has made these statements in 1975, why do you think this UN resolution is happening now?
Muhannad: I presume that it's out of desperation, that there's so little being done and talked about that they thought, well, we need to commemorate this event in order to get people to acknowledge the existence of Palestinians and their inalienable rights and the fact of their history and suffering.
Vinita: So you don't think that it has anything to do with a recent push by Israeli settlement policies, which have potentially led to an [00:06:00] increase in violence. And there's also been reports of large Palestinian resistance movements, especially from youth.
Muhannad: Absolutely. So if you read their report, which they presented to the United Nations General Assembly before this decision was voted on, you'll see that they lay out a whole bunch of contexts, issues that led to their call.
Expansion of settlement is a huge one. The blockade, I would call it a siege of the Gaza Strip, they mention that. How Israel designated six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations, quote unquote, they name that. They do also name the increase in settler violence. They name the increase in Israeli forces’ violence committed against the Palestinian, which has intensified over the last few years.
There’s no doubt about that and the numbers show that. They mentioned the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, how Israel is preventing Palestinians from their right to worship at Al-Aqsa. They name all of these things and others as indicators of how much worse things have gotten. None [00:07:00] of these violences that I just named or knew. They've been happening for decades.
But we need to talk about it as an intensification, not the addition of something brand new. So this right wing government, yes, it's the most extreme that Israel has ever had, but they're just intensifying what already existed.
Vinita: 30 states voted against this resolution, including Canada, the US, the UK, Germany.
Let's talk about that a little and why you think that is the case.
Muhannad: This comes as no surprise. The countries that you just listed, they're all North American and Western European countries. I'm sure there's a few other countries from other regions sprinkled in, but that's usually who always provides diplomatic cover to the Israeli state.
And the reason is simple. The United States is an imperial power, and it has an imperial hegemonic block in which Canada plays a role and is a part of, and so is [00:08:00] Israel. I go back always to that quote from Biden in the 1980s when he said in Congress, in his speech, if Israel didn't exist, we would have to invent it.
And what he's referring to is that Israel serves American imperial interests. They prefer, of course, the term strategic interests, but its imperial interest in region. The Zionist project in fact allied itself with the British Empire and without the British Empire, there would be no Israel. The connection between the British Empire and Zionist movement was that it would enable a Jewish state in that region, which would enable the British Empire to advance its own imperial interests.
After the collapse, the British Empire, the American took over that role slowly. You know, Israel, for example, played a very important role in the American Cold War against the Soviet Union, and then played an important role for the Americans in securing access to resources and markets in the region, so on and so forth. So over the years, that relationship has become very, very close.
[00:09:00] So there's no neutral arbitraries here. The US is an active participant in the dispossession and colonization of Palestinians and colonization of Palestine. So those votes don't surprise me because the United States will provide diplomatic cover to Israel at the UN and has been doing that for decades.
Vinita: We're talking about the US being part and parcel of this occupation. How did the critique of the occupation of Palestine become equated with antisemitism?
Muhannad: Most scholars will start to date that back into the 1960s, 1970s, when you have the clear emergence of a strategy where Israeli government officials start to talk about this notion of the new, quote unquote, antisemitism where they associate critiques of Israel and the naming of Israel as an apartheid state or a settler colonial state as [00:10:00] antisemitic.
All serious decolonial critiques of the Israeli state are to be posited as antisemitic so that they would be silenced and censored and marginalized. That effort has grown and developed over the years.
It's now a full fledged campaign driven by the Israeli state and its allies to paint and cast all Palestinian critiques as antisemitic. They'll always use the language of, oh well, you know, you can still criticize Israeli policy, but you can't call Israel a racist state. You can't call it a settler colonial state.
Well, that's the whole critique, the Palestinian critique. That's the whole thing. That's the whole problem. Is that it is those things. They didn't resist the Zionist movement because it was Jewish. They resisted it because it was expelling them from their lands, displacing them, taking rights away, killing them, and so on.
That's the core of the problem. It's settler colonialism. That's what is still the [00:11:00] problem because the settler colonial project is not just some event that happened in the past. It's an ongoing structure. It's still happening today.
Vinita: When I was looking at pictures of past Nakba days in various places around the world, this doesn't just get commemorated in Palestine, but also in places where Palestinians are living.
But one of the things, the symbol is that big key. This idea that the right to go back to your home, the key to your home becomes so important.
Muhannad: Absolutely. And many Palestinian refugees held onto their key and still hold onto their key. They passed it down to the different generations. As you mentioned.
You know, there's approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and lands in 1948 never to see those lands again. The numbers of their descendants are now approximately 7 million Palestinian refugees worldwide. There are, with the United Nations Relief and Works agency, [00:12:00] over 5.3 million Palestinian refugees are still registered.
This is one of the largest and longest suffering group of refugees in the world, and they still have not given up on their inalienable right to return to their lands and homes, as the UN General Assembly declared in its resolutions in the 1070s. This is the crux of the problem and the whole charge of antisemitism against Palestinians who are simply declaring their right to narrate their experiences of violence and suffering and their aspirations for freedom and liberation.
From a substantive standpoint, I think it's ludicrous, the charge of antisemitism against it, but unfortunately it is effective. Those strategies are effective and they do work, and especially within the Canadian context, American context, British context. Most people, even if they do know that it's a disingenuous charge, they'll go along with it because they don't think there's anything to gain [00:13:00] from Palestinian freedom.
There is a real sense out there in the majority mainstream society, in Canadian society and beyond, that Palestinian freedom is not something worth fighting for because it doesn't add anything to the interest of the Canadian state. In fact, it might be against the interest of the Canadian state for Palestinians to achieve their freedom because if settler colonialism is defeated there, it might be defeated here, it might be defeated elsewhere.
The imperial project becomes undone from within. You know, so there is actually an invested strategic interest, in Canadian state politics and certainly in American state politics, to forbid Palestinians from achieving their freedom.
Vinita: Because it has implications for a changed narrative. And in that changed narrative about settler colonialism you think has implications for Canada as well.
Muhannad: It has implications for Canada and it also has implications for the [00:14:00] imperial project itself. You know, the American Empire started through settler colonialism, and of course, since settler colonialism is ongoing, that's what still enables the American Empire to grow and expand. So any challenge to that colonial hegemony and discourse and that racialized way of thinking, that white supremacy that still guides much of our existence, social and political existence today, any challenge to it anywhere is suppressed by the imperial forces.
Vinita: Let's talk about that. Do you think this UN resolution impacts the narrative of what's happening at all?
Do you think it could have some impact on the way that the story is told or talked about?
Muhannad: So, let me just go back a little bit here, back to 2021 in the spring of 2021, where there was a discernible change in the narrative through the really impressive work of Palestinian activists and journalists on the ground using social media [00:15:00] to tell the Palestinian story directly to people.
There was a change in the narrative. People were no longer buying the mainstream talking points of ‘Israel is just defending itself.’ ‘These are all Palestinian terrorists.’ ‘They all deserve what they got.’ The attempt to displace Palestinians and take their homes. ‘This is a real estate dispute.’ All of those kinds of talking points were really shattered by the presence on social media of Palestinian activists and journalists.
The demonstrations were quite significant, including in Canada. You know, Toronto had a huge demonstration in that spring of 2021. Palestinian voices like Mohammed El-Kurd were put on national networks like MSNBC and CNN and then those clips would go viral and so on. So there was a shift in narrative.
Vinita: The shift in narrative, you're saying, came from the ground up by Palestinians, Palestinian journalists, Palestinians on social media, Palestinian activists [00:16:00] in the diaspora, but also on the ground there. And you're also saying that mainstream media picked up on that story.
Muhannad: They couldn't ignore it because it was getting so much attention on social media and the protests in the streets were so large they couldn't ignore it. They had to put people like that on. Look, within mainstream media, there is editorial sort of erasure of Palestine.
But there are many journalists that don't like that and see that and want to change that. It's often racialized journalists that are doing that work and are trying to change the discussion on the question of Palestine and the reason why it is usually racialized journalists, by the way, is because they don't buy into white supremacy and they see Palestinians as human beings.
You really only have to do that. I ask all of the listeners here today, just think of Palestinians as human beings who have the same aspirations for freedom and sovereignty and political rights that you do, and then you'll [00:17:00] start to see everything differently.
This is why racialized journalists tend to see the Palestinian struggle for what it is because they don't accept the idea that Palestinians are not human. So that shift in narrative is important. We have not though seen that translated into shifts in policy. The public discourse is not some just neutral open marketplace of ideas.
It's a very politicized space that states try to manipulate and direct it to serve their own interests. So states that are invested in the suppression of Palestinian freedom, like the Israeli state, like the Canadian state, like the American state, they also counter that narrative with their own ideological attacks on the Palestinian narratives, again, the charge of antisemitism and so on.
So it's not like the narrative once it changes, it stays changed forever. It could also revert back. So we need to continuously keep up efforts to bring truth to the narrative on Palestine and allow the Palestinians to [00:18:00] narrate their own story, which they're more than capable of doing and have been doing for decades and decades and decades.
It always comes from the ground. These changes always come from the ground. People will always focus on the United Nations, this committee, this politician, and all of the rest of it. Those people would've never said what they've said if it wasn't for people on the ground saying, this is violence, this is what is wrong, this is unjust, and this is what my aspiration for liberation is.
If Palestinians don't do that, we’d disappear decades ago. Decades ago. So whenever there is international pressure on Israel, don't ever forget that the root of that is Palestinians on the streets, the names that you'll never know, the people who have refused to be silenced and erased into the dustbin of history.
Vinita: You mentioned something about Canada and the way that Canadian media tells the [00:19:00] story, the way that that narrative is framed. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Muhannad: In the spring of 2021, approximately 500 people in media wrote a letter asking for Canadian media, you know, to meet the regular standards that are applied to any other issue, on the question of Palestine and how did Canadian media respond?
They collected the names of everyone who signed that letter and said, you can't cover Palestine anymore.
Vinita: Right. I remember that now.
Muhannad: The effects of that are how little people in Canada know about Palestine. But trust me there is a thirst because people know on some internal level that the story and the narrative that they're getting, which is an Israeli narrative, like it's not even close, that it's not telling them the whole picture. It's not giving them the whole truth.
So there's a long way to go here in Canada on that issue. And Canadian media will sometimes put on a Palestinian that will talk about their story of suffering, but they never present the [00:20:00] Palestinian paradigm that explains why Palestinians are suffering and what their aspirations for freedom looks like.
I know what some media will say is like, well, we put on an interview with a person whose home was demolished, but you painted them as just an individual suffering some mishap. You barely named Israel as the culprit of the violence that this person is experiencing. You never use the framing of settler colonialism.
So that paradigm is what is erased.
Vinita: to try and counter that erasure, just for a moment, you mentioned the paradigm. And how this ideally should be framed objectively. The 75 year conflict, more than 75 years, is often framed as this kind of equal conflict. So could you, for someone who is brand new, let's say, to this issue and wondering what does all of this mean?
I have been reading Canadian media my whole life. How should I [00:21:00] be framing this issue? Can I ask you to try and give us a summary of that?
Muhannad: For thousands of years this land has been populated by Palestinians and people who identified in different ways throughout this long ancient history. And people of different faiths. Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other smaller faiths.
So they've been living there forever. So this land was already always populated and inhabited by people. Within Europe, of course there was the horrendous structure of anti-Semitism, which is also a structure of violence, not just one event. It's not just the Holocaust. It's the pogroms. It's the head taxes. It's discrimination, expulsion from homes, like all, you know, horrendous violence.
And the Zionist movement decided that it was no longer possible for Jews to live in Europe because of that. That they were never gonna be welcome in Europe. They were just never gonna be accepted as Europeans, even though they are [00:22:00] Europeans. They're just as German as the next German, or as French as the next French, Polish and so on.
They decided that the only solution to that problem is a Jewish state populated by a Jewish majority, and they considered a few pieces of the earth to build that state. But they always understood, because they were European, that this was going to be part of the European colonial project. So places that they considered were already under the control of European colonial power, in South America and in Africa, and of course in the Middle East.
So eventually they settled on Palestine because of the long connection to Judaism and so on. Eventually they allied with the British Empire to help them create this Jewish state. I understand the impetus for wanting to leave Europe, but the whole problem was that this land was already inhabited.
Palestinians had been living there, have identified themselves as Palestinians, have called this place Palestine for thousands of years. It was their land. They lived on it, they cultivated it. They lived across the whole [00:23:00] territory and the Zionist movement knew this. They knew it was populated. They told people it was a land without a people, for a people without a land, but they knew that that was bs.
And we can see it in the thinking of early Zionists, that they understood that the only solution was to expel the Palestinians. Expel the Palestinians, and replace them with the European Jewish settlers. That's the whole problem. That's why it's settler colonialism.
That's why it's a racialized project, because it replicated European colonial imaginary and racialized thinking in Palestine, and they liken themselves, by the way, to American settler colonialism, and they liken the Palestinians to the Indigenous peoples across North America who, you know, we're letting the land go to waste and that this advanced civilization needs to come and take its place to make the desert bloom and all the rest of that nonsense.
They even like borrowed legal techniques from them. They replicated most, if not the majority of the British empire's violences.
[00:24:00] That's what continues to this day. This Zionist project is a continuation of the colonial European project which thought of itself as advancing civilization and modernity to the land of the backward orient and the racialized other who deserves to be dominated, expelled, removed, killed because they lack the civilizational status of European, of white European civilization, whatever that means.
On the level of structural violence, there are so many structural violences that Israel commits. The apartheid wall. The besiegement of Gaza, which’s brutality is beyond our comprehension, really, that has been ongoing for decades. The checkpoints, the economic de-development of the Palestinian economies that leads to immense hardships.
Arrests, the pain of imprisonments on the families, the psychological violence that Palestinian experienced as a result of these structural violences. The home demolitions, the threat of home demolitions. You know, the list [00:25:00] goes on and on. So you're calling these immense structural violences that you can't even quantify in numbers because they're so large a symmetrical warfare or conflict?
We're talking about a big powerful state with a very well funded and strong military with nuclear capabilities, unleashing those structural violences and subjective violences against a stateless people. Once you start seeing it that way, you'll see that the Palestinian struggle is a struggle for decolonization and against the Euro-American raciology or racial forms of thinking, and there are alternatives.
Vinita: Oh, let's talk about those alternatives then, because I think it's really important to think about. Back to the UN resolution, because we started off there and we wanna talk about, you know, this has happened, it's identified Nakba as something to be recognized, to be commemorated. And you're saying, [00:26:00] well, okay, so how do we build on this and what needs to happen?
Muhannad: This is when we get into some tricky territory when we talk about the two-state solution because the report and the UN still stands by the idea of a two-state solution. The problem with that is Israel doesn't want it, and the reality on the ground has become such that it is very difficult to implement a two-state solution where the Palestinian state would actually be a real state.
The Israeli government, by the way, has never agreed to full Palestinian sovereign statehood, and practically speaking that looks impossible to me right now. You know, the Gaza Strip is, is separated from the West Bank, from East Jerusalem. The West Bank itself and East Jerusalem are separated. There's fragmentation within the West Bank to a very high degree.
But there are alternatives. You know, Palestinian scholars, Israeli scholars, and other scholars who are interested in justice and decolonization have looked at the one state solution. And there are varying models that you can adopt within that one state solution. [00:27:00] Whether it's a federal state, a binational state, there is a rich discourse out there that one can engage with to get a better understanding of what an alternative solution might be.
There are, of course, other scholars who argue for a no state solution, scholars who are opposed to the state structure itself who would argue that a different mode of social and political organization is needed. Me, myself, I lean towards a concept that I'm still developing and it's under review in my book, but a notion of decolonial sovereignties. It would shift the discussion a little bit away from the state structure and focus on the, I think, more important question of sovereignty.
And I understand sovereignty here, not in the American, Euro-American sense of sovereignty, but in the sense of an intimate relationship that people form with the land, like their basic understanding of: What is my relationship to the land and what is my relationship to other people? To me, that kind of discussion, which is very substantive and existent in all human societies, is what the [00:28:00] word sovereignty really means for me.
And I think if we shift our attention to that, then we can actually come up with some really I would say, you know, transformative revolutionary ways of reimagining what life will look like on this land for both Palestinians and Israelis. Nobody's going anywhere. So we need to really imagine this life, social and political life on this land beyond the Euro-American colonial ideology of which Zionism is a part.
And we need to rethink some fundamental questions about our relationship to the land and our relationship to each other, and what that means. There is no shortage of alternatives and people thinking about alternatives. They haven't reached the mainstream. That's the issue. But that doesn't mean that people can't go and dig them out and find them out and engage themselves and bring the pressure on politicians and these institutions to make the necessary changes because the track that we are on can only lead [00:29:00] to one place, and that is another Nakba, another mass expulsion of the Palestinians.
All the signs are there that, that would be the inevitable outcome of the road that we're on. But that won't end the story because we already saw what those 7 million Palestinian refugees are doing. They're not giving up. What do you think in another Nakba that those Palestinians will give up? Never.
And that story will only continue on until there's more violence, more death and destruction, more expulsion. At what point do we say we need to get off this path? I mean, I think the point is many years ago, but let's start it at least now. And by the way, those alternatives are not just purely imaginative and theoretical.
You can find examples of that in the long history of Palestinian resistance. There are concrete examples where you can follow these alternative ways of envisioning social and political life.
Vinita: Thank you so much for all of your time today.
Muhannad: Thank you. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed my conversation with you.
Thank you.[00:30:00]
Vinita: That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. Thank you to Professor Muhanned Ayassh for taking the time to discuss the Nakba. There was a lot to take in during this convo, and if you'd like to know more, I've dropped some of the resources into the show notes as well as some other further reading from theconversation.com.
If you wanna have a conversation with me about what you heard, reach out. I'm on Twitter at writevinita, that's W R I T E V I N I T A. And tag our producers at conversation ca so they can join in. Use the hashtag,#DontCallMeResilient. If you like what you heard today, great news because we'll be back next week.
In the meantime, consider sharing this pod with a friend or family member, or drop a review on the podcast app that you use. And if you haven't done this already, please give us a follow on [00:31:00] whatever podcast app you're using. It means you won't miss an episode. Finally, if you have ideas about news stories that you would love to hear us cover, we'd especially like to hear from you.
Email us. At D C M R @theconversation.com. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me.
Vinita Srivastava. Boke Saisi is our producer. Ollie Nicholas is our assistant producer and student journalist. Jennifer Moroz is our consulting producer. Our audio editor is Rehmatullah Sheikh. Ateqah Khaki is our audience development and visual innovation consultant, and Scott White is the c e o of The Conversation [00:32:00] Canada.
And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the five, that's the amazing Zacky Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.