Nakba and Naksa: disasters without end

The Palestinian Remah Naji was born in Amman and raised among refugees, hearing at her family’s dinner table what most Australians never learn at school. Israel displaced her mother once. Israel displaced her father once as a child, in a second catastrophe nineteen years after the first. Two events made her family refugees before she existed, and they explain what she brings into public life: the Nakba and the Naksa.

1. Yaffa, before

Remah Naji comes from a family exiled from Yaffa, known in English as Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coast. Before 1948, Yaffa was the largest and wealthiest Arab city in Palestine, a port and citrus-export hub of some 70,000 people. Palestinians called it Arus Filastin, the Bride of Palestine, for its wealth, its orange groves and its standing as a centre of Arab cultural and political life (Britannica; Washington Report on Middle East Affairs).

That city no longer exists in the form Remah’s grandparents knew it. What happened to it in the space of three weeks in the spring of 1948 is the beginning of her family’s story.

2. The Nakba: catastrophe, 1948

From 25 April 1948, Irgun forces bombarded Yaffa while Haganah units encircled the city, cutting off supply routes as tens of thousands fled by sea and by road. By the time the city’s Arab leadership formally surrendered on 13 May 1948, the day before Israel declared statehood, as few as 3,000 to 4,500 of Yaffa’s Arab residents remained, out of a population that had numbered in the tens of thousands only weeks earlier (WRMEA).

Yaffa’s collapse was one part of a nationwide catastrophe. Across historic Palestine, those forces drove more than 700,000 people from their homes between 1947 and 1949 and emptied some 400 towns and villages (United Nations). Palestinians call this the Nakba, the Catastrophe. It is why Remah’s mother was born in Jordan rather than in Palestine: the war had already driven her family from their homeland before she was born, one household among hundreds of thousands scattered into refugee camps and diaspora communities across the region.

A generation was born into exile before it was born at all.

3. The Naksa: a second exile, 1967

Nineteen years later, war returned. In June 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War. Israel displaced around 300,000 Palestinians in the process, most of whom fled to Jordan (Amnesty International Australia). Palestinians call this second catastrophe the Naksa, the Setback, and mark it each year on 5 June.

What makes 1967 distinct from 1948 is whom Israel displaced. Close to half of those forced out in the Naksa were already 1948 refugees, uprooted for the second time in less than twenty years (BADIL Resource Center). Remah’s father lost his home for the first time in 1967, a child when Israel forced his family out, joining a refugee population that, by the war’s end, made up nearly half of all Palestinians living outside their homeland.

4. Refugees, still

Remah was born in Amman and raised there, among Palestinian refugees, in a household that was Jordanian by paperwork and Palestinian by memory. Today, UNRWA registers some 5.9 million Palestinians as refugees worldwide, the majority of them, like Remah, descendants who have never set foot in the homeland their grandparents fled (United Nations).

Remah Naji brings that inheritance into every room she enters, including the ballot for the Australian Federal Parliament. It explains why her solidarity with First Nations struggles for land and sovereignty is no borrowed talking point. She said as much herself, standing with the Hayes family in their fight over the land occupied by the Pine Gap military base: she would take her lead from First Nations people “because I would also like my land back”. Her family knows exactly what it means when somebody tells you your home is no longer yours.

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