What began in 1948 has become something even darker. On this anniversary, we call it al-Ibādah – the Destruction.
When my grandmother, Khadija Ammar, walked out of her home in Beit Daras for the last time in May 1948, she embarked on a lonely journey. Even though she was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – also forced to leave behind their cherished homes and lands to escape the horror unleashed by Zionist militias – there was no one in the world watching. They were together, but utterly alone. And there was no word to describe their harrowing experience.
In time, Palestinians came to refer to the events of May 1948 as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The use of the word nakba in this context invokes the memory of another “catastrophe”, the Holocaust. The Palestinians were telling the world: just three years after the catastrophe that befell on the Jewish people in Europe, a new catastrophe – very different, but no less painful – is unfolding in our homeland, Palestine.
Tragically, our catastrophe never came to an end. Seventy-seven years after my grandmother’s expulsion, we are still being hunted, punished and killed, for trying to live on our lands with dignity or demanding that we are allowed to return to them.
Because it has never truly ended, commemorating the Nakba as a historical event has always been difficult. But today, a new challenge confronts us as we try to understand, discuss or commemorate the Nakba: it has entered a new and terrifying phase. It is no longer just a continuation of the horror that began 77 years ago.
Today, the Nakba has transformed into what Amnesty International described as a “live-streamed genocide”, its violence no longer hidden in archives or buried in survivors’ memories. The pain, the blood, the fear and the hunger are all visible on the screens of our devices.
As such, the word “Nakba” is not appropriate or sufficient to describe what is being done to my people and my homeland today. There is a need for new language – new terminology that accurately describes the reality of this new phase of the Palestinian catastrophe. We need a new word that could hopefully help focus the averted eyes of the world on Palestine.
Many terms have been proposed for this purpose – and I have used several in my writing. These include democide, medicide, ecocide, culturicide, spacio-cide, Gazacide, and scholasticide. Each of these terms undoubtedly defines an important aspect of what is happening today in Palestine.
One term that I find especially powerful as an academic is scholasticide. It underlines the ongoing, systematic erasure of Palestinian knowledge. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Ninety percent of schools have been reduced to rubble. Cultural centres and museums flattened. Professors and students killed. The term scholasticide, coined by the brilliant academic Karma Nabulsi, describes not only the physical destruction of Palestinian educational institutions but also the war being waged on memory, imagination and the Indigenous intellect itself.
As such, I propose a new term – al-Ibādah or the Destruction – to define this latest phase of the Nakba. The term reflects the horrifying rhetoric employed by Smotrich and numerous other Zionist fascist leaders and captures the comprehensive and systematic erasure under way not only in Gaza, but across historic Palestine. Al-Ibādah is capacious enough to encompass multiple forms of targeted annihilation, including democide, medicide, ecocide, scholasticide, culturicide and others.
In Arabic, the phrase for genocide, “al-Ibādah jamāʿiyyah” meaning “the annihilation of everyone and everything” has the word al-Ibādah as its root. The proposed term al-Ibādah intentionally truncates this phrase, transforming it into a concept that signifies a permanent and definitive condition of destruction. While it does not assign a specific geographical location, it draws conceptual strength from the work of Pankaj Mishra (The World After Gaza), who argues that the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza represents a qualitatively distinct form of genocidal violence. According to Mishra, Gaza constitutes the front line of Western neocolonial and neoliberal projects, which seek to consolidate global order around the ideology of white supremacy. By pairing the definite article with the noun, al-Ibādah asserts this condition as a historical rupture – a moment that demands recognition as a turning point in both Palestinian experience and global conscience.
Today, when it comes to Palestine, the word “destruction” is no longer whispered. From military commanders to politicians, journalists to academics, vast segments of the Israeli public now openly embrace the complete destruction of the Palestinian people as their ultimate goal.
Entire families are being wiped out. Journalists, doctors, intellectuals and civil society leaders are deliberately targeted. Forced starvation is used as a weapon. Parents carry the bodies of their children to the camera, to document the massacre. Journalists are killed mid-broadcast. We are becoming the martyrs, the wounded, the witness, the chroniclers of our own destruction.
My grandmother survived the Nakba of 1948. Today, her children and over two million Palestinians in Gaza live through even darker days: the days of destruction.
My pregnant cousin Heba and her family, along with nine of their neighbours, were killed on October 13, 2023. By then, just days after October 7, dozens of families had already been erased in their entirety: the Shehab, Baroud, Abu al-Rish, Al Agha, Al Najjar, Halawa, Abu Mudain, Al-Azaizeh, Abu Al-Haiyeh.
On October 26, 2023, 46 members of my own extended family were killed in one strike. By last summer, that number had grown to 400. Then I stopped counting.
A worker at the restaurant that was hit spoke about a pizza order placed by two girls. He said he overheard their conversation. “This is expensive, very expensive,” one girl said to the other. “That’s okay” she replied. “Let’s fulfil our dream and eat pizza before we die. No one knows.” They laughed and ordered. Soon after their order arrived, the restaurant was shelled and one of the girls was killed. The worker does not know the fate of the other. He, however, says he noticed a single slice from their pizza was eaten. We can only hope that the one who was killed got to taste it.
This, all this, is al-Ibādah. This is the destruction.
In the face of global inaction, we are all but powerless.
Our protests, our tears, our cries have all fallen on deaf ears.
But we are still left with our words. And speech does have power. In the Irish play Translations, which documents the linguistic destruction of the Irish language by the British army in the early 1800s, the playwright Brian Friel explains how by naming a thing we give it power, we “make it real”. So in a final act of desperation, let the commemoration of this year’s Nakba be the time when we name this thing and make it real: al-Ibādah, the Destruction.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect media’s editorial stance.
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