Seventy-eight years since an entire people were torn from their homes, their olive groves, their streets, their dead, and their memory. Seventy-eight years since the Nakba — the catastrophe — when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their land while the world learned to look away behind diplomatic language and strategic silence.

The Nakba was not an accident of history. It was not the inevitable consequence of an abstract war between equals. It was a planned, organized, and executed ethnic cleansing aimed at emptying Palestine of Palestinians in order to build a state upon the physical and human ruins of another people. Entire villages were erased from the map. Families were separated forever. Homes were occupied while their owners walked into exile believing they would return within days. They were never allowed to return.

And since then, the Nakba has never ended. Today, it continues to advance at an alarming pace with international complicity.

Because the Nakba is not only 1948. The Nakba is the continuous present of a people forced to permanently justify their own existence. It is the checkpoint, the wall, house demolitions, land theft, illegal settlements, the blockade, administrative detention, and the daily humiliation transformed into a political system. It is Gaza turned into a laboratory of collective punishment while Western governments speak of a “right to defend itself” as thousands of children are buried beneath rubble with no possibility of defense at all.

There is something profoundly obscene in the way Palestinian suffering has been managed by the media for decades. Every massacre is followed by calls for “restraint.” Every mass killing is relativized through bureaucratic language that dehumanizes the victims. Palestinians are expected to remain calm while burying their children. They are asked to condemn their own despair before even being granted the elementary right to live freely.

Meanwhile, Western democracies — including Canada and much of Europe — continue to finance, arm, or politically and diplomatically legitimize a regime of occupation and apartheid that has been denounced for years by international human rights organizations. It is not enough to mourn the victims while maintaining economic, military, and strategic relations with those sustaining this machinery of expulsion and death.

The Palestinian tragedy also reveals another uncomfortable truth: the structural racism that determines which lives deserve mourning and which become mere statistics. Some deaths dominate headlines for weeks, while others disappear behind impersonal terms like “collateral damage.” Some refugees immediately inspire solidarity, while others are treated as demographic threats.

But Palestine resists.

It resists in the stubborn memory carried through generations in the form of old keys. It resists in mothers teaching their children the names of villages destroyed decades ago. It resists in culture, in poetry, in language, and in the dignity of those who continue to affirm that simply existing is already a form of struggle. It resists in every demonstration around the world where millions refuse to accept that barbarism can become normalized indefinitely.

Remembering the Nakba is not an act of nostalgia. It is a political and moral obligation. Because what began seventy-eight years ago does not belong to the past: it is still happening before our eyes.

And one day, the world will have to ask itself how it was possible to witness for decades the systematic destruction of an entire people while continuing to speak of human rights, democracy, and civilization.

Long live Palestine. We do not forget.