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Al-Araby
Al-Araby
Nakba is Arabic for “catastrophe” and refers to the 1948 dispossession and displacement of nearly 750,000 Palestinians in the wake of Israel’s inception. Even though “catastrophe” suggests a singular past event, the Nakba for Palestinians is an abridged word for a series of disasters that befell them, commencing with the First Zionist Congress in 1897, peaking in 1948, and continuing today as an evolving system of military occupation and apartheid. One might even say it is a past event that is happening in the present, acting as both collective traumatic memory and a signifier of today’s strug…