Thread by @AsaWinstanley

"I submit, therefore, that this year is not the [72nd] anniversary of the Nakba at all, but rather one more year of enduring its brutality; that the history of the Nakba has never been a history of the past but decidedly a history of the present." electronicintifada.net/content/resist…

Extracts from Joseph Massad's brilliant 2008 Nakba essay: "While Israel has succeeded in imposing physical & geographic realities, its attempt to obliterate historical memory has failed. Palestinians are always standing in the way of its falsification of their history & its own"

"To identify the Nakba as a past and finished event is to declare its success and insist on the irreversibility of its achievements. It is to insist that there is no longer a struggle to define it, nor a successful resistance that stands in its way" #Nakba72

"That the Nakba transformed Palestine into 'the Jewish State,' Palestinians are told, is not reversible and no amount of civil rights activism or national struggle will undo this major achievement. Palestinian citizens of Israel however seem unconvinced and continue to resist"

"If Palestinians would simply accept their status as mankubin [catastrophe-d], the Nakba, as an unfinished process, would be finally completed. This logic of conquest is not exceptional at all, nor is it limited to the Israelis" #Nakba72

"The presence of Palestinians is what provokes Israel to expel them. If Palestinians would accept to displace themselves and leave Palestine, Israel tells them, there would no longer be expulsions... Zionist insistence on self-displacement is not only directed at Palestinians."

"Since its inception until now, Zionism and Israel have always recommended and continue to recommend that world Jewry displace itself and come to Israel. Like the Palestinians, most Jews outside Israel continue to resist Israel’s call on them to displace themselves." #Nakba72

"While Israel is no longer able to force Jews outside its borders to move to it (and there were many times when it could), it has the ability and the will to displace the Palestinians no matter how much they resist." #Nakba72

"In resisting Israel, Palestinians have forced the world to witness the Nakba as present action; one that, contrary to Zionist wisdom, is indeed reversible. This is precisely what galls Israel and the Zionist movement." #Nakba72

"Israel’s inability to complete its mission of thoroughly colonizing Palestine, of expelling all Palestinians, of 'gathering' all Jews in the world in its colony, keeps it uneasy & keeps its project always in the present continuous" Joseph Massad electronicintifada.net/content/resist… #Nakba72