The Psychological context:
Every word in Arabic when analyzed must be reduced to its three-letters root which simply equal to the “infinitive” in English or the simple present verb, except in Arabic this “infinitive” is always just three letters. Nakbah نكبة can be reduced to N-K-B نكب nakab which mean to devastate or destroy completely. However, Nakbah means both the actual devastation and the psychological outcome of it. If someone loses his whole family in a car accidentو for example, we say he was (intakab انتكب) devastated which doesn’t only mean the outcome of the accident but more the inner devastation of the person who must have been psychologically destroyed by that great loss with the feeling of loneliness, being plucked out of his habitat and thrown in the middle of nowhere, to live the horror itself. This is exactly the feeling of the (mankoub منكوب) devastated person which might accompany him for his whole life and nothing can compensate the loss he experienced.
“I am from there,
I am from here,
But I am not there nor here
I’ve got two names that meet and detach
And two languages I forgot by which I was dreaming …”
The Palestinian exiled poet Mahmoud Darwish
This is EXACTLY the feeling of being utterly lost and belong to nowhere but to there… your original home.
Lots (if not most) of Palestinians feel this alienation of being uprooted from their homes and thrown in an alien world that they can’t accommodate with. They feel that they belong there, to their razed villages and demolished homes that were looted by the zionist (jewish) colonizers of Palestine. This feeling of alienation, of being devastated, of being “Mankoub” cant be felt or lived but by those who are unjustifiably ethnically cleansed from their spiritual, ancestral and historical nest. Nabkah; devastation (or wrongly translated as catastrophe) doesn’t mean the physical loss only, but it is more into the deep ongoing feeling of hollowness and nothingness of this world, of an unjustified and unexplained loss that cant be cured but by reverse. If you lose your whole family, nothing would compensate you but the return of them, otherwise you will live the devastation your whole life. And this what the Palestinians still feel even after 70 years of being plucked out of their ancestral villages and towns.
It would be strange (but expected) to find a “jewish” Zionist colonizer in Palestine writing of the Nakbah who not only miss the inner feeling of it, but the philological context of it by (probably intentionally) misspelling the Nakbah into “Naqba” (which has no root in Arabic.
Imagine if a Nazi German writes about the holocaust saying that we did this and that for the jews, can he get the meaning and the feeling of it? Imagine a rapist who is still raping his victim and while he is still on her he talks about his poor victim saying: look at this poor victim and what I did to her, look how I tore hear clothes and scratched her skin .. can he be listened to? Can he really feel the criminality of his act? This is EXACTLY how it is when a Zionist “jewish” occupier in Palestine writes about his crimes of devastating the Palestinians and ethnically cleansing them especially when he/she is still living on a stolen Palestinian land.
I can’t buy into the trick of some Zionists who write about the Palestinian Nakbah while they are still living in Palestinian stolen homes. But this is explained: some Zionists like those leftists who like to play the “humanist”, feel it is profitable to write a selling book about Palestine (the name that sells very good everywhere) in order to get money and look good as being a “humanist” occupier. A rapist cant talk about his victim while still riding it, and a Zionist cant play the humanist while still living on a Palestinian stolen home.
The roots of the Nakbah:
Ironically, but so true, the first use of the word Nakbah was used by the Christian Arab writer George Antonius in 1920 to describe the devastation the Britons did to Palestine and the Palestinian in their occupation starting from 1917. This indicates that the Palestinian Nakbah had started actually long before the actual ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948.
The Zionist Hasbarah goes like this: The Palestinians attacked the “poor” jews and the jews retaliated and won the battle, that simple.
Another Zionist Hasbaraah trick is: The Nakbah is an old history, lets not talk about it and just make peace, make love.
Once I was talking with a “humanist” “peace-loving” Zionist about the Nakbah and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, then he said: “Oh! That’s an old history that can’t be reversed’.”, Then I replied: “How on earth can you justify the ancient jewish invasion of Palestine of 3000 years ago and want to “return” to a land that you ORIGINALLY invaded coming out of the Egyptian enslavement, while cant digest that the recently massacred out Palestinian want to return to their ancestral homes.? …
This is the Zionist Talmudic criminal logic of justifying their crimes and denying the natives of Palestine their basic rights. It is a racist claim based on the Talmudic brainwashing of ancient heresies of the “chosen people” and the “promised land”.
The Nakbah (devastation) of the Palestinians didn’t start just in 1947-8, It started over a hundred years ago when the European Zionist “jews” held their First Zionist conference in Basl in 1897, when they assigned Palestine as their target for the jewish colonization, which mean inevitable the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Palestinian Nakbah started by the British Balfour Declaration of promising Palestine to the European colonizers (a declaration that British doesn’t have the right to issue as it never owned Palestine). It started by forming the Zionist Jewish National Fund to facilitate the Zionist colonizing of Palestine in 1903. It started by the British occupation of Palestine in 1917, it started by crushing the first Palestinian uprising in 1922, by British devastating the Palestinian revolt in 1929, it started by the Brutal British suppression of the Palestinian “revolution” that continued for 3 years in 1936-9 during which the European Britons systematically devastated the Palestinian political-economic-social structure to pave the way for the Zionist colony in Palestine. In the 1936-9 revolt, the British occupiers killed, injured imprisoned or exiled one-fifth of the Palestinian male population, a devastation that if struck Britain now will make a huge socio-economic catastrophe in Britain.
Why Gaza?
When talking of Gaza you got to know that over 73% of the people living in this concentration camp are not originally from there, they had been ethnically cleansed from their homes in the occupied and razed Palestinian towns and villages like Ashkilon, Jaffa, Lod, Ramleh Haifa and the rest of the now zionist colonies. Gaza is the clearest manifestation of the Palestinian Nakbah and systematic devastation the Britons and the zionists have been perpetrating for over a century now. There, people are fighting back for their stolen homes and land especially as they are imprisoned, starved and jammed in what is knows now as the biggest open air prison in the world. They have been left to lick their misery for all these 70 years without anybody caring of them, it is time for them to start fighting for their robbed homes
“No place like home”
Displaced, ethnically cleansed, devastated and Mankoub, the Palestinians wont forget their stolen homes nor the soil they nurtured for thousands of years and leave them for the zionist European colonizers no matter how long it takes nor how many lives it would take. Within this context one can understand the Palestinian Great March of Return that is expected to be culminated in the 70th memory of the Nakbah on May the 15th every year, 70 years of systematic continuous devastation. You cant stop masses marching back for their homes, no matter how killing machinery you used nor how long you tried !
Sami, The Bedouin. 