Systemic erasure of Palestinian memory fuels global mobilisations amid far-right counter-protests: Nakba Day as structural resistance to colonial amnesia
Original framing: “Quarter of a million join Nakba Day rally as far-right protest also takes place in central London” — Middle East Eye
The Nakba (1948) is the culmination of a century of Zionist settler-colonialism, enabled by British colonial policies and later institutionalised through UN Partition Plan (1947) and Israeli state violence. Historical parallels include the 1947-48 partition of India, the 1965-66 Indonesian massacres, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where colonial cartography and ethnic cleansing were justified as 'national security.' The erasure of Palestinian history is part of a broader pattern of Western historiography that privileges colonial narratives over Indigenous ones.
The Nakba is not a historical footnote but a living wound in the body of global settler-colonialism, where the erasure of Palestinian memory is both a tool and a symptom of Western hegemony.
The 76-year continuum of resistance—from the villages destroyed in 1948 to the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank—demands a systemic response that centres Indigenous Palestinian epistemologies, dismantles Zionist historiography in education, and builds transnational solidarity with other anti-colonial movements. The far-right counter-protests in London are not isolated incidents but part of a transnational white supremacist network that opposes not just Palestinian rights but any challenge to Western imperialism. Solution pathways must therefore be intersectional, linking BDS campaigns to Indigenous land reclamation, digital resistance to algorithmic erasure, and decolonial education to the unlearning of colonial myths. The trickster’s laughter—whether in Palestinian oral histories or global memes—reveals the absurdity of these power structures, offering a path to liberation that is both joyful and disciplined.