Every year since 1948, Palestinians in historical Palestine and the diaspora commemorate on May 15th the ongoing Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), recalling the forced exodus of 750,000 indigenous Palestinians from their lands and the ethnic cleansing of towns and villages at the hands of Zionist forces.
At a time when Palestinians are facing remorselessly fierce campaigns to delegitimize their narrative and suffocate any criticism of Israel’s oppression against them on the flawed premise that conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, this essay attempts to revisit the Nakba as a departure point in order to deconstruct Zionism and redefine it as a gendered colonial project.
It places women at the center of revising the Nakba to highlight Zionist strategies to instrumentalize sexual violence as a primary tool of eliminating indigenous Palestinians, and maintaining the Israeli settler-colonial regime.
Zionism is a settler-colonial project
Since the mid-1990s, the settler-colonial paradigm has gained prominence in Palestine studies. The emerging debates on the validity and applicability of the settler-