TPAN

Every year, 15 May marks Nakba Day. This year marks 78 years of ongoing Nakba: 78 years of the genocide of the Palestinian people and 78 years of zionist colonisation of Palestine.

In 1948, and the years leading up to it, zionist militias committed massacres and forcibly displaced almost a million Palestinians from their homeland. Most believed they would eventually return, taking the keys to their homes with them in that belief. But the perpetrators of this Nakba, this catastrophe, sought to prevent Palestinian return. Countless homes were destroyed, entire villages erased, and forests planted over them to hide the crimes and entrench their position. Their so-called state was built on land where people were already living.

Zionists demand that we acknowledge that israel has a right to exist. But who grants that right? What is it based on? Didn't the Palestinians have a right to live in freedom, dignity and peace in their homeland? Don't they still have that right today?

The Nakba started in 1948, but it is still ongoing. It continues in Gaza, where the genocide is still continuing, despite the so-called ceasefire. The zionist occupation continues expanding the so-called yellow line every day, now controlling over half of the Gaza strip. Palestinians can wake up on any given morning and suddenly find themselves inside an area arbitrarily declared a military zone, where they are treated as ‘legitimate targets’. even outside of these zones, israel continues to bomb, starve and murder Palestinians while blocking entry of desperately needed food, medicine, fuel and aid.

The Nakba also continues in the Westbank, where settlers and state violence escalates under an apartheid system enforced through checkpoints, military occupation, land theft, home demolition, and segregation. The Nakba also continues through the denial of the right to return of millions of Palestinians living in exile and the diaspora.

Australia is not neutral in this. The australian government continues to enable the ongoing Nakba through political, diplomatic and material support for israel while suppressing Palestinian voices at home. Our taxpayers money and institutions are used to sustain a state currently carrying out genocide while politicians remain concerned with protecting the interests of the israeli lobby rather than standing for justice or international law.

We are also witnessing the language of cultural safety increasingly weaponised in the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion and the broader australian political discourse to suppress solidarity with Palestine. Originating in Aotearoa - New Zealand, the concept of cultural safety comes from Maori nursing practices designed to protect marginalised communities from institutional harm and colonial violence. It was a concept developed to ensure respect for first nations cultural practices in a colonised world. We understand here that from this heritage of cultural safety comes an inherent challenge of power. What we see in the current australian discourse is cultural safety leveraged to shield states from criticism, criminalise political dissent and, in a perverse inversion of its historical roots, protect colonial ideologies from scrutiny.

To invoke cultural safety in order to censor Palestinian grief, anger or resistance completely inverts the meaning of the term. There is nothing culturally safe about demanding silence from oppressed people while their families are massacred in real time. There is nothing safe about policing the language of the colonised while materially supporting the coloniser.

After 78 years, to simply pray for peace without challenging the structures producing violence becomes meaningless. A peace built on silence, neutrality or coexistence without liberation preserves the conditions that created the Nakba in the first place. Peace without justice is not peace at all. Justice is what creates the conditions of peace. And there can be no peace while colonisation, apartheid, siege, occupation and genocide continue.