“I remember them / and I ride the nightmare train with them / each night / and my coffee, this morning / I’m drinking it with them // You, murderer— / Who remembers you?”

Najwan Darwish, “Who Remembers the Armenians?”

The world must accept what Palestinians have been trying to tell us for generations: Israel is not only murdering the people of Palestine, it is erasing them, utterly and absolutely. It wants Palestine vanished and then forgotten, by any means necessary.

Why else bomb the universities?

Why else raze the cemeteries?

Why else assassinate the poets?

Israel wants to make Palestinian life unlivable and Palestinian death ungrievable. Along with its partners in genocide, the United States chief among them, Israel tells us that resistance and mourning are illegitimate. Of course it does! Murderers never accept resistance from their victims or with their victims. Mourning, true mourning, is inconceivable to them.

Abdaljiwad Omar warns us against mourning which “declares loss as past.” Israel wants us to build museums, to construct Palestine and Palestinians as artifacts in a tragic past—a way of erasing the living memory of Palestinian existence by freezing it in time. An unfortunate necessity, Israel’s founding fathers may have said, to make the desert bloom. The colonizers cry crocodile tears and call it mourning. But the true work of mourning is a work of remembrance into the present and for the sake of a future.

Colonizers want nothing more than to erase the memories of the colonized. Cultural erasure and physical expulsion are the methods. And, where expulsion fails, extermination soon follows. Israel’s necropolitical regime creates catastrophic conditions for the colonized. It guarantees catastrophe into perpetuity.

Nakba. Catastrophe. This is what Palestinians call the events of 1948, when Israel violently displaced over 750,000 Palestinian people. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were trampled underfoot, their residents evicted with guns held to their heads. Entire cities were left barren after Zionist forces expelled all their inhabitants. Many Palestinian families still have the keys to their homes, their homes stolen out from under them during the 1948 Nakba.

When you ask an Israeli about 1948, they don’t think of the Nakba. They think of the so-called “War of Independence,” when their heroic leaders liberated the land from the Arabs after attaining freedom from subjugation under British rule. Independence from the British followed by newly invigorated efforts to tear apart the lives of the colonized: Israel, a veritable America in miniature.

The truth of Israel—like the truth of America—is the truth of its victims. Its innumerable victims.

Innumerable, but numbered. Turned into numbers by the perpetual onslaught of colonial terror. AI-powered drones crunch numbers. American warheads bury them under rubble.

Palestinian artists, doctors, friends, and lovers are all “targets;” Palestinian homes are “structures;” Palestinian children are “young people.” Lives are turned into cleaned-up categories the killer-statisticians use to define their data fields. The morally exculpating language of colonialism and the War on Terror preempts even the need for the colonizer to forget his own crimes. There’s no crime in updating a spreadsheet. 

Nakba. Catastrophe. This is what Palestinians call the ongoing process of their erasure, as people and as a people. Nakba: the steady march towards extinction. Now, past the tipping point, a march become a sprint.

Israel remembers the Palestinians only through targeting systems, reduced to pixels on screens in Tel Aviv.

Who is the Israeli sniper but Chris Kyle born and raised a few miles from his future victims?

Israel remembers the Palestinians only as an inconvenient population of undesirables, void of history and culture.

Who is the Israeli settler but a human bulldozer, crushing and flattening the life-world of the settled?

We cannot remember like the colonizers. We must remember the Palestinians in the fullness of their humanity—past, present, future. We must remember them as a present against those who wish to foreclose their future. They cannot be extinguished. They cannot be extinguished.