On May 15, Palestinians mark the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the 1948 mass displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the founding of the Israeli colony. Seventy-seven years later, the Nakba continues. From the siege of Gaza to the creeping annexation of the West Bank, Israel’s colonial project remains fundamentally intact. This week, as Israel escalates plans to fully annex Gaza and increase repression in the West Bank, Palestinians and their allies across the world are rising in protest.

The Nakba: A Continuing Process

The Nakba is not a singular event confined to 1948, but an ongoing process of colonialism, displacement, and apartheid. The Zionist project was materially enabled by British imperialism, which during the Mandate period facilitated land seizures, supported settler paramilitaries, and violently repressed Palestinian resistance. This laid the groundwork for the creation of a Jewish-majority colony. After 1948, U.S. patronage deepened this trajectory, providing Israel with military, economic, and diplomatic support that has allowed its colonial project to continue and expand.

The project of land accumulation and demographic dominance led to mass expulsions, massacres, and permanent military occupation. Israel’s formation and maintenance depend on racialised apartheid, ecological plunder, and imperialist subsidies. The colony intensified contradictions between social classes and national groups by enforcing a regime in which Israeli citizens, particularly the dominant Jewish bourgeoisie, are economically privileged, while Palestinians are systematically excluded from resources such as food, housing, employment, and mobility. Within this structure, Palestinian workers have been hyper-exploited or entirely dispossessed, while Israeli capital accumulates wealth through militarisation, surveillance, and land seizure. This exploitative order is obscured and justified by a pervasive security narrative, which casts the colonised as inherently violent and the coloniser as merely defensive, transforming acts of occupation and apartheid into supposedly necessary measures of protection.

The Nakba continues today through displacement in East Jerusalem, siege and starvation in Gaza, and home demolitions in the West Bank. The Israeli colony functions as an instrument of repression, legitimised by dominant ideological narratives that portray resistance as terrorism and apartheid as democracy.

Israel today serves as a key node in the U.S.-led imperialist system. It is both a military outpost and a testing ground for the tools of repression, surveillance technologies, border walls, drone warfare, and counterinsurgency tactics, which are then exported to other repressive regimes. U.S. financial and military aid ensures Israel’s dominance, reinforcing its capacity to maintain a system of apartheid and occupation. Meanwhile, U.S. media and cultural industries sustain ideological cover for these actions, framing the coloniser as democratic and peaceful, and the colonised as violent and irrational. Australia, as a junior imperialist partner, is complicit through arms deals, intelligence sharing, bilateral trade agreements, and near-unconditional diplomatic support for Israeli aggression. This complicity ties Australia not only to the ongoing colonial violence in Palestine but also to the wider structure of imperialist domination globally.

Resistance in Palestine is inseparable from global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. This resistance is not just national or cultural—it is part of a wider battle against a world system rooted in exploitation, militarism, and imperial domination. Palestinian demands for decolonisation, return, and liberation challenge the foundations of global capitalist order and align with struggles of the oppressed everywhere.

Current Crisis: Genocide and Annexation

On Nakba Day 2025, Israel’s far-right government is advancing plans to occupy and annex Gaza following its devastating siege. These plans are not isolated; they are part of a wider strategy to annex the West Bank and render Palestinian statehood impossible. The timing of this latest round of annexation is not incidental; it is a calculated and brazen move. Israel’s announcement that it will formally intensify the occupation of Gaza on May 15, 2025, precisely 77 years to the day since the Nakba began, reveals the colony’s contempt for Palestinian memory and resistance. This is not only an act of expansionism; it is an ideological provocation, meant to humiliate and erase, asserting colonial dominance on the very day Palestinians mourn their dispossession.

The Duty of Revolutionary Internationalism

The genocide in Gaza and ongoing annexation of Palestine are not aberrations, they are the logical conclusion of colonial capitalism. For comrades in Australia, Nakba Day is not just a memorial, but a call to organise. Join the rallies. Reject Zionist apartheid. And build the anti-imperialist, decolonial movement that can dismantle Australian and Israeli capitalism alike.

Palestine Solidarity Rallies in Australia (May 12–19, 2025)

Attending these rallies is an important act of internationalist solidarity. They are moments to publicly reject the ongoing colonial violence in Palestine, to demand an end to Australian complicity, and to affirm that the Palestinian struggle is part of our collective fight for justice. Presence on the streets helps build pressure, amplify Palestinian voices, and sustain a broader anti-imperialist movement rooted in resistance and liberation.

Event details across Australia are available via the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.

Darwin: Thursday, 15 May at 4:00 pm, Smith Street Mall
Darwin: Thursday, 15 May at 5:00 pm, Luke Gosling’s office, Casuarina
Adelaide: Thursday, 15 May at 5:00 pm, Parliament House
Geelong: Thursday, 15 May at 5:30 pm, Little Malop St
Newcastle: Thursday, 15 May at 6:00 pm, Civic Park
Sydney: Thursday, 15 May at 6:30 pm, Town Hall
Perth: Saturday, 17 May at 11:00 am, Forrest Place
Hobart: Saturday, 17 May at 11:00 am, cnr Davey & Campbell Streets
Canberra: Saturday, 17 May at 12:00 pm, Civic Square
Warrnambool: Sunday, 18 May at 10:00 am, Warrnambool Civic Green
Melbourne: Sunday, 18 May at 12:00 pm, State Library
Brisbane: Sunday, 18 May at 1:00 pm, King George Square
Traralgon: Sunday, 18 May at 1:00 pm, Clocktower, Franklin St
Adelaide: Sunday, 18 May at 2:00 pm, Parliament House