The Palestinians’ perseverance and resilience have not broken or wavered, even though it has been 71 years since the Palestinian Nakba, and it continues to grow and intensify. The Palestinians insist on freedom, independence, the restoration of their confiscated rights, and on returning to their homeland and their determination grows and is handed down to generation after generation. The Great March of Return continues despite the obstacles, pitfalls, and conspiracies accompanying it.
Over the past seven decades, the age of the Palestinian Nakba, the number of Palestinians has multiplied by 9, amounting to over 13 million Palestinians. Half of the Palestinian population is inside Palestine, and the other half is outside. The Palestinian struggle to establish an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes has continued nonstop.
In 1947 and 1948, Zionist gangs committed more than seventy massacres in the historic cities and villages of Palestine, killing more than 15,000 Palestinian martyrs. Moreover, they displaced more than 800,000 Palestinians inside and outside Palestine and destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages and communities. Israel has now usurped over 85 per cent of historical Palestine, amounting to 27,000 square kilometres and about 7 million Israeli occupiers live there.
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The Zionist project is not yet complete in historic Palestine, because this occupation project aims to confiscate all of Palestine, establish a Jewish nation-state, and expel all the Palestinians from their land and property. The comprehensive Palestinian war on the Palestinian people is moving in three directions: geographic, demographic, and financial/economic direction, but the goal is one: to uproot the Palestinians from their land. The process of confiscating and stealing Palestinian land across occupied Palestine, with a focus on occupied Jerusalem.

Palestinians perform on the ruins of a home which was bombed by Israeli warplanes in Gaza on 14 May 2019 [Mohammed Asad/Middle East Monitor]
The Palestinian people are facing a new Nakba within the next three months, known as the deal of the century. This Nakba began implementation last year, but the next three months will witness the continuation of the new Nakba’s chapters, which aim to completely liquidate the Palestinian cause, in cooperation and direct coordination between the Israeli occupation and the American Zionist administration, headed by Trump, and the complicity of others.
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This article first appeared in Arabic in Addustour on 15 May 2019
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.