Nakba Day Statement from the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress
Sid Shniad
Nakba Day Statement from the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress
May 15, 2025
Today, on Nakba Day, we commemorate not only the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, but we affirm what Palestinians have always known:
the Nakba is not a matter of the past—it is ongoing and hasn’t stopped ever since.
From the pre-meditated ethnic cleansing of hundreds of villages in 1948, to the forced exile and denial of return to generations of refugees—who constitute the majority of all Palestinians, to the current genocidal campaign in Gaza, Zionism has always been a project of erasure and racial domination. What is happening today is not a deviation from Zionism—it is its very essence being live-streamed for the whole world to see.
As organizers of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress we declare with unwavering clarity: Zionism is a crime against the Palestinian people, a crime against Judaism, and a crime against humanity.
The same logic of ethnic cleansing that drove the expulsion of Palestinians from Yafa in 1948 and which established the Gaza Strip as a concentration camp to house millions of surplus human beings, is guiding the current genocide in Gaza. It is the inevitable continuation of the settler-colonial project whose entire mission is to complete what was started during the Nakba: the removal of Palestinians from their homeland to make way for a racially pure state.
Just like Israeli statements today, this logic was never a secret. As early as Dec 20, 1940, Zionist leader and Nakba architect Yosef Weitz wrote:
“There is no room for both peoples in this country. After the Arabs are transferred, the country will be wide open for us… The only solution is Palestine, at least Western Palestine, without Arabs… Not a single village or a single tribe must be left… There is no other solution.”
This genocidal vision is not marginal—it is foundational to the establishment and operation of the Zionist race-state. It has shaped every aspect of its legal system and policies ever since its creation, just as it shaped the siege on Gaza and it shapes the current attempt to annihilate the entirety of Gaza’s population—to finish the job of 1948.
“Will they have somewhere to return to?
- We are actually now rolling out the Nakba of Gaza. At the forefront, this is the Nakba of Gaza.
So this is the Nakba of Gaza, Avi Dichter?
- The Nakba of Gaza 2023.
And it will also end like this? With refugees?
- That is how it will end.”
(Avi Dichter, Israeli Minister and former Shin Bet chief, TV interview 11 Nov 2023)
We reject the efforts of those who claim there is a "moral" Zionism distinct from these atrocities. Trying to make such a distinction is reprehensible. The same arguments and type of thinking used to justify the ongoing genocide in Gaza are those that were used to justify the Nakba since 1948. Zionism cannot be rehabilitated. It must be dismantled.
Therefore, we stand up to Zionism and reject it in its entirety. It is precisely our duty to do so because of the legacy which is handed to us, echoed in the oath of the survivors of the Mauthausen concentration camp:
"True to these ideals, we make a solemn oath to continue to fight, firm and united, against imperialism and against the instigation of hatred between peoples.”
We call on all people of conscience—Jews and non-Jews, Palestinians and allies, survivors and descendants—to join us in opposing Zionism, rejecting genocide, and working toward a free and decolonised Palestine.
End the Nakba. End the Genocide. End Zionism. Decolonise Palestine!