Dania is a qualified Palestinian lawyer, with demonstrative experience in international law and a strong focus on human rights law and international criminal law. Her career spans a diverse range of experiences in the private, governmental, and non-governmental sectors. She has led legal work on business and human rights, torture and ill treatment cases, administrative detention and defamation campaigns against Palestinian NGOs. She has also led documentation and field work in the OPT on various matters, including forcible transfer and effects of Israeli settlements on Palestinians agriculture, access to water and electricity. Dania holds an LLM from the University of Edinburgh and an LLB from AlQuds University.
Western discourse and media often treat the Nakba as an abstract historical event, detached from lived reality. In doing so, it is frequently stripped of its human and material consequences, obscuring the extent to which the event marks not a concluded past, but the beginning of an ongoing system of dispossession and displacement upon the foundation of Israel in 1948 that continues to structurally deny Palestinian life today.
Since I moved to London, returning to Palestine and Jerusalem has become increasingly disorienting; not because the reality has changed but because it has become harder to ignore what daily life under such conditions entails. There is a disquieting recognition that, when one lives within this reality, the minutiae of everyday life are often normalized or set aside as survival takes precedence. Yet from a position of distance, there is a recurring sense of re-encountering the Nakba not as memory, but as present tense: in the fragmentation of space, the regulation of movement and the constant negotiation of access, permission and presence.
The demography of space is visibly shifting. Places that once formed Palestine's continuous social and geographic fabric are more disjointed and reconfigured than the past.
- Dania Abul Haj
Upon my recent visit, I reflected on this shifting landscape, namely through the expansion of Israel's extremist far right policies and the deepening economic deterioration in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. What is often reduced in external discourse to fragmented geographies is, in reality, an increasingly consolidated architecture of control. Its structure is visible beyond formal mechanisms: land confiscation, settlement expansion, home demolitions, night raids, administrative detention and a pervasive system of permits, checkpoints and road closures that governs entry, exit and internal movement. It is also witnessed in the physical transformation of the landscape itself: Roads are rerouted or restricted; familiar routes are severed or replaced, and areas that once felt immediately recognizable are increasingly difficult to place.
The demography of space is visibly shifting. Places that once formed Palestine's continuous social and geographic fabric are more disjointed and reconfigured than the past. Daily life has increasingly become structured around uncertainty and delay, producing not only physical restriction but the disruption of social and economic existence itself: work, education, health care and family life are all rendered contingent.
For Palestinians in Gaza, the Nakba is not memory but an intensified reality: a live-streamed genocide that encompasses the systematic destruction of residential neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, water systems and agricultural land, alongside mass displacement, repeated forced evacuation and the collapse of basic conditions of survival. For Palestinians in the diaspora, it persists through the gradual foreclosure of the right of return, even as families preserve the keys and deeds to homes from which they were displaced, maintaining an inherited archive of loss that is both legal and emotional.
The Nakba cannot be limited to those who were dispossessed or killed in 1948, nor to those whose villages remain as a testimony to an indigenous presence that predates and survives erasure.
- Dania Abul Haj
What becomes increasingly clear is that the Nakba cannot be confined to 1948. It is a continuing structure that adapts and intensifies across time, shaping Palestinian existence through repeated and escalating forms of dispossession and erasure. It is also sustained through what is often an inability or unwillingness to recognize its current reality, even as it unfolds in plain sight.
The widening gap between the language of international law and its enforcement in practice reinforces this dynamic. Despite extensive evidence of serious violations of international humanitarian law, international human rights law and other international crimes, there remains a persistent absence of accountability and meaningful enforcement. Such a divergence reflects not a lack of legal norms, but a lack of political will to apply them consistently, resulting in entrenched impunity and selective application of international law.
In conversations in London, particularly with those working within or alongside political parties, I am often asked about "peace plans" or "the way forward." This framing is deeply unsettling. It abstracts Palestinians into witnesses to discussions about the Nakba itself instead of unwilling targets of a dispossessive and colonial project, expected to evaluate pathways forward while its ongoing reality continues without delay or exception. It reflects a wider tendency to treat structural violence as a policy problem to be managed by a party facing asymmetry and disingenuous entreaties, rather than a reality that must first be brought to an end before any future can be seriously discussed in an equal context.
That core problem is why the Nakba cannot be limited to those who were dispossessed or killed in 1948, nor to those whose villages remain as a testimony to an indigenous presence that predates and survives erasure. Each experience is essential history, and it must not be forgotten. But history is not 1948. History is now, lived every day as though the current reality is normal, even as an entire people continues to struggle for its existence, let alone recognition of that existence.
What is often forgotten becomes, for those living it, a form of daily alienation. The Nakba is not only what happened in 1948; it is what has unfolded in recent years, what is unfolding today and what is sustained through the normalization of life alongside it. It is intensified by an increasingly extreme political environment, including punitive legislation and rhetoric directed at Palestinians, alongside deteriorating conditions for those deprived of liberty through detention, administrative orders and incarceration without due process.
There is, ultimately, a limit to what can be conveyed about the degree of intrusion into Palestinian life. It is not only movement or law, but presence itself: the extent to which life is structured, observed and constrained. Even in moments of rest, there is often an underlying awareness of a system that remains ever-present, a constant reminder of the conditions that shape every aspect of Palestinian existence.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
