They named it catastrophe because no other word held the weight of what was taken.
Not just the land. The olive trees with their centuries folded into root. The stone houses with their doors still warm from the hands that had always opened them. The names of villages that exist now only in the mouths of those who were made to leave them, passed down like holy text, like wound, like compass.
Lubya. Saffuriyya. Haifa. Deir Yassin. Al-Lajjun. Yaffa.
Say them. They are not past tense.
This is what erasure looks like when it is methodical.
You do not only remove the people. You plant trees over the rubble so the rubble looks like forest. You rename the streets so the maps lie. You call the theft a miracle. You call the survivors a threat. You call the children of the survivors a threat. You call the memory of home a threat.
You build a state on the premise that a people can be made to un-belong if enough force is applied across enough decades.
Seventy-eight years is a long time to keep proving that premise wrong.
And yet.
They remain.
Not as symbol. Not as tragedy archived in someone else's conscience. As people, rooted and breathing, carrying the key that was never metaphorical, that was always a key to a door that still exists somewhere beneath someone else's certainty that it does not.
Against the guns and the bureaucratic violence and the starvation engineered with spreadsheet precision and the bombs that know the names of hospitals and the cease-fires that were never really that,
they remain.
In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in the diaspora, inside the borders of what is called "Israel" and is not peace, in the refugee camps that were supposed to be temporary seventy-eight years ago,
they remain.
Return is not a dream deferred. It is a coordinate. It is a direction. It is the thing that cannot be negotiated away because it was never on the table to begin with.
It belongs to them.
Today is May 15.
The world will say many things today. Some will say both sides. Some will say complex. Some will say we must consider all perspectives as if one perspective is not a boot and another is not a throat.
I am not Palestinian. I do not speak for Palestinian people. I speak only as a witness who has read enough history to know that what was done was not inevitable, was not natural, was not ancient hatreds made flesh.
It was a plan. It was carried out. It is still being carried out, in real time, while we watch.
Witnessing without naming is not witnessing. It is looking away with your eyes open.
Nakba. Catastrophe. Ongoing. Dispossession as policy. Erasure as architecture. Genocide as the current tense, not the history lesson.
And I name what cannot be erased.
The memory held in the body of every person who knows which direction home is.
The child in Gaza who drew her house before the house was gone. Who drew it after. Who will draw it again.
The grandmother in the camp who has outlasted every prediction that she would forget.
The poet Refaat who wrote if I must die, let it bring hope and was killed and whose words are still here, still moving through the world like light that started before the source went dark.
Seventy-eight years.
They have not disappeared. They have not been made to un-belong. They have not stopped knowing where they come from and where they are going.
Freedom is not the word you use for something that might happen someday.
It is the word for what is already true in the bones of a people that colonialism could not finish because you cannot finish what was never yours to end.
Return is their right. Freedom is their destiny.
And this, today, is witness.
They remain.
For the Palestinian people, on the 78th commemoration of the Nakba. From a non-Palestinian writer, in solidarity, in grief, and in unwavering commitment to liberation and return.