Baker Zoubi
+972 Magazine / April 28, 2026
After police prevented the main procession, families returned to depopulated villages across the country, keeping alive the memory of what was lost in 1948.
Each year on Israel’s Independence Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel take part in the March of Return — an annual protest to the site of a different Palestinian village depopulated in 1948. Organized by the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID), this year’s march was set to head to Al-Damun, near Acre. But sweeping Israel Police restrictions forced its cancellation, marking the second consecutive year it did not take place.
Instead, organizers moved the commemoration online, hosting a virtual program with speeches by High Follow-Up Committee Chairman Jamal Zahalka, Israeli Jewish journalist Israel Frey, representatives of ADRID, as well as cultural performances and recorded testimonies from elders displaced in 1948.
Yet the absence of a central procession did not stop Palestinians from commemorating the Nakba on their own terms. Throughout the week of Israel’s “Independence Day” — marked each year by March of Return organizers with the slogan “Their independence is our Nakba” — hundreds made their own way to the sites of destroyed villages across the land.
They came in smaller numbers and without centralized coordination, but with the same purpose: to mark the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian communities during the campaign of ethnic cleansing that paved the way for Israel’s establishment. Families returned to the lands from which they were uprooted, sharing meals and stories carried across generations.
In the village of Miska, near the majority-Jewish city of Kfar Saba, dozens of Jewish activists joined descendants of those displaced from the village, marching across the site where only two walls of the main mosque still stand. Amjad Shbita, Secretary-General of the political party Hadash, whose family was displaced from Miska, said the annual march there has grown steadily in recent years. This year, he added, efforts to block the central March of Return had the opposite effect: instead of concentrating attention in one place, they spurred renewed visits across many villages.
Hundreds also gathered at Al-Damun, the original destination of the main march. This time, organizing extended beyond ADRID to local family committees. In recent years, similar groups have emerged across many displaced communities, connecting second, third, and fourth-generation descendants — sometimes through WhatsApp groups, and in other cases through regular visits and collective activities.
‘I am from Al-Mujaydil’
On a spring morning, 80-year-old Saeed Nakhash, known as Abu Jihad, walked through a park in the northern Israeli town of Migdal HaEmek. Carrying a large pot, he called out to those nearby — Palestinians of all ages — to gather around the dining table. On the menu: mujaddara, salad, and yogurt.
But this was not a family gathering in his backyard. The park sits atop the ruins of Al-Mujaydil, the village from which Nakhash and others of his generation were expelled in 1948 by Zionist paramilitary forces.
Before that war, Al-Mujaydil was home to more than 2000 Palestinian residents. Most were Muslim, the rest were Greek Orthodox and Catholic Christians. The village had a mosque, two churches and some 18,000 dunams of surrounding farm land, where residents grew grain and olives. On July 15, 1948, it was captured by Haganah forces who expelled its entire population. Many, like Nakhash’s family, resettled in Nazareth or nearby Yafi’a; others fled to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
“Here was the village’s Muslim cemetery, and there are also two Christian cemeteries,” Nakhash told +972 Magazine, standing at the edge of the park. Scattered among the grass were fragments of metal arches and beams — the last visible traces of the village that once stood there.
Migdal HaEmek was established in 1953 as a transit camp for Jewish immigrants from Arab countries (“ma’abara”), several years after Al-Mujaydil was destroyed. In the intervening years, Nakhash recalled, the rubble of the village remained piled high. “Later, they moved the rubble to the nearby slope, near the cemetery. They covered part of it and created a large mound. That mound is where we are standing right now,” he said. “The trees around us and this beautiful vegetation — they grew on the ruins of our homes.”
Nakhash was just two years old when his family was expelled. The story of their displacement was repeated throughout his childhood: they left through the valley separating Al-Mujaydil from Yafi’a. Most families continued toward the Al-Battuf plain, but his family reached Arraba, where they were advised to return to Nazareth in the hope that they might eventually be allowed back to their village.
“Nowhere do I feel more at home than here — not even in my house in Nazareth,” he said. “The children and grandchildren say they are from Nazareth, but originally from Al-Mujaydil. I could never say it any other way: I am from Al-Mujaydil.”
Nakhash was among dozens participating in a tour organized by the Association for the Preservation of the Heritage of Al-Mujaydil Village, which brings together descendants of those displaced and works to maintain connections among them. This year’s event marked the first large-scale gathering of its kind.
Alongside personal testimonies, participants viewed historical maps and aerial photographs illustrating the village’s former scale and location — between Nazareth and Marj Ibn Amer (the Jezreel Valley), near the Hejaz railway and the route of the Iraqi oil pipeline.
The atmosphere was almost festive. There was laughter, even ululation. Some of those expelled as children pointed out where homes and landmarks, long etched in their memory, had once stood. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren listened.
“Here was our house,” one participant said. “And over there was the olive press. People from all over the area used to come here, even from the nearby kibbutzim,” another added.
Nearby stood the village of Ma’alul. After 1948, a military base was built on its lands, yet its residents continue to gather regularly in the village church — the only structure still standing — to mark holidays. Perhaps for this reason, Ma’alul remains relatively well known, while Al-Mujaydil, though bigger, has largely faded from public awareness.
“Al-Mujaydil was a large and central village, perhaps even comparable to Saffuriya,” said 88-year-old Ibrahim Kasabri, known as Abu Amad, referring to another major depopulated village now replaced by the moshav Tzipori. “Students from Ma’alul studied in the school and church in Al-Mujaydil. We had two olive presses, several shops, a mosque, and two churches.
“The residents of Ma’alul were more active in returning to their village and maintaining a presence there,” he continued. “I hope the activity we are starting now in Al-Mujaydil will continue, because the feeling of being here, on our land, is different.”
‘It all feels as if it is happening here and now’
One question surfaced again and again during the tour of Al-Mujaydil: How did you leave?
“There are different versions,” said Saeed Nakhash. “Some say the residents fled because of loud banging on barrels, as if they were frightened for no reason. But that is not the truth. Armed [Zionist paramilitary] forces surrounded the village and opened fire. They shot into the village and killed one or two people here, near where we are sitting. People took their children and whatever they could carry — and fled.”
Kasabri, who was around nine years old at the time, remembered it similarly. “I remember leaving Al-Mjeidal: people carrying their belongings and children on their backs. Those who had a donkey loaded what they could onto it. We left in fear, without direction.”
In the early years after their expulsion, displaced residents pooled money and hired a lawyer from Haifa in an attempt to secure their return. “There were officials in the Israeli government who agreed to allow only the Christians to come back,” Nakhash said. “But the villagers rejected the offer; they insisted we all return together.”
Many believed they would be gone only a few days. Some tried to sneak back under military rule to retrieve belongings. “They returned like thieves to their own homes,” Nakhash said. “Then the harsh reality set in: within a short time, we went from farmers with homes, land, and fields to refugees renting rooms in Nazareth, looking for work and trying to survive. The years passed quickly, and life in Nazareth became fixed.”
For some participants, this tour was a first return. Jazi Arouk (88) stood in the church courtyard and pointed to what once was. “There, in that area, was my aunt’s house. Later there was a council office. The school was here, the olive press, our home, and my father’s lands.”
Leaning on a table at the church entrance, he paused. “I can reconstruct everything. In this church, I received vaccinations as a child. Everything comes back like a film: our wandering and playing as children in the village, the locations of the houses — even though nothing remains — down to the colours of the clothes. Even the moment when the villagers left toward the nearby wadi, and from there to Yafi’a, it all feels as if it is happening here and now.”
Inheriting the past
My own village, Kafr Misr, is among the few whose residents were not expelled in 1948. Still, each year on Nakba Day, I take my family on a tour of other villages in the Lower Galilee that were ethnically cleansed during that war.
This year, we walked the lands of Hadatha. We told our children – Jabr, 7, Jida (4) and Jawad (3 months) – about the expulsion of the village’s residents. It was not the first time they had heard it. They already know the story of Saeed Abu al-Hijja, a boy much like them who once played with his friends in Hadatha’s green fields, from a children’s book series recently produced by the Al-Tufula center in Nazareth. Our children now wander through those same fields.
Just before we left, our youngest, Jawad, began to cry. We took it as a sign that his mother should nurse him there, in Hadatha, by the village spring. And so she did.
While it is true that our generation, the third since the Nakba, speaks more openly about the 1948 war than those that came before (our parents were raised by survivors who lived under nearly two decades of military rule, passing that fear onto their children), I did not grow up with much awareness of the Nakba.
In my village, there was little political party activity and no real effort to foster a sense of national consciousness as was the case in larger towns like Nazareth or Sakhnin. We were raised with a deep connection to the land, to Al-Aqsa, and in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but developing a clear national identity required special effort. Today, our children have no need for that. Social media, despite its known drawbacks, has played a significant role in spreading national awareness among younger generations.
Yet generational change alone does not explain why Palestinians experience the Nakba with increasing intensity each year. The conduct of the State of Israel — in Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel itself — leaves little room for forgetting that it was Israel that caused our catastrophe. From home demolitions to entrenched inequality, from the state’s abandonment of Arab communities to criminal organizations to its attacks on its sovereign neighbours Iran and Lebanon, the past is not confined to history.
David Ben-Gurion once predicted, when asked about the Palestinian refugees, that “The old will die and the young will forget.” He was wrong. The old have indeed passed on, but the young have not forgotten. Under the conditions of an ongoing Nakba, they cannot afford to.
Baker Zoubi is a journalist and Palestinian citizen of Israel, based in the village of Kufr Maser in the Lower Galilee; he began his career in 2010 as a reporter for local Arab media outlets, before advancing to the position of senior editor at the Nazareth-based news platform Bokra
