The Nakba anniversary: Shared lessons between Palestine and Latin America

While its geographical epicentre lies in the Middle East, the memory and meaning of the Nakba extend far beyond Palestine, resonating deeply across Latin America — a region shaped by colonisation, dictatorship, forced displacement and enduring resistance. Though the names, languages, and landscapes may differ, the emotional terrain is strikingly familiar: the pain of losing one’s home, the fight to preserve memory and the relentless pursuit of justice.

From refugee camps in Palestine to indigenous territories in Guatemala, the shared experiences of uprooting and survival bind these distant regions together. Here, solidarity is not just political—it is personal. The Nakba lives on not only in Palestinian stories but also in Latin American hearts, where the act of remembering becomes a powerful form of resistance against erasure, silence, and historical injustice.

Memory isn’t just the past

When Palestinians gather each May to mark Nakba Day, they don’t just mourn what was lost — they protect it from being forgotten. Grandmothers recall the sounds of bombs in 1948; young artists paint the villages they’ve never seen but still call home. Memory becomes a kind of defiance, a refusal to let history be erased.

Latin America shares a deep commitment to historical memory, where survivors of military dictatorships in countries like Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Guatemala have built powerful movements to resist silence and denial. From the weekly marches of Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo, holding photos of their disappeared children, to the oral histories preserved by indigenous elders in Guatemala recounting state-led massacres, memory in Latin America is not a passive act, it is a form of rebellion. These movements assert that remembering is political, and that forgetting allows injustice to persist. Across the region, memory becomes a way to keep truth alive when official narratives attempt to erase it.

 

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The pain of losing home

Ask a Palestinian refugee what they miss and you’ll hear about jasmine gardens, stone houses, and neighbours who disappeared in a single night. The Nakba wasn’t just loss, it was a violent ripping apart of families and places. Many still carry the keys to homes they were never allowed to return to.

In Colombia, El Salvador and Peru too countless people have been pushed off their land by war, by corporate greed, by governments who saw them as disposable. The idea of “return” isn’t just political. It’s emotional. It’s about belonging somewhere, about reclaiming what was stolen; not just land, but dignity.

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In Gaza today, entire neighbourhoods have been wiped out. Electricity is scarce, water undrinkable, and hope flickers dimly. Yet people remain, digging through rubble, rescuing books from bombed-out homes, holding onto each other.

In each case, communities learned to live with unspeakable pain, and to resist being silenced. Palestinians in Gaza, like survivors in Latin America, have learned how to resist with very little: with songs, with stories, and with memory.

 

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From pain art is born

The human spirit has a strange, beautiful power: it can turn grief into song, exile into poetry, and destruction into creation. In Palestine, embroidery (tatreez) becomes a quiet form of resistance, stitching the memory of lost villages into every thread. Poets like Mahmoud Darwish have turned heartbreak into verses that echo across generations, while filmmakers like Elia Suleiman and artists like Naji Al-Ali use satire and cinema to critique occupation and preserve identity.

In Latin America, protest songs by artists like Violeta Parra and Mercedes Sosa became lifelines during dictatorship, giving voice to the silenced when speaking was dangerous. Murals by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros transformed walls into histories of the people. Writers like Eduardo Galeano and Gabriel Garcia Marquez wove memory, resistance, and colonial critique into their literature. Across both regions, art is not just expression — it is survival. It says, “We are still here. We still feel. We still dream.”

Solidarity across continents

You can often spot the Palestinian flag at protests in Latin America, waving beside local banners, painted on murals, stitched onto indigenous ponchos. Solidarity is not charity. It’s connection. It’s recognition. It’s saying: “Your struggle is also mine.”

During the 1970s and 80s, revolutionary governments in Cuba and Nicaragua supported the Palestinian cause as part of a global fight against imperialism. Today, students, artists, and human rights groups from Buenos Aires to La Paz continue that legacy, not because Palestine is trendy, but because they see themselves in its people.

From 1948 to 2025: The catastrophe never ended

What began in 1948 never truly stopped. The ongoing Gaza genocide — with its heartbreaking images of collapsed apartment blocks, bloodied children, and families sheltering in overcrowded schools — is a continuation of the Nakba, not a new story. It is a direct continuation of the violence, displacement, and dehumanisation that began in 1948. The genocide in Gaza is not a new chapter but part of an ongoing story of systemic oppression.

Latin Americans understand this kind of continuation. From military dictatorships to modern displacement by extractive industries, the violence faced by the poor, the indigenous, and the marginalised often stretches across decades. Just as the Nakba lives on in Gaza, so do the ghosts of Operation Condor, civil war, and colonisation haunt the present in Latin America.

The Nakba began in 1948, but it never ended. For Palestinians, it continues every time a home is demolished, a child is arrested, a family is denied return. In Latin America, too, history doesn’t rest, memory is still under attack and justice is still unfinished.

But there’s something else these regions share: hope without illusions. The kind of hope rooted not in forgetting, but in remembering well. Because when we remember, we build bridges. And through those bridges, we walk — slowly but stubbornly — toward a future where dignity is not a dream, but a right.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.