From the Apartheid-Free Newsletter put out by the American Friends Service Committee. Subscribe to it here.

May 15 marks the 78th commemoration of the Nakba – “Catastrophe” in Arabic — which refers to the period in 1948 when Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the creation of Israel. Between 1948 and 1950, an estimated 750,000 to one million Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland by militias and the new Israeli army — about 85% of the Palestinian population. Most ended up in refugee camps in the West Bank, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Jordan. In addition to mass displacement, forced removal, the destruction of entire villages, and expropriation of over 4 million acres of land belonging to Palestinians, May 1948 marks the beginning of the Israeli apartheid system.Here are some of the early markers of apartheid that Israel would use to tighten its grip through ongoing occupation and erasure:

Creation of the “Transfer Committee” which oversaw the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages, repopulating them with Jews. The Zionist militias and Israeli army systematically destroyed more than 400 Palestinian towns. This map documents them.  Passage of the “Absentees’ Property Law,” (1950) which granted the government “custodianship” over lands and property belonging to Palestinian refugees, (with no compensation for the owners). An “absentee” was defined as any Palestinian who left his or her home after November 1947, even if they remained inside what became Israel. Passage of two additional laws — the Law of Return (1950), which still grants Jews from anywhere in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and automatically become a citizen, and the Entry into Israel Law (1952) which was designed to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees.

It is important framing in this time to name that the Nakba never ended — that it is a structure and a system, not one event in history. You can use this month to raise education and awareness about the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people — a forced erasure which we continue to witness in its most recent and deadliest form in the Gaza genocide.