A resolution for the US Congress to recognize the "ongoing Nakba" was reintroduced by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Thursday, the Michigan representative's office announced in a press release.
The resolution, reintroduced into the House in time for Nakba Day, called for an official commemoration of the Nakba and for US legislators to denounce an "ongoing Nakba."
“The Nakba never ended," Tlaib said in a press release about the bill that had been previously introduced the same time last year.
"Today, the Israeli apartheid regime is committing genocide in Gaza, violently erasing entire communities across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, and bombing Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It is a campaign to erase Palestinians from existence.”
The US government would adopt a policy, if the bill passed, to reject and disassociate with "denial" of the Nakba and encourage Nakba education.
The legislation would also resume aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to end US "complicity" by prohibiting Israel from using American-made weapons against Palestinians and cutting diplomatic support.
The resolution, cosponsored by 12 congresspeople, including Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, described Israel as an apartheid state engaged in genocide of the Palestinians.
'The Nakba never ended'
"Zionist militias and the new Israeli army had expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians, roughly 75 percent of the entire indigenous Palestinian population, from their homes in areas that became the State of Israel, becoming refugees living in exile," read the resolution.
"The Nakba refers not only to a historical event but to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day, including the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes, the construction and expansion of illegal settlements, and the confinement of Palestinians to ever-shrinking areas of land."
Over a hundred organizations endorsed the bill, including The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), whose policy project executive director, Margaret DeReus, said in a statement that the Nakba was an "ongoing horror" that the US had been complicit in.
"This May marks 78 years of Israel’s continuous efforts to erase Palestinians from their homeland," said DeReus. "It is the height of cruelty that while so many Americans struggle to pay for a home here in the U.S., our government sends billions to enable Israel to forcibly remove Palestinians from their homes instead.”
'It is the height of cruelty'
One of the signatories was representative Delia Ramirez, who attended a Palestinian flag-raising ceremony at Chicago's Daley Plaza on Saturday. The event was held to commemorate the Nakba, with American Muslims for Palestine writing on Instagram on Sunday that the flag raising was a "powerful display of visibility, resilience, and solidarity."
Elsewhere in the country, the Palestinian Youth Movement Houston commemorated Nakba Day by staging protests on 59 bridges in the city, hanging banners from the railings.