On 15 May 1948 — a date Palestinians that marks the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe – more
than 700,000 people were expelled from their homes, 400 to 600 villages were destroyed, and
a people’s connection to their land, their identity, and their future was severed in a historical
act of displacement. The Nakba continues to be the lived reality of the Palestinian people
living under occupation and systematic injustice to this day. It has continued in the form of
law and in practice for seventy-eight years. For the World Communion of Reformed
Churches — a communion whose majority membership lives in the global south, in
communities that know from their own histories what it means to have land taken, language
suppressed, and presence declared inconvenient — this anniversary is not a foreign
commemoration. It is a mirror. The prophetic tradition at the heart of Reformed faith
demands that we not simply observe what is reflected in that mirror, but that we act on what
we see. The Nakba is not distant history for the Palestinian people. It is the present tense
reality of Palestinian life under Israeli Occupation.

In this 4-week-long campaign, we will focus on Bethlehem, the Christian town and on the
Ush Ghurab area of Beit Sahour — a plateau east of the city, just beyond the hills where the
angels announced the birth of Christ to the shepherds. Ush Ghurab is not a distant symbol. It
is the last substantial reserve of public land available to Beit Sahour, a city that is one of the
oldest Palestinian Christian community in the West Bank and, by current count, home to a
Christian population that now represents less than one percent of the West Bank’s inhabitants.
For decades, Ush Ghurab sat under Israeli military control as a base; when that base was
evacuated in 2006, the municipality worked quietly to reclaim it for parks, housing, and the
kind of ordinary future that displacement denies. Then, at the end of 2025, a settler outpost
called Yatziv was established on its edge — thirty caravans, a claim of divine right, and the
machinery of a system designed not merely to seize land but to make Palestinian life, over
time, impossible. The WCRC launches this campaign on Nakba Day because the story of Ush
Ghurab is the story of the Nakba told in the present tense: a community surrounded, a future
foreclosed, and a church — the global Reformed church — is being asked to decide whether it
will bear witness or look away.

For Nakba Day from Global Kairos for Justice – Asia Forum (Theology Group).

Photo by WCC/ Albin Hillert