Brian Garrison lives in South Portland and writes about human rights, accountability and international law.

On May 16, from 1 to 3 p.m., Mainers will gather in Portland’s Longfellow Square to commemorate the Nakba — the Arabic word for “catastrophe.” For many Americans, the Nakba is understood as a tragic historical event tied to the founding of Israel in 1948. But for Palestinians, the Nakba is not merely remembered. It is lived.

In 1948, during the war surrounding Israel’s creation, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes. More than 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed or depopulated. Families were scattered across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and beyond, often carrying little more than house keys and deeds to homes they would never see again.

Those refugees and their descendants now number in the millions.

For decades, many in the West have treated the Nakba as though it belongs safely in the past — an unfortunate but completed chapter of history. But the reality on the ground tells a different story.

The core structures that defined the Nakba in 1948 — mass displacement, land confiscation, statelessness and permanent dispossession — did not end. They evolved.

In Gaza today, entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. Families who had already been displaced multiple times were again forced to flee, often with nowhere safe to go. International aid organizations and U.N. officials have repeatedly warned of catastrophic humanitarian conditions, including widespread hunger, collapsed medical infrastructure and the destruction of civilian life on a staggering scale.

In the occupied West Bank, settlement expansion continues to fragment Palestinian land into disconnected enclaves. Palestinian homes are demolished for lacking permits that are almost impossible to obtain. Villages face repeated raids and growing settler violence. Families live under military occupation while nearby settlers enjoy the protections and rights of civilian law.

This is why Palestinians often describe the present reality not as a separate crisis, but as an extension of 1948.

The refugee camps that were originally intended as temporary shelters still exist nearly eight decades later. Generations have now been born and raised without citizenship, without sovereignty and without the right to return to the homes from which their families were expelled.

None of this requires denying the suffering of Israelis or ignoring the trauma that Jewish communities carry from centuries of persecution, including the Holocaust. Nor does it require supporting Hamas or excusing violence against civilians. Civilian life must have equal worth everywhere.

But moral consistency requires us to recognize something many political leaders still avoid saying plainly: permanent displacement and unequal systems of control cannot produce lasting peace. History has shown this repeatedly.

As Mainers, we often pride ourselves on plain speaking and fairness. We believe that power should be restrained and that vulnerable people deserve protection under the law. Those values should not disappear when the suffering is Palestinian.

The United States has provided enormous military, diplomatic and political support throughout this conflict. That reality creates not only strategic responsibility, but moral responsibility as well.

Remembrance without action eventually becomes ritual. Commemoration without honesty becomes performance.

So as Mainers gather this month to remember the Nakba, we should ask ourselves a difficult question: What does it mean to say “never again” to human displacement and collective punishment if we refuse to recognize those realities while they are still unfolding?

Because if the Nakba is still being lived, then memory alone is not enough. Silence becomes participation. And indifference becomes permission.