In 1948, the State of Israel was founded. While the philosophy of Zionism that advocated for a Jewish homeland in what was then known as Palestine dates back to 1897, the creation of Israel in 1948 was justified by the terrible crime of the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany during WWII. Many defenders of Israel would like us to believe that the creation of Israel was a peaceful process on a barely populated land, however, this is far from true. Rather, the creation of Israel was accompanied by what is known by the Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe)--an operation in which 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their land and their homes. Since that time, Israel has continued to usurp more and more land from the Palestinians who they falsely portray as a people without a history and without a culture.

Israel has been particularly cruel to the people of Gaza--70 percent of whom are refugees from the 1948 Nakba. Gaza has been converted by Israel into what some call a giant open-air prison surrounded by barbed wire. It is in this context that we are currently witnessing the tragic violence between Israel and the people of Gaza--violence on a scale not seen in this land since the Nakba of 1948. Indeed, many Palestinians are calling this a second Nakba, with around 1.5 million Palestinians already displaced and thousands killed.

All of this is being accomplished by Israel with critical military and diplomatic support from the United States. This second Nakba is also being facilitated by the mainstream press that both downplays and justifies what many believe to be genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

The Case for Palestine is written as a counternarrative, with the hope that, if the truth is told, this violence and displacement can be stopped before it is too late; before Gaza is no more.

Daniel Kovalik has been a labor and human rights lawyer since graduating from Columbia Law School in 1993. He has represented plaintiffs in ATS cases arising out of egregious human rights abuses in Colombia. He received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford Law School, has written extensively for the Huffington Post and Counterpunch, and has lectured throughout the world.