When Palestinians commemorate the Nakba - the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 - they are not simply remembering a past event in which over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, over 400 villages and towns destroyed and thousands killed.

They are also marking a continued Nakba (al-Nakba al-Mustimirrah in Arabic) - an ongoing process of erasure and ethnic cleansing which has seen Palestinians ghettoised, fragmented, killed and more.

This year we will be marking 72 years of the Nakba and yet one word seems to be taking front and centre stage: annexation. Ever since the announcement of US President Donald Trump's 'Deal of the Century' at the end of January this year, formal annexation of the occupied West Bank by Israel has been looming.

Indeed, it is rumoured that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's visit to Netanyahu on Wednesday was to give the green light for the annexation of the Jordan Valley.

The term 'annexation' in its legal meaning refers to when following the forced acquisition of territory by an occupying regime, said occupier applies its sovereignty over the occupied territory.

The act is illegal under international law and has been reaffirmed by the UN Security Council as such in the case of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Syrian Golan Heights many times.

It's pertinent also to describe what annexation means in non-legal terms and its actual manifestations on the ground; the theft of land, total control over it and the resources, and usually the displacement of large swathes of the indigenous population.

In Palestine, this initially happened in 1948 with the foundation of the settler colonial State of Israel, and later with the occupation of the 1967 territories and their de facto annexation.

International law deemed this later occupation and annexation as illegal, and for the last 53 years there have been lukewarm condemnations by the international community.

All the while, Israel has solidified the occupation and continued with attempts to make it irreversible through the "illegal" settlement enterprise, which was launched by an Israeli Labour Government.

This last point is an important one - settlement building is not just a policy of the right-wing in Israel, as some liberals in the US and elsewhere may like to believe.

It is a cross partisan policy and one that enjoys wide support in Israeli society, as demonstrated by the fact that both Likud and the opposition coalition 'Blue and White' fought over who would deliver formal annexation throughout this year's election period.

Palestinians and their leadership have very little influence over whether or not this de jure annexation will happen, and it seems in actual fact that the decision will be made in Washington DC.