On May 15, every year, Palestinians mark the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), referring to the displacement of thousands of Palestinians, and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in service of the creation of Israel. Nakba Day is observed on the day after Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. But the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people neither began nor ended in 1948. Here is the history. ‘Promised’ land According to the Hebrew Bible, God “gave” the land of Canaan (corresponding to modern-day Israel-Palestine) to the descendants of Abraham, the patriarch of the three ‘Abrahamic’ religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. “On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying: ‘To your descendants I have given this land…’” (Genesis 15:18). These descendants then settled in this ‘promised land’, and established the (biblical) Israelite nation. Israel was the name God gave to Abraham’s grandson Jacob, the third and final of the Jewish patriarchs (after Abraham and Isaac). By the 19th century CE, however, Jewish people were a small minority in Palestine, then a province in the Ottoman Sultanate. Since antiquity, this land had passed among many ruling dispensations (from Greeks and Romans, to Persians and finally, the Ottomans, to name just a few). Genesis of Zionism All this while, Jewish people spread out across Europe, where they lived as prosperous but vulnerable minorities. In the late 19th century, there was a wave of anti-Jewish violence in Europe, starting with the 1881-82 anti-Jewish pogroms in Imperial Russia, and then in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, in which a Jewish officer in the French military was falsely convicted for passing vital information to Germany. Zionism, or the political movement towards the establishment of a Jewish homeland, was born out of this persecution. Theodor Herzl, remembered as the “spiritual father” of Israel, published a highly influential pamphlet called Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. He wrote: “We [the Jews] are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so. as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level”. This is not to say that there was no expression of Zionism prior to Herzl. For millennia, the idea of “returning to the promised homeland” was a central feature of Jewish culture and belief. The very first wave of Jewish migration to Palestine began in 1881, following the pogroms in Russia. Well-off Jewish people from eastern Europe began to buy large tracts of land in Palestine, from the now enfeebled Ottomans. They bribed local Ottoman officials, and paid large sums of money to absentee landlords to purchase land which had been tilled by Arabs for generations — beginning the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians which continues till date. Balfour Declaration and after Jewish migration into Palestine picked up in the 20th century, especially after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British promised to help the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1914, Palestine had come under the jurisdiction of imperial Great Britain. By giving its support to Zionist goals in Palestine, the British hoped to shore up Jewish support for its war effort. Post-War, Britain began to actively enable Jewish migration into Mandatory Palestine, and soon effected significant demographic changes in the region. A 1920 British survey of Palestine estimated the total population of Palestine to be around 700,000, “four-fifths of the whole population [were] Moslems” and “the Jewish element … number[ed] only 76,000…[in] 64 settlements, large and small”. By 1945, however, even as Palestine’s overall population climbed to over 1.76 million, only 60% were Muslims, and over 31% were Jewish. According to British estimates, 98% of Palestinian Muslims were born in Palestine, compared to 80% of Christians and 42% of Jews. The changing demographics fuelled ethnic conflict. Arab frustration soon manifested in the form of attacks on Jewish settlements, railroad tracks, and British personnel. In response, Jewish migrants organised to form armed militias to protect settlers, and further usurp Palestinian land. Moderate Jewish leaders, who advocated the establishment of a pluralistic Palestinian state, were sidelined. In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched a massive uprising against the British and Zionist settler-colonialists, known as the Arab Revolt. This lasted till 1939, and was eventually violently crushed by the British authorities. The catastrophe Post-World War II, Britain decided to make an exit from Palestine and leave its fate up to the United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish nation was allocated 55% of the land, big cities like Jaffa with Arab majorities, key agricultural tracts, and important seaports — Palestinian Arabs summarily rejected this proposal. Fighting broke out in what is now remembered as the First Arab-Israeli War. Zionist militias, by this time, were far superior fighting forces than their Arab opponents, benefiting from the training many had received during the War, and modern weaponry and funding from the West, especially the United States. These militias forced the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages in what Palestinians remember as the Nakba. According to UN estimates from 1949, roughly 711,000 Palestinian refugees were expelled during the Nakba, with one quarter of roughly 160,000 Palestinian Arabs still in Israel living as “internal refugees”. Dozens of massacres also took place, such as in Deir Yassin, where at least 107 men, women and children were killed. It is during the height of this violence that David Ben-Gurion, Zionist leader who went on to become the first Prime Minister of Israel, declared his country’s independence on May 14, 1948. Since 1948, the Nakba has gone on to become a central aspect of Palestinian identity, with a significant population of Palestinians living as refugees in the Middle East, and across the world. “. the collective memory of that experience [the Nakba] has shaped the identity of the Palestinian refugees as a people”, historian Robert Bowker wrote in Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace (2003). ‘The Nakba continues’ Just like Palestinian dispossession did not start in 1948, for many Palestinians, it did not end in 1948. For example, in 1950, around 2,500 remaining Palestinian residents of Majdal were forced into the Gaza Strip. In many ways, this displacement has never stopped. As Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) said in an interview earlier this year: “the Nakba continues.”. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Israel occupied Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip — an occupation, which persists varying degrees till date. This also led to the displacement of some 430,000 Palestinians, half of whom originated from areas Zionist forces occupied in 1948, and thus became twice refugees. While the UN partition plan allocated Israel around 55% of Mandatory Palestine, Israel today controls closer to 80% of the land. Israeli settlements continue to encroach upon the West Bank, the only Palestinian territory still under some semblance of Arab rule. Palestinian movement is severely restricted, and Israel does not allow refugees to return to their homeland. Many continue to live under torrid conditions in refugee camps in Palestine and beyond, including Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp which Israel has now launched an assault on.
