The Nakba
The Nakba – which means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic – refers to the forced uprootment of over two thirds of Arab Palestinians from their homes and lands in the years 1947 to 1949, through ethnically cleansing operations that were perpetrated by the Zionist forces in order to establish an exclusive Jewish state. Most Palestinians were driven out by a comprehensive Zionist ethnic cleansing policy, which was carried out by both the official Zionist paramilitary forces, the Haganah, and underground militant groups such as the Irgun and Lehi groups. The most notorious of these plans was Plan Dalet – designed to ensure a majority Jewish population in historic Palestine. Massacres perpetrated by Zionist forces in places such as Deir Yassin and al-Dawayima, terrorised the population and induced the flight of Palestinians from their homes. According to some commentators, there were at least sixty such massacres. Prior to the Nakba, Jews owned only 7% of the land in Palestine. The British had supported Jewish settlement as a way of maintaining a foothold in a region which they saw as strategically important. In the areas that became Israel (78 percent of Mandate Palestine), 82 percent of Palestinians, the indigenous population, were expelled.
The Nakba is at the core of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and its resolution and a recognition of the disaster that befell Palestinians remain the sina qua non of any sustainable solution. But 1947-49 was not the end of the displacement of Palestinians; between 1948 and the mid-1950s, Israel expelled around 15 percent of the remaining Palestinian population within its borders, while the 1967 war saw 35 percent of the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip flee.
Nakba is not simply a historical event but an ongoing process, and the push to create and maintain an exclusive Jewish state in historic Palestine continues to be a mechanism of dispossession. Whether as exiles, members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or subjects of a brutal and violent military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians continue to face Israeli attempts to dispossess, disinherit, and physically control the land, the most recent mechanism of which is the Wall. As such, when Palestinians mark the Nakba, it is not simply about commemoration or of remembering a denied history, but also about resistance and an affirmation of their identity and right to exist.