The Nakba of 1948

[Watermelonpower]

Hello everyone
I’m creating this thread because I feel there is not enough awareness about the Nakba of 1948 and the impact this had on the Palestinian people, community and the diaspora that was created as a result. Anyone seeking to understand current events in the Middle East needs to understand The Nakba, what it meant to Palestinians and how the consequences and generational trauma impacts Palestinians to this day. For those who are unaware, 70% of Gaza’s population are Nakba refugees/their descendants.

At the outset I would like to say this thread is about understanding and awareness. Above all, it is about the Palestinian experience and perspective. I would therefore appreciate it if people would keep this in mind and be respectful in their posting, ensuring MN Talk Guidelines are adhered to. I will be also be sharing some personal stories and
suggesting some additional resources and media for those who wish to learn more.

https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/

Neither myself, or anyone else on this thread has attempted to excuse October 7th. Quite the opposite if you’d taken the time to read what has been posted.

I don’t believe I have shut down other views. I have tried (unsuccessfully) to keep the thread on topic because I feel that’s important. Despite that, we’ve had other views being discussed on here, some of which are repugnant to me personally. These include that Palestine didn’t exist and was an empty land, all Arabs are the same, most Palestinians left willingly and Palestinians shouldn’t have refugee status anymore but should move on with their lives. If a Jewish person were to write about the Jewish experience of the holocaust, or an Armenian were to write about what happened to their friends and family during their genocide, I’m not sure they’d be similarly criticized or told “it’s sad” they don’t want their “ideas” held up to scrutiny.

Whether you accept it or not, Palestinians were the victims of massacres and dispossession as a result of Israel’s creation. This is evidenced historical fact and it is still relevant to what’s happening today. It’s not a personal opinion or a belief that I just made up.

I also did not say all Israelis are baddies. I challenged statements that I believe to be misinformation relating to the present day treatment of Palestinians in Israel. You may have a black and white view of the world but I’d be grateful if you would not project that thinking on to me.

"the following 75 years of the harsh treatment of the Palestinian people by every single Israeli government in power during those years."

You seem to be mistaken somewhat.

Jordan, as it was now known, ruled over the West Bank from 1948 until 1967. and those living there were offered Jordanian citizenship.

Gaza was under the military control of Egypt for the same time period.

Israel had no jurisdiction over either of those two areas during that time frame. So any 'harsh treatment' that was meted out was nothing to do with Israel.

So maybe the Palestinians should take up their issues with the countries concerned ?

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was caused by the UN Partition and half of the Nakba having happened.

Even then, the Palestinians didn’t declare war on Israel, they were too busy fleeing as refugees. Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon did on 15 May 1948

The first half of the Nakba happened under British rule between 30 November 1947 and 14 May 1948 as around 350,000 of the Palestinians had been displaced by then.

“Approximately 750,000 Palestiniansover 80% of the population in what would become Israelwere expelled or fled from their homes and became refugees in neighboring states.[3] About half were expelled or fled before Israel declared independence at the end of the British Mandate on 14 May 1948”

“The British terminated the Mandate at midnight at the end of 14 May 1948. On that day, the last remaining British troops and personnel departed the city of Haifa and the Jewish leadership in Palestine declared the establishment of the State of Israel. This was followed the next day by the invasion of Palestine by the surrounding Arab armies and expeditionary forces. The invasion marked the beginning of the second phase of the war, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The Egyptians advanced on the southern coastal strip and were halted near Ashdod; the Jordanian Arab Legion and Iraqi forces captured the central highlands of Palestine. Syria and Lebanon fought several skirmishes with the Israeli forces in the north.”

@ER2
“I believe that had the Arab league been successful in 1948 in annihilating Israel, there would have never arisen a demand for a Palestinian state.”

The UN Partition established what should have been a Palestinian State, so there was international demand prior to 1948.

The Arab League gave reasons for its invasion in Palestine in the 1948 cablegram, which indicates they also demanded a Palestinian State:

• the Arab states find themselves compelled to intervene in order to restore law and order and to check further bloodshed. [Recall that half the Nakba was completed by this time under British rule]
• the Mandate over Palestine has come to an end, leaving no legally constituted authority. [Israel had by then started annexing some of what should be Palestinian lands per the UN partition]
• the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian state.

"Despite that, we’ve had other views being discussed on here, some of which are repugnant to me personally. These include that Palestine didn’t exist and was an empty land,"

You may find this view 'repugnant' which is your choice.

May I, respectfully, suggest that you read a bit more of the history of the region.

From 1239 the Ottoman Empire covered all the land we now know as Israel/ Palestine/The Holy Land/Jordan/Syria/Judea etc.

The Jews were kept in dhimmitude (second class citizens) in the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire (Turks) sided with Germany in World War I (1914–18); post-war treaties dissolved the empire, and in 1922 the sultanate was abolished by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who proclaimed the Republic of Turkey the following year.

So technically the landed didn't belong to anyone. It wasn't empty because some Turks, Jews, Arabs eked out a nomadic existence there as 'hunter gathers'..

Palestine per se did not exist. The Romans had called the area 'Judea'.

The “Philistines” refers to an ancient enemy of Israel who occupied the coast of what had been called “Canaan” prior to their arrival from overseas, which was around 1200 B.C. (Israelite tribes were in control of the hill country of what had been Canaan at that same time.) Most of where the Philistines lived is in the modern-day Gaza Strip. However there is no evidence that those that now live in Gaza have a common heritage with the Philistines.

@ER2
”To be displaced within a country is not really considered displaced and you're certainly not a refugee because of that. Palestinians who once lived in Lod and now live in Ramallah (WB) are not refugees.”

Displaced people within their country of origin is considered being displaced. These are called IDPs- Internally Displaced People. IDPs are also covered by the UNHCR so it can be confusing.
https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-protect/internally-displaced-people

To also be refugee you need to have left the country of your national origin. Palestinians who were in Israel and are now in the Palestinian Occupied Territories are in fact refugees per the UN 1951 Refugee Convention because they have been forced out of Israel.
https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-protect/refugees

People can be IDPs but not refugees, people can be refugees but not IDPs, and people can be both a refugee and an IDP- which is the status of most Gazans today.

Which countries have had jurisdiction over the Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank since 1967? That was over 50 years ago....

No, that's not the alternative view of the Nakba. The alternative view is that a lot of people who left and then wanted the right to return, left because they were told to do so by the surrounding Arab nations. Partly to make life difficult economically for the new state of Israel by them losing a lot of their workers during a time of rapid expansion, but also so Muslims wouldn't get harmed when the surrounding nations attacked.

I am not here to disagree with the Nakba being a disaster for those affected, or that there were people who were forcibly made to leave or killed etc due to extremist violence. I'm just clarifying something this poster seems to not be aware of.

@ER2
“What is absolutely clear is that Israel's goal in 1948 was not to ethnically cleanse all the Arabs. This is evident from the declaration of independence which explicitly calls for the Arabs to remain and build the country together.”

Failure to permanently ethnically cleanse 100% of a population from a region such that 20% survive your progrom doesn’t indicate absence of intent to ethnically cleanse.

Dozens of massacres were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned in a biological warfare program and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.

Around 80% of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel left or were expelled from their homes. About half of all Nakba Palestinians fled or were expelled before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, a fact which was named as a casus belli for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. [ see cablegram in my prior post]

@AdamRyan "That was over 50 years ago...."

I'm not arguing with you.

I'm questioning the "the following 75 years of the harsh treatment of the Palestinian people by every single Israeli government in power during those years." (from 1948)

@ER2
“Additionally one just has to look and see the 2 million + Israeli Arabs - descendants of those who didn't leave - who enjoy equal rights as Israeli citizens.”

The law says Israeli-Arabs are supposed to have equal rights, but the reality is very different. The Human Rights Watch goes into a lot of evidence in their 213-page report published in 2021, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,”

This report examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinians both Israeli-Palestinians within Israel and those in the occupied territories.

It presents the present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government, ruling primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, and methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.

Drawing on years of human rights documentation, case studies, and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials, and other sources, Human Rights Watch compared policies and practices toward Palestinians in the occupied territory and Israel with those concerning Jewish Israelis living in the same areas.

To maintain domination, Israeli authorities systematically discriminate against Palestinians. For example, the institutional discrimination that Palestinian citizens of Israel face includes laws that allow hundreds of small Jewish towns to effectively exclude Palestinians and budgets that allocate only a fraction of resources to Palestinian schools as compared to those that serve Jewish Israeli children.

Just to try to get back to the original post, I found this disturbing recount by a 126 year old man who experienced the Nakba.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/126-year-old-palestinian-recalls-agonies-of-1948-nakba/49132

I will post some of his testimony below.

Rajab al-Toum, a 126-year-old Palestinian man, says the history books fail to accurately describe the days that followed the Palestinian Nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic), which coincided with the establishment of Israel on May 15, 1948.

Al-Toum still vividly recalls events, including the atrocities committed by Jewish terrorist gangs against the local Palestinian population – memories that still bring tears to his eyes.

"The massacres that took place at the time remain etched on my memory," al-Toum told Anadolu Agency.

Already 59 years old when the Nakba occurred, al-Toum had been working on a farm in Beersheba (in what is now southern Israel) when violent Zionist gangs forced hundreds of thousands Palestinians to flee their homes and villages.

He remembers seeing Jewish soldiers dragging a young pregnant Palestinian woman away before killing her in front of her husband and children.

"I trembled in fear when I saw this," al-Toum said. "I was afraid they would kill me too."

After the soldiers slaughtered the pregnant woman, they withdrew, giving al-Toum – along with other Palestinians who were hiding in fear – some respite.
Later, however, al-Toum would discover – to his horror – that the pregnant woman was not the only Palestinian to be slaughtered by Jewish paramilitary groups.

Numerous other men, women and children, he later found out, were killed – often in front of their families – by armed Zionist groups like the Haganah and the notorious Stern Gang.

Many were slaughtered, al-Toum recalled, while others were simply shot and killed.

At the time, he said, most Palestinians failed to grasp the enormity of the catastrophe that was unfolding before them.

They began to understand the scope of the crisis when heavily-armed Jewish gangs stormed their villages on the backs of tanks.

News of the carnage spread like wildfire, said al-Toum, prompting Palestinian men, women and children to flee for their lives – most of them leaving all their property behind.
"Jewish gangs shelled Palestinian villages indiscriminately with the aim of terrorizing residents into fleeing," the old man said.

Hundreds of Palestinians, he added, were buried under the rubble of their destroyed homes.

"The history books fail to adequately describe the horror of the massacres that took place," al-Toum, who lives in the city of Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip, said.
"They don't do justice to the painful experiences of the Palestinian families who lost their homes," he asserted.

He said he would never forget the scenes of Palestinian families fleeing their ancestral homes in terror.

"It was the most terrible thing I've ever seen in my life," al-Toum said.

@ER2
”So to say Israel as a state stole 'Palestinian land' is an out and out lie. There was no such thing as Palestinian land because there was no such thing as Palestine. It was an ownerless country, having been made ownerless when the British Mandate ended. (the mandate of course just being a guardianship arrangement, not sovereign its own right.)”

Israel agreed to the UN Partition of 1947 which divided the region into land for Israel and land for a Palestinian State. The Declaration of Independence affirmed these borders for Israel. At the very least, the UN Partition created a Palestine on a map as much as it created an Israel on a map.

So, it is not a lie to say that Israel has stolen Palestinian lands from 1948 onwards, because they took land that was not set aside for them by the 1947 UN Partition.

The British Mandate of Palestine was a guardianship on behalf of the UN which was sovereign over the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The land set aside for a Palestine was granted by that sovereign power, but never respected nor implemented.

It’s what the UN has passed into international law by resolutions since 1948.
Would it be similarly ludicrous for Israel to expect the UN to uphold the lands they were given in 1947 too? Or only for Palestinians?
https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2023/06/right-return-palestinian-refugees-must-be-prioritised-over-political

”For Palestinians, forced displacement has become part of their life for generations, tracing back to 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee massacres and mass expulsions and forcible transfers during the birth of the State of Israel. The majority, along with their descendants, are still in neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while 40 per cent of them remain under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967. Progressively, Palestinian exile has scattered them across various nations globally.
Since 1948, both the General Assembly and the Security Council have consistently called upon Israel to facilitate the return of Palestinian refugees and provide reparations. Despite these repeated appeals, Palestinian refugees have been systematically denied of their right to return and forced to live in exile under precarious and vulnerable conditions outside the borders of Palestine. The right of return constitutes a fundamental pillar of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination. The fragmentation of the Palestinian people, both geographically and politically, through administrative methods of control based on residency and race, tantamount to apartheid, has obstructed the realisation of the right to return and self-determination.”-

Above written on 21 June 2023 by
Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967; Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons; Ashwini K.P., Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; Obiora C. Okafor, Independent Expert on human rights and international solidarity; Michael Fakhri, Special Rapporteur on the right to food; Felipe González Morales, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants; Pedro Arrojo Agudo, Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation; Dorothy Estrada Tanck (Chair), Ivana Radačić (Vice-Chair), Elizabeth Broderick, Meskerem Geset Techane and Melissa Upreti, Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences.*

The Arabs also captured land. The Egyptians conquered Gaza, while the Jordanians usurped the West Bank. Unlike Israel, this was not for the safety of their citizens, but to increase their own territory

No poll is truly anonymous in a surveillance state on a war time footing. You would do well to remember this of ever you are asked in an “anonymous poll” whether you agree with a war your ultranationalist state is prosecuting.

A war that means citizens are being ‘administratively detained’ in the middle of the night by armed soldiers for tweets that are innocuous like “God willing we will beat them” and IDF thinking purely based on your ethicity, that “them” cannot be Hamas.

On a side note, as it's relevant to this discussion I wanted to share this Wikipedia article about Nakba denial, a common phenomenon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba_denial

I've seen it going on here on MN and it was depressing to witness.

And here is an article about it:

https://dawnmena.org/denying-the-nakba-75-years-later-a-democracy-in-exile-roundtable/

Here is a partial quote from the article above and I think it is very pertinent to some of the posts here.

The Ghosts of 1948

Israeli policymakers are generally, and without exaggeration, either Nakba deniers or Nakba apologists. In order to appease Israeli politicians, Western policymakers have adopted a similar approach—either denying the Nakba and its impact, or justifying or ignoring Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland. The outcome has been disastrous for Palestinians. Owing to this Nakba suppression, Western policymakers view the right of return as an "obstacle" to a "negotiated settlement," with policymakers often pushing for Palestinians to accept their fate in exile rather than pushing for their return. Western policymakers assume that Israel seeks to act in good faith and that Israel's colonization is some aberration that will come to an end through negotiations—and, of course, without any external pressure.

This denial effectively demands that Palestinians similarly "forget" or ignore the Nakba, focusing solely on Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip through the framework or lens of human rights—thereby ignoring Israel's violent colonial past and linking it to its violent colonial present. Policymakers draw a line—the Green Line—where there isn't one, with actions on one side condemnable and actions on the other side not worthy of attention. How is it legitimate for a whole community to be demolished more than 100 times (the "unrecognized" Bedouin village of al-Araqib, in the southern Negev) simply because it is inside Israel and claimed as state land?

Palestine was a country with a rich culture and history. It was home to close to 1 million people. Israel was created—literally—on the ruins of villages and by breaking into and taking over Palestinian homes. Israel destroyed whole communities and ruined lives. The ghosts still remain, 75 years later. While Western policy can try, as Israel has done for 75 years, to deny or legitimate the Nakba, doing so only cements the belief that the West is Israel's accomplice.

—Diana Buttu is a Palestinian lawyer, writer and analyst. A Palestinian citizen of Israel based in Haifa, she is a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.

Absolutely this. Thank you.

@Estersouwester
”So technically the landed didn't belong to anyone. It wasn't empty because some Turks, Jews, Arabs eked out a nomadic existence there as 'hunter gathers'..” - said as of 1947

Technically the land belonged to the victors of WWII, the 5 permanent members of the UN which are USA, U.K., France, Russia and China. The UN gave the U.K. the guardianship.

The people in the former Mandate of Palestine were neither nomadic nor Hunter gatherers, not since 8,000 BCE.

Some of the oldest cities are in the region. It was part of Sumeria, one of the most ancient civilisations known to build cities and have agriculture, writing, trade. Jerusalem itself originally an Egyptian colony founded by the Ancient Egyptian Empire. Gaza city dates from the Bronze Age. Jericho is from the Neolithic. The Romans ruled it too.

Kingdoms have risen and fallen there, Empires have invaded, colonised and similarly fallen. There was even a medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem established by the European crusades for a couple centuries.

There were many bustling cities with trade, art, politicians, universities long before the Ottomans ruled the area in the 1200s that were still there until the Nakba happened.

Not all of the Palestinian people were in Gaza or West Bank when Egypt and Jordan were occupying them between 1949 and 1967. They still aren’t. There is nothing wrong with the statement.

The Arab League gave reasons for its invasion in Palestine in the cablegram:

• the Arab states find themselves compelled to intervene in order to restore law and order and to check further bloodshed.
• the Mandate over Palestine has come to an end, leaving no legally constituted authority.
• the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian state.

It is clear the stated reason was for the safety of the Palestinians and to secure land that should be for a unitary Palestinian state in the future. At the time around 350,000 were refugees as the Nakba massacres were well under way.

In the case of Jordan, a delegation of 2,000 West Bank Palestinians in Jericho stated they wanted to join Jordan rather than have an independent State. This was the Jericho Conference of 1948. The other UN nations, the rest of the Arab league and Israel condemned this solution. So Jordan and Egypt kept the territories until 1967 as de facto guardians hoping that a Palestinian state would emerge.

Sexual violence during the Arab-Israeli War:

“She was abducted on Aug. 12, 1949, 66 years ago this month, by Israeli soldiers near the Nirim military outpost in the Negev desert, close to the Gaza Strip. The unnamed Palestinian Bedouin girl, in her mid-teens, was then raped and executed.” Article from 2015

warning link has very disturbing account of exactly how this unfolded
https://english.alarabiya.net/perspective/analysis/2015/08/17/RE-EXPOSED-A-horrific-story-of-Israeli-rape-and-murder-in-1949

2nd Lt Moshe was asked to write a report on what had happened: “In my patrol on 12.8.49 I encountered Arabs in the territory under my command, one of them armed. I killed the armed Arab on the spot and took his weapon. I took the Arab female captive. On the first night the soldiers abused her and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world.”

Moshe was sentenced to 15 years in jail for murder. The other 19 soldiers received sentences between one and three years, mainly for allowing the incident to happen.

Dr Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, professor of law at the Hebrew University and a writer on military violence against women in conflict zones, says rape of Palestinian women was used as a military tactic during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“We don’t have statistics, but we have documentations of cases. Some of them are very well known, like the case of rape in Qula, and some of them are hidden,” said Shalhoub-Kevorkian.
“In my interviews with Palestinian refugee families, many expressed that they ended up fleeing because of the rape. There was terror, horror and fear,” she added.
In an interview with journalist Ari Shavit for Haaretz, Israeli historian Benny Morris is quoted as saying that in his research of 1948 in the military archives, he was surprised to find that “there were also many cases of rape,” which usually ended in murder.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian says sexual violence is still relevant today, citing Middle East scholar Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
He suggested raping Palestinian mothers and sisters as a solution to Hamas’s armed resistance, on Israeli radio during last summer’s war on Gaza. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,” said Kedar.

More on what Kedar said in 2014:
”Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, explicitly called for the rape of Palestinian women to deter the Palestinian resistance during the unrest of the summer of 2014. Kedar was speaking to an Israeli following the killing of three Israeli settlers who had gone missing in the occupied West Bank: “The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the [Israeli] children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped […] this is the culture of the Middle East,” he said.”