Every year, Palestinians gather on the 15th of May to commemorate the Nakba. That’s Arabic for “Catastrophe”. The Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, from what is today Israel. From 1947 to 1949, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their ancestral lands. They were violently expelled, to pave the way for the Jewish-majority nation of Israel.
In 1917, while World War 1 was underway, the British government made the Balfour Declaration, supporting the creation of a “national home for the Jewish People” in Palestine. After the end of the First World War, Britain wrested control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. The region became known as the British Mandate for Palestine, or Mandatory Palestine.
With British support, there was an influx of Jewish people into Mandatory Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees arrived from Europe and other parts of the World where they faced persecution. However, not all of them came just seeking refuge. Many of them were Zionists.
Zionism is a movement that believes in carving out a separate homeland for Jewish people, based on the holy land in Jewish scripture. This led to rising tensions with the Palestinian Arabs, who already lived there. Those tensions erupted into communal riots and even massacres. So, both the Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs formed armed militias to defend their communities.
The United Nations was formed after the end of World War 2. In 1947, Britain announced that it would be terminating its Mandate for Palestine, and asked the UN to decide the future of the territory. The United Nations came up with a plan to Partition Palestine into two states. A Jewish state, and an Arab one. The holy city of Jerusalem was supposed to be independent, and under a special international regime.
The Arabs rejected this partition plan. They still made up about two-thirds of the population of Mandatory Palestine. Despite all the waves of Jewish migrants and refugees. But the UN wanted to give the Arabs only 43% of Palestine. The UN plan allocated about 56% of Mandatory Palestine to the new Jewish state. Even though Jewish people made up just about a third of the population at the time. The Zionists were happy to accept this allocation. Despite the rejection by the Arabs, the UN voted to adopt their Partition Plan for Palestine on November 29, 1947. So, the very next day, a civil war erupted in Mandatory Palestine. And this is when the Nakba began.
Zionist militias fought against Palestinian Arab forces. They fought for control of territory in Palestine. The Zionist paramilitaries gained the upper hand, and began violently expelling Palestinians. Hundreds of villages were destroyed. Palestinians were driven out of cities when the Zionist forces besieged them. Some left believing they would be able to return once the war ended, but that wasn’t to be. That is why there are still millions of Palestinian refugees today.
