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lorddreadnought
The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the catastrophe') was the violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.[1] The term is used to describe both the events of 1948, as well as the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and persecution and displacement of Palestinians throughout the region.[2]
The foundational events of the Nakba took place during and shortly after the 1948 Palestine war, including 78% of Mandatory Palestine being declared as Israel, the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army[3] and subsequent geographical erasure, the denial of the Palestinian right of return, the creation of permanent Palestinian refugees, and the "shattering of Palestinian society".[4][5][6][7]
The Nakba is described by many scholars including Ilan Pappe as ethnic cleansing[8]. The Palestinian national narrative views the Nakba as a collective trauma that defines their national identity and political aspirations, whereas the Israeli national narrative views the same events in terms of the war of independence that established Jewish aspirations for statehood and sovereignty.[10][11][12] The Palestinians mark 15 May as Nakba Day, the day after Israeli independence day.[13][14]
The Nakba greatly influenced Palestinian culture and is a foundational symbol of Palestinian identity, together with "Handala", the keffiyeh and the symbolic key. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba.[15] Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish described the Nakba as "an extended present that promises to continue in the future."[16][17]
History
Prior to 1948
The roots of the Nakba are traced to the arrival of Zionists and their purchase of land in Ottoman Palestine in the late 19th century.[18] By the time the British announced their official support for Zionism in the 1917 Balfour Declaration during World War I,[19] the population of Palestine was about 750,000, approximately 94% Arab and 6% Jewish.[20]
After the partition of the Ottoman Empire, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine began in 1922.[21] By then, the Jewish population had grown to around 10%; both the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine referred to the 90% Arab population as "existing non-Jewish communities."[22]
In 1947, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations partitioned Mandatory Palestine, leading to the 1948 Palestine war and the creation of the State of Israel.[23] By that time, Palestinian Arabs were about two-thirds of the population,[24] and owned about 90% of the land,[25] while Jews made up between a quarter and a third of the population,[26] and owned about 7% of the land.[27]
1948
The central facts of the Nakba in 1948 are not disputed.[28] During the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs--over 80% of the population in what would become Israel--were expelled or fled from their homes and became refugees in neighboring states.[29] Cities such as Tiberias, Haifa, Safed, Jaffa, Acre, and Beersheba,[30] and hundreds of towns and villages, were destroyed or depopulated.[31] Thousands of Palestinians were killed in dozens of massacres,[32] including at Deir Yassin,[33] Tantura,[34] Lydda and Ramle,[35] Safsaf,[36] and Dawayima.[37]
By the end of the war in 1949, Israel held about 78% of Palestine.[38] About 156,000 Palestinians remained within the borders of Israel, many becoming internally displaced persons.[39] The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control,[40] and in 1950, the West Bank was annexed by Jordan.[41]
1949–1966
The Nakba continued after the end of the war in 1949.[2] From 1948 to 1966, Palestinians in Israel lived under martial law and needed a permit to move from one village to another.[42] Israel prevented Palestinian refugees outside of Israel from returning.[43] Palestinians continued to be expelled,[44] and more Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed,[45] with new Jewish settlements established in their place.[46] Palestinian place names and the name "Palestine" itself were removed from maps and books.[47]
Sixty-nine Palestinians were killed in the 1953 Qibya massacre;[48] a few years later, 49 Palestinians were killed in the Kafr Qasim massacre, on the first day of the 1956 Suez Crisis.[49] Some two thousand Palestinians were massacred at the Siege of Tel al-Zaatar in 1976, during the Lebanese Civil War.[50]
1967–present
During the 1967 Six-Day War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees were driven from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, mostly into Jordan,[51] in what became known as al-Naksa (the "setback").[52] After the war, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.[53]
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were killed or displaced during the 1982 Lebanon War, including between 800 and 3,500 killed in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.[54] The First Intifada began in 1987 and lasted until the 1993 Oslo Accords.[55] The Second Intifada began in 2000.[56] In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza and blockaded it.[57] In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has built the Israeli West Bank barrier[58] and created Palestinian enclaves.[59]
In 2011, Israel passed the Nakba Law, which denies government funding to institutions that commemorate the Nakba.[60]
The 2023 Israel-Hamas War has caused the highest Palestinian casualties since the 1948 war,[61] and has raised fears among Palestinians of a repeat of the events of that year,[62] which were exacerbated when Israeli Agricultural Minister Avi Dichter said in a media interview that the war would end with "Gaza Nakba 2023,"[63] resulting in a public rebuke from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[64]
Components
The Nakba encompasses the violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, and the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.[1]
Displacement
During the 1947–49 Palestine war, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, comprising around 80% of the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of what became Israel.[65][66] Almost half of this figure (approximately 250,000–300,000 Palestinians) had fled or had been expelled ahead of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948,[67] 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.[68]
Clause 10.(b) of the cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the UN Secretary-General of 15 May 1948 justifying the intervention by the Arab States, the Secretary-General of the League alleged that "approximately over a quarter of a million of the Arab population have been compelled to leave their homes and emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries." In the period after the war, a large number of Palestinians attempted to return to their homes; between 2,700 and 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel during this period, the vast majority being unarmed and intending to return for economic or social reasons.[69]
The Nakba is described as ethnic cleansing by many scholars,[70] including Palestinian scholars such as Rashid Khalidi,[71] Adel Manna,[72] Nur Masalha,[73] Nadim Rouhana,[74] Ahmad H. Sa'di,[75] and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury,[76] Israeli scholars such as Alon Confino,[77] Amos Goldberg,[78] Baruch Kimmerling,[79] Ronit Lentin,[80] Ilan Pappé,[81] and Yehouda Shenhav,[82] and foreign scholars such as Abigail Bakan,[83] Elias Khoury,[84] Mark Levene,[85] Derek Penslar,[86] and Patrick Wolfe,[87] among other scholars.[88]
Other scholars, such as Yoav Gelber,[89] Benny Morris,[90] and Seth J. Frantzman,[91] disagree that the Nakba constitutes an ethnic cleansing. Morris in 2016 rejected the description of "ethnic cleansing" for 1948, while also stating that the label of "partial ethnic cleansing" for 1948 was debatable; in 2004 Morris was responding to the claim of "ethnic cleansing" ocurring in 1948 by stating that, given the alternative was "genocide - the annihilation of your people," there were "circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing ... It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland ... ['cleanse' was] the term they used at the time ... there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war"; Morris said this resulted in a "partial" expulsion of Arabs.[92][93]
Still other scholars use different frameworks than "ethnic cleansing": for example, Richard Bessel and Claudia Haake use "forced removal" and Alon Confino uses "forced migration".[94]
At the same time, a significant proportion of those Palestinians who remained in Israel became internally displaced. In 1950, UNRWA estimated that 46,000 of the 156,000 Palestinians who remained inside the borders demarcated as Israel by the 1949 Armistice Agreements were internally displaced refugees.[95][96][97] As of 2003, some 274,000 Arab citizens of Israel – or one in four in Israel – were internally displaced from the events of 1948.
Dispossession and erasure
The UN Partition Plan of 1947 assigned 56% of Palestine to the future Jewish state, while the Palestinian majority, 66%, were to receive 44% of the territory. 80% of the land in the to-be Jewish state was already owned by Palestinians; 11% had a Jewish title.[99] Before, during and after the 1947–1949 war, hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed.[100][101] Geographic names throughout the country were erased and replaced with Hebrew names, sometimes derivatives of the historical Palestinian nomenclature, and sometimes new inventions.[102] Numerous non-Jewish historical sites were destroyed, not just during the wars, but in a subsequent process over a number of decades. For example, over 80% of Palestinian village mosques have been destroyed, and artefacts have been removed from museums and archives.[103]
A variety of laws were promulgated in Israel to legalize the expropriation of Palestinian land.[104][105]
Statelessness and denationalization
The creation of Palestinian statelessness is a central component of the Nakba and continues to be a feature of Palestinian national life to the present day.[106] All Arab Palestinians became immediately stateless as a result of the Nakba, although some took on other nationalities.[107] After 1948, Palestinians ceased to be simply Palestinian, instead divided into Israeli-Palestinians, East Jerusalem Palestinians, UNRWA Palestinians, West Bank-Palestinians, and Gazan-Palestinians, each with different legal statuses and restrictions,[108] in addition to the wider Palestinian diaspora who were able to achieve residency outside of historic Palestine and the refugee camps.[109]
The first Israeli Nationality Law, passed on 14 July 1952, denationalized Palestinians, rendering the former Palestinian citizenship "devoid of substance", "not satisfactory and is inappropriate to the situation following the establishment of Israel".[110][111]
Fracturing of society
The Nakba was the primary cause of the Palestinian diaspora; at the same time Israel was created as a Jewish homeland, the Palestinians were turned into a "refugee nation" with a "wandering identity".[112] Today a majority of the 13.7 million Palestinians live in the diaspora, i.e. they live outside of the historical area of Mandatory Palestine, primarily in other countries of the Arab world.[113] Of the 6.2 million people registered by the UN's dedicated Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA,[a] about 40% live in the West Bank and Gaza, and 60% in the diaspora. A large number of these diaspora refugees are not integrated into their host countries, as illustrated by the ongoing tension of Palestinians in Lebanon or the 1990–91 Palestinian exodus from Kuwait.[115]
These factors have resulted in a Palestinian identity of "suffering", whilst the deterritorialization of the Palestinians has created a uniting factor and focal point in the desire to return to their lost homeland.[116]
Long-term implications and "ongoing Nakba"
The most important long-term implications of the Nakba for the Palestinian people were the loss of their homeland, the fragmentation and marginalization of their national community, and their transformation into a stateless people.[117]
Since the late 1990s, the phrase "ongoing Nakba" (Arabic: النکبة المستمرة, romanized: al-nakba al-mustamirra) has emerged to describe the "continuous experience of violence and dispossession" experienced by the Palestinian people.[118] This term enjoins the understanding of the Nakba not as an event in 1948, but as an ongoing process that continues through to the present day.[119]
On November 11, 2023 Israeli Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter remarked in an interview on N12 News on the nature of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war that "From an operational standpoint, you cannot wage a war like the IDF wants to in Gaza while the masses are between the tanks and the soldiers," he said. "It's the 2023 Gaza Nakba."[120]
