My father told me Arabic was the perfect cup to hold love, humor and grief all at once. I remember this when I try to explain the Nakba in English.
Whereas the usual translation of “catastrophe” implies something that began, culminated and ended, the Arabic Nakba conveys a sense of continuous pain and grief of being a Palestinian since 1948. There are, however, summits of the trauma. May 15, 1948, has become a symbol of this dispossession and consummate loss for all 14 million currently occupied and diaspora Palestinians.
The creation of Israel resulted in the forced expulsion of 40% of Palestinians from their homes through coercion, massacres and violence. This created refugees out of 750,000 of the 1.9 million Palestinians between 1947 and 1949.
Over the course of just a few years, Zionist forces murdered 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres, destroyed or depopulated 530 previously prosperous villages, and ethnically cleansed Palestinians from 78% of historic Palestine. The Nakba, however, started well before May 15, 1948. About half of the Palestinians expelled from their homes had already become refugees before this date.
The Nakba is rooted in Zionism. Beginning in 1882, European Jews—facing antisemitism and pogroms—envisioned a country based not on Torah, Mishnah or Talmud, but on the relatively new idea of a secular European nation-state.
At this time, the Palestinian Jews (the Yishuv) were around 3% of the population and had no aspiration to separate themselves from their neighbors. For the European secular Zionists, the initial idea of a Jewish state in Palestine was met with scoffs and derision by the Jewish members of the Viennese upper crust who “spoke German, felt Austrian, and could not fathom why they should move to a hostile scrap of desert two thousand miles away.”
Thus, even good old Texas was in the running as a candidate for the creation of a Jewish homeland, as were Argentina, Angola and Uganda.
When consensus eventually fell on Palestine, the World Zionist Organization doubled its efforts to recruit individuals in European governments to support the idea. Chaim Weizmann, David Lloyd George and former Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour were among the most prominent figures involved in this lobbying. They pushed for the creation of a European outpost in Palestine and helped craft official policies to send European Jews to settle the land.
The native Arabs—Arab Jews, Christians, Muslims and others—were not a major consideration in their plans. Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president, was eager to make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English.”
As a result of these policies, by 1935, the Jewish population rose from 9% to nearly 27% of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought farms from absentee landlords. Growing alarm in the indigenous population followed, with leading Palestinian Christian and Muslim leaders openly warning of the intent of the European settlers.
With the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, between 1933 and 1936, 60,000 more European Jews arrived in Palestine. The breaking point came in the 1936 Arab Revolt against land sales, dispossession, removal of local villages, and replacement with new European arrivals. This foreshadowed the violence that would be inflicted on Palestinians.
The British crushed the revolt, destroying 2,000 Palestinian homes, placing 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps, subjecting them to violent interrogation and torture, deporting 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders and nobles, and essentially gutting Palestinian society and intelligentsia. At least 10% of the Palestinian male population was killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned by the end of the revolt.
By this time, Zionist leaders were open about their intention and vision for Palestine. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, stated, “It is impossible to imagine general evacuation of the Arabs without compulsion—and brutal compulsion.”
He clarified that, even for him, “Were I an Arab, I would rebel even more vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule.”
The tactics were also clear: “Blowing up a house is not enough … There is a need for a brutal and firm response. We need precision in time, place and casualties. If we definitely know the family—hit without mercy, including the women and children of this family who might be there. Otherwise the reaction will not be effective. There is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.”
Zionist preparation for when the British tired of holding onto Palestine came in the form of this intent to harass, expel and replace the indigenous Arabs to secure the future of a demographically Jewish state. Strong and well-armed militias were formed, including the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi.
In 1947, as expected, the British announced they intended to hand over the disaster they had created in Palestine to the United Nations. In response, the U.N. adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine. This decision was made without consideration of the opposition from the majority Palestinian population.
At the time, the Jewish population made up about a third of Palestine and owned less than 6% of the land. Despite this, the partition plan awarded them 55% of the land. This included many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities and the vital coastline stretching from Haifa to Jaffa.
The Arab state would lose key agricultural lands and seaports, leading Palestinians to reject the proposal. The process of ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion accelerated with the British departure, resulting in violent dispossession exemplified by the Deir Yassin massacre.
On April 9, 1948, Irgun and Lehi units, supported by the Haganah, attacked the village of Deir Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. Palestinian families were slaughtered in or near their homes.
According to Irgun officer Yehuda Lapidot, the Stern Gang “put forward a proposal to liquidate the residents of the village after the conquest in order to show the Arabs what happens when the Irgun and the Stern Gang set out together on an operation.” Benzion Cohen, the Irgun commander of the raid, later recalled, “The majority was for liquidation of all the men in the village and any others found that opposed us, whether it be old people, women and children.”
After Zionist forces took control of the village, many of the remaining villagers, including children, were rounded up and shot. The surviving inhabitants were expelled to Arab-controlled eastern Jerusalem.
Some 150,000 Palestinians remained in the areas of Palestine that became part of the Israeli state. Of these, more than 30,000 were internally displaced. As for all Palestinians—displaced internally or ethnically cleansed—they were not allowed the right of return to their homes. Many carry the keys to their homes to this day.
In 1950, the remaining 2,500 Palestinian residents of the city of Majdal, for example, were forced into the Gaza Strip, about 2,000 inhabitants of Beer el-Sabe were expelled to the West Bank, and some 2,000 residents of two northern villages were driven into Syria. The Nakba never stopped.
In the 1967 Naksa or “setback,” Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The 33% Jewish population that had controlled 6% of the land and had been given 55% now occupied 85% of historic Palestine, confining Palestinians into the occupied territory.
The Nakba continues in the form of home demolitions, land seizures by settlements, settler violence, checkpoints, detention without warrants, and a system of apartheid that has been well documented by people from President Carter to author Ta-Nehisi Coates. The genocide in Gaza will necessitate its own terms, vocabulary and historiography—among its victims and those complicit in it, such as the United States and United Kingdom.
Until Palestine is free, the Nakba continues.
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Ali Khan is a gastroenterologist in Little Rock, Arkansas.
