In May of 1948, a new Jewish state Israel was born in a bath of blood. This was due to the British’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, which opened up a pathway for Britain to gain power in Palestine, and pledged to help secure this land for Zionists without consulting the native Palestinian population. This declaration referred to the majority Arab population as non-Jewish communities, who would be given civil and religious rights, but not political rights. This led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland and the creation of the state of Israel. One of the villages affected by this was the village of 750 people, where everybody knew each other, and where a massacre occurred as part of the catastrophic events known as the Nakba. This history has been carefully concealed, purposefully distorted, and in the West, largely forgotten. After World War I, Britain gained control of Palestine through a mandate. This mandate required them to put the Balfour plans for Jewish settlement in motion, leading to a more than doubling of the Jewish population between 1922 and 1931. This migration helped the Zionist movement gain steam, and the slogan “A land without people for a people without land” took off. This slogan sent a message to Western leaders that the people who had been living in Palestine for generations could just be easily moved elsewhere, despite the fact that Palestine was a land with a people - in 1931, there were more than 850,000 Palestinian Arabs in the region, still the vast majority.
With the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party, Jewish flight from Europe became even more urgent, leading to the biggest wave of Jewish emigration yet. This led to violence rooted in tensions over land, as Jewish settlers purchased swathes of fertile land and evicted tenant farmers, creating a crisis of hundreds of thousands of landless, dispossessed Palestinian-Arabs. Though Palestinians fiercely rebelled against both British colonial forces and Jewish settlers, they were brutally crushed by the British, who put in Palestine more troops to repress the rebellion than they had stationed in India at that time.
In an attempt to prevent further Palestinian resistance, the British began to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine, which angered Zionist extremists and led to more violence. In 1947, after decades of trying to manipulate both Palestinian Arabs and Zionists to keep their control over Palestine, Britain gave up and handed the question of Palestine to the United Nations.
The UN proposed the land be divided into two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as a separate UN-controlled entity. This was called the Partition Plan of 1947, and shocked Palestinians, as it proposed giving over half the land and often the most fertile areas to the Jewish state, even though the population was almost 2 to 1. Furthermore, within this proposed area of the Jewish state were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, including both Muslims and Christians who had lived there for generations, making the plan morally unjust and unfair.
In November 1947, the UN put the plan to a vote, and after lobbying from US leaders and Zionists, the UN voted in favor of partition. Britain announced their mandate over Palestine would end on May 15th, 1948, and by the end of 1947 Zionists had several well-developed paramilitary forces, the largest one known as the Haganah, and more extremist militias like Irgun. On March 10th, two months prior to the end of the British mandate, the Haganah adopted Plan Dalet (also known as Plan D). The primary objective of this plan was to gain control of the Jewish state as outlined in the Partition Plan, while also defending Jewish settlements outside of the borders. In reality, the majority of the operations took place outside of the proposed Jewish state, some conducted by the Haganah and others by more radical militias. These operations focused on isolating Jerusalem and the roads leading to it. A set of brutal instructions were issued, including the destruction of Arab villages by setting fire to them, blowing them up and planting mines, especially those population centers that were difficult to control. If there was any resistance, it called for the population to be expelled outside of the borders of the state, resulting in many villages being emptied and the occupation and control of Arab villages along main transportation arteries. One of the most widely publicized village massacres happened in Deir Yassin, located 4 miles west of Jerusalem. 91 year old Dawud Assad, who was 18 at the time, was present during the massacre. On April 9th, 1948, extremist Zionist forces executing Plan D closed in on Deir Yassin, despite the fact that the village had made a local peace pact with neighboring Jewish settlements. Stories of women being raped, babies being killed and other atrocities spread quickly, resulting in a great deal of fear among the Palestinian Arab population, many of whom fled as a result. The Zionist militias also took control of major cities such as Haifa and Jaffa, and hundreds of smaller villages and towns. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee, pouring into neighboring states as refugees. Plan D became the blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine in order to make room for a new state. On May 14th, the day before the British mandate ended, the Zionists declared the state of Israel. However, the creation of Israel did not end the Nakba, as neighboring Arab countries that were overwhelmed by Palestinian refugees immediately went to war with Israel. Arab armies eventually lost, while Palestinians continued to be killed and forced out throughout that time. Refugees who were trying to return were often shot at and the villages they had left were destroyed in order to prevent them from doing so. The Nakba is a catastrophe that has had a lasting impact on Palestinian society, both in terms of forcible displacement from their homes and lands and in terms of preventing their return once the fighting was over. More than half of the Palestinian people became refugees, stateless, and dispossessed of their land. To further compound the Nakba, Israel changed place names from Arabic to Hebrew, planted thousands of acres of pine forests and recreational areas on top of hundreds of destroyed Palestinian villages, and captured up to 85% of the total area, leading to 6 million Palestinians becoming refugees without a homeland. To this day, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba on May 15th by protesting and holding up keys as a symbol of the homes they lost and the hope to return.