In 1948, the village of X faced the main road to Jerusalem and was home to only 750 people, all of whom knew each other. This village was a black spot in history, as it was the site of a massacre in the series of catastrophic events known as the Nakba. This period saw the violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland in order to create the state of Israel.
Throughout history, this region has been home to Palestinians for centuries, with hundreds of villages and thriving cities, including the central city of Jerusalem, which holds holy sites important to Jewish, Christian and Muslim people. By the late Ottoman Empire, Palestinians living here were overwhelmingly Muslim with minority Christian and Jewish native populations.
The borders of Palestine have been changed forcefully over time, but the political forces competing for control of these lands during World War I were the growing Arab independence movement, the Zionists and the British. The Arab independence movement wanted a unified Arab state that included Palestine, while the Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state. The British, on the other hand, wanted to expand their spheres of influence and protect trade routes to India.
In 1917, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which supported the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine without consulting the native Palestinian population. This declaration opened up a pathway for Britain to gain power in the region, while the majority Arab population was referred to as non-Jewish communities, who would be given civil and religious rights but not political rights. Britain gained control of Palestine through a mandate after World War I, which also required them to put the Balfour plans for Jewish settlement in motion. This resulted in a rapid increase in the Jewish population between 1922 and 1931, helping the Zionist movement gain steam. The slogan “A land without people for, a people without land” was popularized, sending a message to Western leaders that the people who had been living in Palestine for generations could easily be moved elsewhere. However, in 1931, there were more than 850,000 Palestinian Arabs in the region, still the vast majority.
The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in particular caused Jewish flight from Europe to become even more urgent, leading to a bigger wave of Jewish emigration to Palestine. This caused tensions over land to rise, as Jewish settlers purchased swaths of fertile land and evicted tenant farmers. This created a crisis of hundreds of thousands of landless, dispossessed Palestinian-Arabs. Palestinians fiercely rebelled against both British colonial forces and Jewish settlers, but were brutally crushed by the British. In an attempt to prevent further Palestinian resistance, the British began to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine. This angered Zionist extremists, leading to more violence.
In 1947, Britain gave up and handed the question of Palestine to the United Nations. The UN proposed that the land be divided into two states - a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as a separate UN-controlled entity. This plan 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. The plan also proposed making hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs minorities in their own homeland, which was seen as unjust and unfair. After lobbying from US leaders and Zionists, the UN voted in favor of the partition plan.
After the partition took place, Zionists had several well-developed paramilitary forces, the largest one known as the Haganah, and more extremist militias like Irgun. Palestinians were scared of what might happen to them. Britain announced their mandate over Palestine would end on May 15th, 1948, even as Palestinians continued to reject the UN’s decision. On March 10th, 1948, the Haganah adopted Plan Dalet (also known as Plan D). The goal of this plan was to gain control of the Jewish state as proposed in the UN partition plan, while also defending Jewish settlements outside the borders. However, the majority of operations took place outside of the proposed Jewish state, some carried out by Haganah and others by more radical militias. These operations focused on isolating Jerusalem and the roads to it, and included instructions for the destruction of Arab villages, setting fire to them, blowing them up, planting mines, and expelling the population outside of the borders in case of resistance. One of the most widely publicized village massacres happened in Deir Yassin, where 91 year old Dawud Assad was present. On April 9th, 1948, extremist Zionist forces closed in on the village, even though it had made a local peace pact with neighboring Jewish settlements. The attack resulted in the deaths of roughly 100 people, largely children and the elderly. The Israeli army archive still refuses to release images and intelligence reports on Deir Yassin, but one UN report detailed circumstances of great savagery. The news of the massacre quickly spread, and was used as a propaganda tool by the Zionist militias to tell people that if they didn’t leave, the same would happen to them. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee, pouring into neighboring states as refugees. This plan became the blueprint for carrying out the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine to make room for a new state. On May 14th, the day before the British mandate ended, the state of Israel was declared. However, the creation of Israel didn’t end the Nakba, as neighboring Arab countries went to war with Israel. Arab armies eventually lost, while Palestinians continued to be killed and forced out. Refugees were not allowed to return, and were often shot at if they tried. Zionist paramilitary operations also destroyed the villages to prevent them from returning. The Nakba is a catastrophe that has had far-reaching impacts on Palestinian society. It is the forcible displacement of Palestinians from their homes and lands, as well as the prevention of their return once the fighting was over. This caused more than half of the Palestinian population to become refugees and stateless, and their lands were taken over by Israel. Place names were changed from Arabic to Hebrew and forests were planted on top of ruined Palestinian villages. Though the UN’s partition plan allotted Israel 56% of the land, it ended up capturing 78% of the area, leaving 6 million Palestinians without a homeland. To this day, Palestinians still remember their homelands and commemorate the Nakba on May 15th by protesting and holding up keys as a symbol of the homes they lost and their hope to return.