Reflections on The Nakba at 70: What the Nakba Means to Us
by Nahida Halaby Gordon and Sami A. Halaby
It has been slightly more than 70 years since we had to leave our home, our Palestine, and our Palestinian community of family, friends, and neighbors. It was a traumatic event in our lives, which we relive year after year.
Imagine how you would feel if when you visit the country of your birth, you are treated as an enemy alien and if allowed to enter you would only be able to stay at most three months. You find your home confiscated and occupied by people who were encouraged to come because they were persecuted elsewhere. As you move around you become aware that your community has been erased. Your roots have been cut. Nothing is recognizable - villages have been destroyed, churches, mosques, schools and cemeteries and other infrastructure have been replaced. Palestinian street names are replaced by Israeli names. Olive trees and farmland that have been terraced for generations are being replaced by ecologically unsustainable agriculture. The wasteful use of water has reduced the Jordan River to a trickle, the Dead Sea is shrinking, and Lake Hula in the Galilee has dried up. People in Tel Aviv and in the illegal settlements water their lawns; fill their swimming pools and plant trees unsuited to the environment in order to maintain a European life style alien to this part of the world. The injustice of it all is galling.
The Nakba has transformed Palestine from a pastoral country were people lived peacefully to an expansionist, highly militarized, insecure state that is constantly at war with its neighbors. It has a state religion; it refuses to define its borders; and it privileges those who are identified as belonging to the state religion.
The lack of a just resolution to the displacement of our community, the continual attack upon our culture and upon our memories continues the pain of separation from our Palestine. As the years pass, the realization that the end of our days will arrive before we see a resolution to our loss is a suffering that can only be lessened by our faith and hope that a better day will come, if not for us then for those who follow us.
Nahida Halaby Gordon and Sami A. Halaby are siblings who lived through the Nakba. Curiously, they cannot technically be called “refugees” because the family had the wherewithal to get to safety before it was too late (and before an artificial date was established by the dominant culture of that day). But that does not make them any less children of the refugee diaspora. They were young children who with their parents escaped their home in Jaffa, never to return. Their hearts still long for a home that shall never again belong to them. Nahida has served in leadership positions in our network for many years and in telling us her story, both she and her family have brought Palestine to life in our hearts. Their witness to us has been continual and inspiring. There is no better way for us to remember the tragedy of the Nakba than to hear about it in their own words. We thank both Nahida and Sami for their willingness to share. Theirs is a story we must never forget.
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Learn more about the Nakba
BOOKS
Palestine Is Our Home: Voices of Loss, Courage and Steadfastness, Edited by Nahida Halaby Gordon
The Nakba Through Palestinian Writers’ Eyes, edited by Atef Alshaer
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, Edited by Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha
The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory by Nur Masalha
For individual Nakba stories of the pictures in the above collage and more, see #MyNakbaStory
General Facts & Figures from IMEU.org
The Palestinian “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic) refers to the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from British Mandate Palestine during Israel’s creation (1947-49).
The Nakba was not an unintended result of war. It was a deliberate and systematic act necessary for the creation of a Jewish majority state in historic Palestine, which was overwhelmingly Arab prior to 1948. Internally, Zionist Jewish leaders used the euphemism “transfer” when discussing plans for what today would be called ethnic cleansing.
The Nakba’s roots lay in the emergence of political Zionism in 19th century Europe, when some Jews, influenced by the nationalism then sweeping the continent, concluded that the remedy to centuries of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe and Russia was the creation of a nation state for Jews in Palestine and began emigrating as colonists to the Holy Land, displacing indigenous Palestinians in the process.
In November 1947, following the horrors of World War II and the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, the newly-created United Nations approved a plan to partition Mandate Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. It allocated approximately 55% of the land to the proposed Jewish state, although Zionist Jews owned only about 7% of the private land in Palestine and made up only about 33% of the population, a large percentage of whom were recent immigrants from Europe. The Palestinian Arab state was to be created on 42% of Mandate Palestine, with Jerusalem becoming an international city. (See here for map of the partition plan and subsequent 1949 armistice lines.)
Almost immediately after the partition plan was passed, violence broke out and large-scale expulsions of Palestinians began, long before the armies of neighboring Arab states became involved. When Zionist forces finished expanding, the new state of Israel comprised 78% of historic Palestine, with the remainder, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, falling under the control of Jordan and Egypt, respectively. In the 1967 War, Israel occupied the remaining 22% and began colonizing them shortly thereafter.
The Nakba did not end in 1948 and continues until today, in the form of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land for settlements and for Jewish communities inside Israel, its destruction of Palestinian homes and agricultural land, revocation of residency rights , deportations, periodic brutal military assaults that result in mass civilian casualties such as the one that took place in Gaza in the summer of 2014, and the denial of the internationally-recognized legal right of return of millions of stateless Palestinian refugees.
The Nakba by the Numbers
Between 750,000 and one million : The number of Palestinians expelled and made refugees by Zionist paramilitaries, and subsequently Israeli forces, during Israel’s creation in 1947-49.
Between 250,000 and 350,000 : The number of Palestinians expelled from their homes by Zionist paramilitaries between the passage of the UN partition plan in November 1947 and Israel’s declaration of independence on May15, 1948 - prior to the start of the war with neighboring Arab states.
Approximately 7.1 million : The number of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons as of 2009, including Nakba survivors and their descendants. They are located mostly in the occupied West Bank and neighboring Arab countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, denied their internationally-recognized legal right to return to their homeland by Israel, simply because they are not Jewish.
Approximately 150,000 : The number of Palestinians who remained inside what became Israel's borders in 1948, many of them internally displaced. These Palestinians (sometimes called “Israeli Arabs”) were granted Israeli citizenship but stripped of most of their land and placed under martial law until 1966. As of 2018, there are nearly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who live as second-class citizens in their own homeland, subject to dozens of laws that discriminate against them because they are not Jewish.
At least two dozen : The number of massacres of Palestinian civilians by Zionist and Israeli forces, which played a crucial role in spurring the mass flight of Palestinians from their homes.
Approximately 100 : The number of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, massacred in the town of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang, pre-state Zionist terrorist organizations led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, respectively.
More than 400 : The number of Palestinian cities and towns systematically destroyed by Israeli forces or repopulated with Jews between 1948 and 1950. Most Palestinian population centers, including homes, businesses, houses of worship, and vibrant urban centers, were demolished to prevent the return of their Palestinian owners, now refugees outside of Israel's pre-1967 borders, or internally displaced inside of them. (See here for interactive map of Palestinian population centers destroyed during Israel's creation.)
Approximately 4,244,776 : The number of acres of Palestinian land expropriated by Israel during and immediately following its creation in 1948.
Between 100 and 200 billion : The total estimated monetary loss of Palestinians dispossessed during Israel's creation, in current US dollars.
For further reference, see previously released fact sheets, The Nakba: 65 Years of Dispossession and Apartheid, and The 65th Plan Dalet: Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing.