Saturday, May 16, 2026

The True Story of Israel's Creation: Debunking Israel's Foundational Lies from Their Leaders' Mouths

Muhammad Shehada

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk55AwbXDaw

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

Historical reckoning: The push for the US to acknowledge the Nakba... On the 78th anniversary of the mass expulsion of Palestinians, experts say US ‘political amnesia’ continues.

Palestinian villagers who fled from their homes during fighting between Israeli and Arab troops, on November 4, 1948 [Jim Pringle/AP Photo]

By Joseph Stepansky

Washington, DC – It is a question that reaches a fever pitch this time of year for Palestinian survivors and rights advocates: Can the United States government create just policy in the Middle East without a full accounting — or recognition — of Palestinian history?

Thursday marks the annual day of remembrance for the Nakba, a period that began in 1948 with the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the creation of the state of Israel.

Since then, Palestinians have endured decades of displacement and ethnic cleansing.

But the US government does not recognise the Nakba, which translates to the “catastrophe” in Arabic, even as it continues to assert gargantuan influence over the region and maintains ironclad support for the Israeli government.

Under the second administration of President Donald Trump, the US has taken a further active role in Palestinian affairs, establishing the controversial “Board of Peace” to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, even as it continues to take a permissive approach towards Israel’s genocide.

When faced with the question of whether the US can responsibly address Palestinian issues without acknowledging the Nakba, Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, believes the answer is simple: No.

“If you only acknowledge the humanity and suffering of one side, that forces you also to ignore historical realities that are still with us today,” he told Al Jazeera.

Elgindy said “political amnesia” has long defined the US government’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

For decades, the US has supported Israel with billions in foreign assistance and military aid, despite the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and a system of segregation that rights groups say constitutes apartheid.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians. Elgindy told Al Jazeera that the US has played a key role in underwriting the conflict.

“For better or worse, mostly for worse, the United States is inextricably tied to the Palestinian issue,” Elgindy said.

A fundamental – if long delayed – corrective step would be recognition of the Nakba, he said. “It is a historical reality that Palestinians have a collective trauma that is part of their identity and part of their political psychology.”

‘The ongoing Nakba’

On Thursday, US Representative Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution to officially recognise “the ongoing Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights”.

It was the fifth consecutive time she has put forward the bill, with the latest version carrying 12 co-sponsors, up from six when it was first introduced in 2022.

In a video conference this week, she explained that it was necessary to draw attention to the Nakba, given that the human rights abuses against Palestinians continue.

“Too many of my colleagues in Congress like to act like … the state violence against the Palestinian people began with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Tlaib said.

“We know that Palestinian history has been one of the ongoing Nakba and the ethnic cleansing campaign since the creation [of Israel] in 1948.”

All told, about 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled during the Nakba, displaced to refugee camps across the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab countries.

About 400 cities and villages were depopulated, with massacres committed in Balad al-Sheikh, Saasaa, Deir Yassin, Saliha and Lydda, among others.

Like in past years, Tlaib’s latest legislative effort is largely symbolic, with little chance of progressing in Congress, which remains predominantly pro-Israel.

Still, the latest resolution comes amid signs of shifting public awareness, with polls showing increasing sympathy for Palestinians and a rise in negative views towards Israel’s government. Polls have shown tanking support for Israel, particularly among Democrats, amid the genocide in Gaza.

Attitudes in Congress have also shown significant, if more incremental, signs of change. Though support for Israel was once considered sacrosanct... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/15/historical-reckoning-the-push-for-the-us-to-acknowledge-the-nakba

The original Nakba

Abdel Mahdi’s sharp memory carries him back to his childhood, living with his parents on their land, among their livestock and property – a normal life, before everything changed.

Abdel Mahdi says he still remembers the heated discussions among families in Bir al-Saba when news first spread that Zionist Haganah militias were approaching, with some wanting to flee, and others insisting on staying.

The decision was eventually made to leave for Gaza, to the west, with the hope of returning in a few weeks.

And so Abdel Mahdi, along with his parents, three siblings, and the rest of his extended family, left, carrying whatever livestock, money and supplies they could manage.

“We all left … We walked for days. We would rest, then continue walking,” he says. “We carried some of our belongings with us. We never imagined it would become a permanent exile.”

The family initially settled in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood before later moving to Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, where the harsh realities of refugee life began.

“We lived in tents. The rain and wind would flood them, the cold was unbearable, then came the scorching heat,” he says. “There was hunger, exhaustion, long lines for food and water, shared toilets, lice, poor sanitation … painful memories.”

Right of return

“I remember my father and grandfather always saying we would return, and they told their children and grandchildren to hold on to the right of return,” Abdel Mahdi says.

But the return never came. Instead, decades of exile, wars and repeated attempts to rebuild life followed.

Abdel Mahdi worked for years inside Israel in construction, during a period when Palestinian labourers were granted work permits.

Together with his brothers, he managed to build homes and buy land, only for the current war to erase everything once again.

“We worked, built homes and bought land,” he says. “We thought we were finally compensating for something after the displacement that destroyed our families and lives. We thought it was over.”

“But this war destroyed everything completely,” he adds. “At the end of our lives, it brought us all back to zero. Nothing is left – no stone, no trees.”

Abdel Mahdi acknowledges that life in Gaza was never truly stable – with several Israeli wars and a years-long blockade – but he says the scale of destruction during the latest war is unprecedented.

“A Nakba at the beginning of my life … and another Nakba at the end of it. What can we even say?” he murmurs while staring at the devastation surrounding him.

The war on Gaza

Abdel Mahdi recounts how his life was turned upside down during the latest Israeli war on Gaza, beginning in October 2023.

This time, he was forced to flee his home as an elderly man, struggling to walk alongside his ageing wife and the families of his nephews.

He was displaced multiple times – once to the Gaza seaport area in western Gaza City, another time to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

Before that, he had sought shelter in a United Nations-run school in Jabalia before Israeli forces stormed it.

He recalls the terrifying moments when Israeli tanks and soldiers entered the school during the early months of the war, as chaos, gunfire and screams erupted while loudspeakers ordered everyone to evacuate southwards.

“They forced us out of the school,” he says. “My elderly wife and I leaned on each other to walk. Some people couldn’t get out and were killed there.”

“We walked long distances until we reached western Gaza, together with what remained of our family, who had scattered in different places,” he adds.

“We were collapsing from exhaustion, but the shelling and fear forced us to keep moving.”

Abdel Mahdi says that he considered staying in his home and refusing to leave, unwilling to repeat what he called “the mistake of our ancestors” when they fled in 1948. But he says the danger eventually forced him to flee.

For the elderly man, displacement itself became one of the cruellest parts of the war.

“When a person leaves his home, he loses his dignity and worth,” he says quietly. “We lived in tents, in the sand, exposed to everything… We lived through famine and shortages of absolutely everything.”

“I wished for death with all my heart,” the octogenarian admits, his eyes filling with tears. “All I wanted was a concrete wall to lean my exhausted back against, but there was nothing. It was unbearable for both the young and the old.”

A taste of return ... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/5/16/from-the-nakba-to-gazas-ruins-one-mans-lifetime-of-displacement

Nakba: Jewish voices are challenging the stories Israel tells about itself A film director, historian and Holocaust survivor speak to Al Jazeera as opinions shift.

Stephen Kapos and Gillian Mosely at the London screening of Planet Israel [Beardvoyage]

By Indlieb Farazi Saber

London, United Kingdom – The lights come up slowly inside a cinema in London’s buzzy Soho district, but nobody rushes for the exit.

As the credits roll, one woman lowers her face into her hands. A couple sit motionless. In the row ahead, someone exhales and says “Free Palestine”.

This screening of Planet Israel: A Cautionary Tale took place on the eve of Nakba Day, the annual commemoration of the 1948 forced displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the killing of thousands more during the creation of the Israeli state.

The documentary, set for UK-wide release from 5 June, explores how trauma, nationalism and militarisation have shaped Israeli society after October 7, 2023, and during the war on Gaza. Featuring interviews with historians, academics, former soldiers and everyday Israelis, the film arrives at a moment when old political certainties around Israel are fracturing — increasingly among Jewish and Israeli intellectuals, artists, rabbis and historians themselves.

“The media has not reported this,” the film’s director Gillian Mosely told Al Jazeera from her London home, days before the screening. “British Jews are being treated as a monolith, which I think is fuelling anti-Semitism.”... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/5/15/nakba-jewish-voices-are-challenging-the-stories-israel-tells-about-itself

Screenshot from Planet Israel, featuring historian Avi Shlaim discussing Israel and shifting public perceptions [Planet Israel] Historian Avi Shlaim, who is featured in Planet Israel, spoke of a rupture between Israel and Jewish communities around the world.

6 Things to Know About the Palestinian Nakba by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) - May 12, 2026

Palestine refugees sit inside their tent in the newly formed Ein El Hilweh refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, in this handout picture believed to be taken in 1948. (Cropped) Myrtle Winter Chaumeny (this link opens in a new window), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons {{PD-US}}

https://imeu.org/resources/the-nakba/6-things-to-know-about-the-palestinian-nakba/469

1. During the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Zionist militias and the new Israeli army ethnically cleansed approximately three quarters of all Palestinians from their homeland. Palestinians call this the Nakba (“catastrophe”).

About 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were violently forced from their homes and land during the founding of Israel. This mass expulsion of Palestinians was a deliberate, planned act of ethnic cleansing as part of Israel’s establishment as a Jewish-majority state in Palestine.
Ever since, Israel has prevented Palestinian refugees from returning home because they aren’t Jewish, denying their internationally recognized legal right of return. Today, about two-thirds of all Palestinians, more than 7 million people, are stateless refugees or internally displaced. Most languish in overcrowded, impoverished semi-permanent refugee camps in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, subject to brutal Israeli military rule, or in neighboring countries and elsewhere in the diaspora.

2. Zionist militants and Israeli soldiers committed dozens of massacres of Palestinian civilians during the Nakba.

Zionist militias and Israeli soldiers carried out several dozen massacres (this link opens in a new window) of Palestinians to terrorize them into fleeing. The most infamous took place in the village of Deir Yassin outside of Jerusalem on April 9, 1948, when more than 100 people, including dozens of children, women, and elderly people, were murdered by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang, which were led by future Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, respectively.
The massacres that were perpetrated during the Nakba were a continuation of a more than decade-long campaign of terrorism waged by the Irun, Stern Gang, and other Zionist militias in their drive to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

3. Israel was literally built upon the destruction of Palestine.

After the new Israeli army finished expanding the state’s borders, Israel covered 78% of Palestine. (The Israeli military occupied the remaining 22%, consisting of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, in the June 1967 war.)
Between 1948 and 1950, Israel systematically destroyed more than 400 (this link opens in a new window) Palestinian cities and towns or repopulated them with Jewish Israelis. Entire communities, including homes, businesses, and houses of worship, were wiped out to prevent the return of their Palestinian owners.
In many cases, the Israelis who took their land and homes also took the personal possessions of Palestinians who were forced to flee on short notice, including clothing, books, children’s toys, furniture, and household items like dishes, pots and pans.

4. Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained inside what became Israel in 1948 were governed by brutal military rule for nearly two decades and today live as fourth-class citizens in their own homeland.

About 150,000 Palestinians survived the Nakba and remained inside the new state of Israel. They were granted Israeli citizenship but between 1949 and 1966 they were governed by repressive military rule (this link opens in a new window), forced into segregated “ghettos (this link opens in a new window),” had most of their land taken from them for the use of Jewish Israelis, and severe restrictions were imposed on their freedom of movement, speech, and ability to earn a living.
Military rule was lifted in 1966 but today Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up more than 20% of Israel’s population, continue to have their land and homes taken or destroyed by the state and face widespread, systematic discrimination affecting almost every aspect of their lives, including land ownership rights, housing, employment, and family reunification.

5. The Nakba didn’t end in 1948 but has continued ever since. This is known as the Ongoing Nakba.

Since 1948, Israel has continued to force Palestinian families out of their homes, including in places like Sheikh Jarrah (this link opens in a new window) in East Jerusalem and the Negev (Naqab) (this link opens in a new window) desert in southern Israel. It continues to steal Palestinian homes and land for illegal settlements. Israeli settlers are waging an intensifying (this link opens in a new window) campaign of terrorism backed by the government (this link opens in a new window), driving Palestinians out of their communities in the West Bank. Since 2023, the Israeli military has forcibly displaced nearly the entire population and systematically destroyed almost every home during its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

6. The Nakba and Ongoing Nakba, and the apartheid system Israel has imposed on Palestinians living under its control, are the root cause of all the violence in Palestine/Israel.

For more than a century, Zionist groups and successive Israeli governments have been dispossessing and oppressing the Palestinian people, denying millions of Palestinians their freedom and the most basic of rights. This is the root cause of the problem between Israelis and Palestinians.
There is a consensus among human rights organizations and other experts, including Amnesty International (this link opens in a new window), Human Rights Watch (this link opens in a new window), and Israeli rights groups like B’Tselem (this link opens in a new window) and Yesh Din (this link opens in a new window), that the discriminatory legal and political system that Israel has imposed on Palestinians amounts to apartheid.
As noted (this link opens in a new window) by Amnesty International: “Israel must dismantle the apartheid system and start treating Palestinians as human beings with equal rights and dignity. Until it does, peace and security will remain a distant prospect for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Go deeper

Quick Facts: The Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)
Timeline: The Palestinian Nakba & Establishment of Israeli Apartheid
Explainer: Plan Dalet & The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Explainer: The Deir Yassin Massacre
In Their Own Words: Israeli Leaders on the Expulsion of Palestinians During Israel’s Establishment
Quick Facts: Palestinian Refugees
Fact Sheet: Is Israel an Apartheid State?

ABOUT The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU)

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) works to increase and enhance the public’s understanding about Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian Americans through media. We do this by offering mainstream US media organizations and journalists access to facts, resources, analysis, and experts in order to help them cover key issues with accuracy and depth, and by creating and disseminating original articles, fact sheets, videos, photo essays, and other digital content.

"Living for decades in crowded refugee camps in the West Bank, the elderly survivors who MEE met spoke of their steadfast yearning to return to their former homes. Some said they still have dreams at night of working in the fields. Azza, who now lives in al-Amari camp near the city of Ramallah, recalls how Tell al-Safi used to be a self-sufficient village with an abundance of various crops - fields growing wheat, barley, corn, sesame, tomato and okra, while trees bore olives, apples, figs and almonds. "At the edge of the village, there was a water well and, using animals, water was pumped from the well to water tanks,” she recalled. “We didn’t need anything from outside the village.""

Palestinian women harvest cotton in the village of Kafr Saba in 1937 (Agricultural memory of Palestine)

Lost land: Nakba survivors recall rural struggle in Mandate-era Palestine

Agriculture was central to Palestinian society before the creation of the state of Israel - and British colonial powers knew it

By Fareed Taamallah in al-Amaari refugee camp, occupied West Bank

Published date: 13 May 2020

For Khadija al-Azza, her home village of Tell al-Safi was a paradise.

"We lived the best of lives,” the 88-year-old Palestinian woman told Middle East Eye, recalling the small rural community of her childhood, before its population was forcibly expelled by Zionist militias in 1948 during the Nakba - Arabic for “catastrophe”.

Between 1917 and 1948, the United Kingdom occupied Palestine during what was known as the Mandate era. Small-scale farmers, known as fellahin, were central to Palestinian society at the time, with three quarters of the population living in rural areas and agriculture the main source of livelihood, bringing families together to work in the fields.

With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government vowed to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, carrying out various policies seeking to fulfill this promise - many of which came at the expense of the Palestinians.

Now, 72 years after the establishment of the state of Israel and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands, Nakba survivors share with Middle East Eye memories of the lives and land they lost, to which they maintain a deep attachment

Country life

At least 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes during the Nakba. They and their descendants now number more than 5.4 million scattered across the occupied West Bank, the besieged Gaza Strip and surrounding countries. Many of the villages that were forcibly evacuated were destroyed or turned into national parks by Israel, trees growing on the ruins of abandoned homes.

Living for decades in crowded refugee camps in the West Bank, the elderly survivors who MEE met spoke of their steadfast yearning to return to their former homes. Some said they still have dreams at night of working in the fields.... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestine-nakba-farmers-rural-resistance-british-mandate

The abandoned harvests of 1948: Palestinian farmers remember the Nakba

Read More »

Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe, explained Middle East Eye breaks down the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, which continues to define events in Israel-Palestine today

More than 750,000 Palestinian were forcibly expelled from their homeland by Zionist militia in 1948 (AFP)

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-palestine-catastrophe-explained

By MEE staff

Published date: 15 May 2026

It's a date inked in infamy for generations of Palestinians.

Each year, on 15 May, millions mark the Nakba, or catastrophe, which refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.

In a premeditated military campaign, Zionist forces killed thousands of Palestinians, destroyed hundreds of villages and forcibly expelled 80 percent of the Palestinian population from their homeland.

After more than a year of relentless violence, the newly created State of Israel captured 78 percent of historic Palestine.

The remaining 22 percent, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were occupied by Israel 19 years later and remain under Israeli military rule.

Before the Nakba

Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until it was captured by Great Britain at the end of World War One (1914-18).

The League of Nations gave Britain a "mandate" over Palestine after the war, in an arrangement that did not take into account the wishes of the native Palestinian population.

The declared aim of the League of Nations mandates was "the rendering of administrative assistance and advice" to the native populations until they are deemed capable of standing alone as independent states.

However, in the case of Palestine, the British Mandate incorporated the "Balfour Declaration" that pledged to establish "in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people", who made up less than 10 percent of the population at the time.

During the mandate years between 1923-48, Britain facilitated the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, increasing their population ten-fold, from 60,000 in the pre-Mandate era to 700,000 by 1948.

They also trained Zionist armed groups, provided them with weapons and allowed them a degree of self-governance.

Meanwhile, the native Palestinian population was violently suppressed following rebellions that called for independence and rejected European Jewish immigration.

In February 1947, Britain announced it would terminate the mandate and turn the question of Palestine over to the United Nations.

The UN adopted a partition plan in November 1947, which divided Palestine into two parts: 55 percent to a Jewish state, and 45 to an Arab state, while keeping Jerusalem under international control.

Palestinians were not consulted over the proposal which never materialised. From that point on, Zionist groups began their attacks.

The Nakba

Drawing upon military plans devised as early as 1945, Zionist armed groups began to systematically increase attacks against Palestinians from December 1947 with the aim of forcing them out.

Zionist strategy culminated in Plan Dalet, the blueprint for their military action that called for "destruction of villages" by "setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris".

It also said that "in the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state".

Zionist forces used various tactics to force Palestinians out, including bombing campaigns, massacres and psychological warfare, among other means.

The crimes of 1948: Jewish fighters speak out

Thomas Vescovi

Read More »

Unarmed civilians were indiscriminately killed during the campaign, some of whom were buried in mass graves.

Between December 1947 and 14 May 1948, some 175,000 Palestinians were expelled and 200 villages and urban centres destroyed and occupied.

On 14 May 1948, the State of Israel was unilaterally declared, a day before the British Mandate officially expired.

Arab armies then entered Palestine to push back against the Israeli military advances.

Hostilities were officially brought to an end by July 1949 with the signing of armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab states.

Israel captured 78 percent of historic Palestine, while the remaining 22 percent was under Arab control.

Aftermath

By the end of the war, Zionist forces had killed 13,000 Palestinians, destroyed and depopulated around 530 villages and towns, committed at least 30 massacres and expelled 750,000 people.

Around 150,000 remained within the boundaries of the newly formed state of Israel, many of them internally displaced.

Israel then passed laws by which it seized Palestinian property and assets left behind by those expelled, including land, homes, cash, stocks, furniture, companies and other movable assets.

They also enacted the Law of Return, which grants Israeli citizenship to Jews who relocate to Israel, while denying Palestinian refugees from returning to their homeland.

Today, there are 5.8 million registered Palestine refugees living in dozens of camps in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Internally displaced Palestinians, who were granted Israeli citizenship, amount to around two million people.

Every year, on 15 May, Palestinians across the world mark the Nakba, which they say has continued since 1948 in different forms of war, occupation, siege, home demolitions, land confiscations and more.