"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

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"The Nakba – Arabic for “catastrophe” – happened because the politicians of this country enabled it. They enabled it with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine...." Britain must help establish a Palestinian state It has a historical responsibility to do so- By William Dalrymple in The New Statesman

[Palestine Refugees Nakba 1948] Photo by CPA Media/Alamy

Seventy-seven years ago, 750,000 Palestinians were terrorised out of their homes and farms and villages in Galilee – from Tiberias, Beit She’an, Safed and the great Palestinian ports of Jaffa and Acre.

They were driven out with napalm and machine guns and machetes, and forced to flee from their groves of olive trees on to the barren dunes of Gaza where they remain. By the end of 1948, less than 15 per cent of Palestinians remained where they had always lived. More than 85 per cent had been ethnically cleansed, despite the promises of Arthur Balfour in his declaration that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

The Nakba – Arabic for “catastrophe” – happened because the politicians of this country enabled it. They enabled it with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. They also enabled it with 30 years of British colonial rule in Palestine during which the indigenous inhabitants were disarmed and their leaders arrested and sent to prison camps in the Seychelles and Cyprus. The black and tans, notorious for their violence, were brought in on Churchill’s orders and unleashed on those Palestinians who tried to stand up against the erosion of their land.

The British, determined to suppress the revolt militarily, dispatched 25,000 soldiers and policemen to Palestine in 1938 – the largest deployment of British forces abroad since the end of the First World War. They established military courts, operating under “emergency regulations” that gave the British Mandate the legal trappings of a military dictatorship. The best account of what we unleashed on the Palestinians can be found in Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence, a chilling study of British anti-insurgency techniques in our imperial colonies. Elkins shows how the British destroyed the houses of all those involved in attacks under the legal authority of the emergency regulations. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed from 1936 to 1940.

Combatants and innocent civilians alike were interned in concentration camps – by 1939, more than 9,000 Palestinians were held in overcrowded facilities; many endured violent interrogation or torture. Younger offenders, between the ages of seven and 16, were flogged. Over 100 Arabs were sentenced to death in 1938 and 1939, and more than 30 were executed. By the time the revolt was crushed in 1939, the Palestinian leadership had been so badly intimidated they were in no position to fight for their survival when the British finally pulled out in 1948, leaving the Palestinians to their fate... READ MORE  https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2025/09/britain-must-help-establish-a-palestinian-state

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Palestinians to ask UK to own up to ‘law violations’ between 1917 and 1948 Petition, drafted by human rights lawyers, says war crimes were committed during British occupation of Palestine

Munib al-Masri in the garden of his home outside the West Bank city of Nablus. Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty

A group of Palestinians will serve a legal petition asking the UK to take responsibility for what they call “serial international law violations”, including war crimes committed during the British occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1948, the consequences of which it says still reverberate today.

The 400-plus page document, drafted by human rights KCs, details “incontrovertible evidence” of the UK’s unlawful legacy.

This includes the 1917 Balfour declaration, acting as an occupying power during the mandate period – an authority to rule the territory that it says had no legal basis – and the subsequent “systematic abuse” of the Palestinian people.

The submission says the Palestinian people face their gravest crisis since 1948, which Britain bears its own distinct responsibility for and so owes them a special debt.

Among the petitioners is the 91-year-old philanthropist Munib al-Masri, who was shot in the leg by British soldiers when he was 13.

The submission, served on the UK government on Sunday, marks the launch of a campaign, Britain Owes Palestine, which is pressing for official UK acknowledgment of wrongdoing, apology and reparations for what it calls a “century of oppression”.

A legal petition is a formal request to the government to act based on evidence and legal analysis, often used by victims of colonial wrongdoing.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/07/palestinians-petition-uk-legal-violations-last-century

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New Icon Appears on Israel's Apartheid Wall - Jerusalem, Palestine 2023

New Icon Appears on Israel's Apartheid Wall - Jerusalem, Palestine

 

& to echo that:

Husam Zomlot

@hzomlot

Today marks 106 years since Britain issued its colonial #BalfourDeclaration, which gave our land away and reduced us to the "non-Jewish" population. The ongoing campaign of mass murder against our people in #Gaza and all over #Palestine is a stark reminder of the catastrophic consequences of that declaration. It is the responsibility of the UK to correct this historic injustice, demand an immediate end to Israel's aggression, recognise the #State_of_Palestine and collect international support to once and for all end Israel's #occupation.