Saturday, May 16, 2026

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

[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]

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.

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

The Nakba: All you need to know explained in five maps and charts

The 1948 forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland has created the longest unresolved refugee crisis in modern history

Palestinians flee from an unidentified village in the Galilee after Zionist attacks in 1948 (Reuters)

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-nakba-ethnic-cleansing-explained-five-maps-charts

Britain and the Nakba: A history of betrayal- An unbroken thread of duplicity, mendacity and chicanery connects British foreign policy from Balfour to the Nakba to the present day

A demonstrator holding an umbrella with colours of the Palestinian flag stands by an Israeli flag during a protest against a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 24 March 2023 (Reuters)

Avi Shlaim

10 May 2023

Britain created the conditions that made the Palestinian Nakba possible.

In 1948, the Palestinians experienced a collective catastrophe of monumental proportions: some 530 villages were destroyed; more than 62,000 homes were demolished; about 13,000 Palestinians were killed; and 750,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of the Arab population of the country were driven out of their homes and became refugees.

This was the climax of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In its essence, Zionism had always been a settler-colonial movement. Its ultimate aim was to build an independent Jewish state in Palestine on as much of the land as possible and with as few Arabs within its borders as possible. Zionist spokesmen constantly reiterated that they meant no harm to the Arab inhabitants of the country, that they wanted to develop the country for the benefit of both communities.

But this was largely rhetoric, kalam fadi in Arabic, empty talk.... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/nakba-britain-history-betrayal

"What they could not do in 1948, they are doing now...." From Nakba to genocide: A Gaza grandmother’s lifetime of loss and resilience. At 95, Fatema Obaid has survived two massive Israeli assaults, lost 70 family members and endured starvation and repeated forced flight - but still refuses to leave her homeland

Fatema Obaid, 95, says the current genocide in Gaza is worse than the 1948 Nakba (Hani Abu Rezeq/MEE)

By Maha Hussaini in Gaza City, occupied Palestine

Published date: 15 May 2026 https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-genocide-gaza-grandmothers-lifetime-loss-and-resilience

At 95, Fatema Obaid has endured daily Israeli bombardment, starvation and the loss of 70 family members.

Yet the Palestinian grandmother, who survived the 1948 Nakba, refused to leave Gaza City when ordered to do so by the Israeli military during the 2023 genocide.

For her, fleeing again would mark the beginning of a “crueller Nakba” - one she refuses to relive.

“In the first Nakba, it is true that hundreds of thousands lost their land, homes and villages,” Obaid told Middle East Eye.

“But in this Nakba, we have lost an entire history,” she said from an unfinished apartment in western Gaza City, where she is displaced alongside her grandchildren.

“We lost entire families, and entire generations have been destroyed for decades to come. What they could not do in 1948, they are doing now.”

Originally from Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighbourhood, Obaid was temporarily displaced during the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias attacked Palestinian towns and villages across historic Palestine, forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to make way for the creation of Israel - an event many scholars describe as ethnic cleansing.

Obaid later returned to Shujaiya, an area that remained outside Israeli control after the 1949 armistice agreement, but lay close to the new de facto border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

More than 75 years later, she relived the same trauma she endured as a teenager - only this time with far greater brutality.

“There is no comparison between the first and the second Nakba,” she said.

New Nakba

Like many Palestinians in Gaza during the Nakba, Obaid experienced both displacement and giving refuge.

She and her family were forced to flee their home for several months amid the violence and chaos that swept across Palestine in 1948.

At the same time, Gaza was inundated with Palestinians forcibly expelled from towns and villages that later became part of Israel.

'Nothing is more painful than being uprooted from your own land and knowing that, after all these years, you will die in displacement'

- Fatema Obaid, Palestinian grandmother

Families arrived with almost nothing after fleeing killings, bombardment and attacks by Zionist militias, believing they would return within days. Instead, Gaza became a place of permanent refuge, overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians uprooted during the Nakba.

Today, around 1.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in the enclave, making up roughly 73 percent of Gaza’s population.

Since October 2023, however, Obaid has been displaced more than 10 ten times after her home and entire neighbourhood were reduced to rubble and absorbed into Israel’s newly imposed no-go zone.

“I have lived in Shujaiya since I was born. Even after marrying my cousin, I moved only a few streets away,” she recalled, adding that they fled for a few months in 1948 but eventually returned.

“Only during this Nakba did we lose our homes, our neighbourhood and all of eastern Gaza,” she added.

“They bombed our house and killed more than 70 members of my family - my sons, grandchildren, nephews, their children and many others from our extended family.”

During the Nakba between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias and later Israeli forces killed an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 Palestinians and permanently displaced around 750,000 people - roughly 75 percent of the Palestinian population at the time.

In the current genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in two years, while nearly two million residents have been displaced. Around 1.5 million remain uprooted despite the ceasefire agreement, most now living in makeshift tents.

Staying in Gaza

Shortly after Obaid was forced to flee her home for another part of Gaza City in October 2023, the Israeli military issued repeated mass expulsion orders instructing residents to move south.

As hundreds of thousands of residents initially refused to comply, Israel imposed what United Nations experts considered a systematic starvation that was “used as a savage weapon of war” to force Palestinians out.

For months that followed, residents were deprived of basic food items, including wheat flour, and struggled to find drinking water. Famine was officially declared in Gaza City in August 2025 by the UN-backed... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-genocide-gaza-grandmothers-lifetime-loss-and-resilience

TIME: The Solemn History Behind Nakba Day ... From 1947 to 1949, 531 towns were destroyed by Israeli militias- Of the 1.4 million-strong Palestinian population at the time, 800,000 were displaced; the massacres of families and towns left enduring scars on the survivors.

Arab refugees, mostly women and children, from a village near Haifa begin a three mile hike carrying large bundles of personal possessions to the Arab lines in Tulkarim, West Bank, on June 26, 1948.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

by Juwayriah Wright

Wright is an Editorial Producer for TIME.

Every year on May 15, Palestinian people across the world observe what is known as Nakba Day, the solemn anniversary of the day in 1948 when the Arab-Israeli War began, precipitating a wave of displacement and expulsion among the Palestinian population. This year, with more than 450,000 people—nearly a quarter of Gaza’s population—newly displaced in just the past week, the commemoration of the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” takes on new significance.

For those who observe it, Nakba Day is not only a day for mourning, but for a sense of re-establishment. Although it is annually remembered, the event has historical nuances and driving forces that can contribute to an understanding of the current events in Gaza.

What is commemorated on Nakba Day?

Political Zionism—the movement to create a Jewish state—dates back to the 19th century, but the persecution of Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s and the horrors of the Holocaust helped drive a massive migration in that decade of 60,000 Jews to what was then known as Mandatory Palestine, the British-controlled land that was ... READ MORE https://time.com/6978612/nakba-day-history/

Annie's New Letters (& notes)

Labels