Clickable map of

Mandatory Palestine Mandatory Palestine ( ar, فلسطين الانتدابية '; he, פָּלֶשְׂתִּינָה (א״י) ', where "E.Y." indicates ''’Eretz Yiśrā’ēl'', the Land of Israel) was a geopolitical entity established between 1920 and 1948 ...

with the depopulated locations during the

1947–1949 Palestine war The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. It is known in Israel as the War of Independence ( he, מלחמת העצמאות, ''Milkhemet Ha'Atzma'ut'') and ...

The Nakba ( ar, النكبة, translit=an-Nakbah, lit=the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"), also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs. The term is used to describe both the events of 1948 and the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the

occupied West Bank The Israeli occupation of the West Bank began on 7 June 1967, when Israeli forces captured and occupied the territory (including East Jerusalem), then occupied by Jordan, during the Six-Day War, and continues to the present day. The status of ...

and the

Gaza Strip The Gaza Strip (;The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p.761 "Gaza Strip /'gɑːzə/ a strip of territory under the control of the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas, on the SE Mediterranean coast including the town of Gaza.. ...

, as well as in

Palestinian refugee camps Camps are set up by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to accommodate Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, who fled or were expelled during the 1948 Palestinian ...

throughout the region. The foundational events of the Nakba took place during and shortly after the

1948 Palestine war The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. It is known in Israel as the War of Independence ( he, מלחמת העצמאות, ''Milkhemet Ha'Atzma'ut'') and ...

, including 78% of

being declared as Israel, the exodus of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and subsequent geographical erasure, the denial of the

Palestinian right of return The Palestinian right of return is the political position or principle that Palestinian refugees, both first-generation refugees (c. 30,000 to 50,000 people still alive )"According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency – the main body ...

, the creation of permanent

Palestinian refugees Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1947–49 Palestine war (1948 Palestinian exodus) and the Six-Day War (1967 Palestinian exodu ...

and the "shattering of Palestinian society". In 1998, Yasser Arafat proposed that Palestinians should mark the 50th anniversary of the Nakba declaring 15 May, the day after Israeli independence in 1948, as

Nakba Day Nakba Day ( ar, ذكرى النكبة, translit=Dhikra an-Nakba, lit=Memory of the Catastrophe) is the day of commemoration for the ''Nakba'', also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, which comprised the destruction of Palestinian society an ...

, formalizing a date that had been unofficially used as early as 1949. The Nakba greatly influenced the Palestinian culture and is a foundational symbol of Palestinian identity, together with "

Handala Handala ( ar, حنظلة, Ḥanẓala), also Handhala, Hanzala or Hanthala, is a prominent national symbol and personification of the Palestinian people. The character was created in 1969 by political cartoonist Naji al-Ali, and first took i ...

", the

keffiyeh The keffiyeh or kufiya ( ar, كُوفِيَّة, kūfīyah, relating to Kufa, link=no), also known in Arabic as a ghutrah (), shemagh ( '), (), in Kurdish as a Shemagh ''(''شه‌ماغ'')'' or Serwîn (سه‌روین) and in Persian, as a ...

and the symbolic key. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish described the Nakba as "an extended present that promises to continue in the future."

Components

The Nakba encompasses the

displacement Displacement may refer to: Physical sciences Mathematics and Physics *Displacement (geometry), is the difference between the final and initial position of a point trajectory (for instance, the center of mass of a moving object). The actual path ...

dispossession Eviction is the removal of a tenant from rental property by the landlord. In some jurisdictions it may also involve the removal of persons from premises that were foreclosed by a mortgagee (often, the prior owners who defaulted on a mortgage ...

statelessness In international law, a stateless person is someone who is "not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law". Some stateless people are also refugees. However, not all refugees are stateless, and many people who are st ...

and fracturing of Palestinian society.

Displacement

During the

1947–49 Palestine war The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. It is known in Israel as the War of Independence ( he, מלחמת העצמאות, ''Milkhemet Ha'Atzma'ut'') and ...

, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, comprising around 80% of the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of what became Israel. Almost half of this figure (approximately 250,000–300,000 Palestinians) had fled or had been expelled ahead of the

Israeli Declaration of Independence The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel ( he, הכרזה על הקמת מדינת ישראל), was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 ( 5 Iyar 5708) by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive ...

in May 1948, a fact which was named as a ''

casus belli A (; ) is an act or an event that either provokes or is used to justify a war. A ''casus belli'' involves direct offenses or threats against the nation declaring the war, whereas a ' involves offenses or threats against its ally—usually one b ...

'' for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the

1948 Arab–Israeli War The 1948 (or First) Arab–Israeli War was the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. It formally began following the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight on 14 May 1948; the Israeli Declaration of Independence had ...

. In the period after the war, a large number of Palestinians attempted to return to their homes; between 2,700 and 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel during this period, the vast majority being unarmed and intending to return for economic or social reasons. At the same time, a significant proportion of those Palestinians who remained in Israel became internally displaced. In 1950,

UNRWA The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's mandate encompasses Palestinians displaced by the 1948 P ...

estimated that 46,000 of the 156,000 Palestinians who remained inside the borders demarcated as Israel by the

1949 Armistice Agreements The 1949 Armistice Agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt,The Internally Displaced Refugees
Today some 274,000

Arab citizens of Israel The Arab citizens of Israel are the largest ethnic minority in the country. They comprise a hybrid community of Israeli citizens with a heritage of Palestinian citizenship, mixed religions (Muslim, Christian or Druze), bilingual in Arabic an ...

– or one in four in Israel – are internally displaced from the events of 1948.

Dispossession and erasure

The UN Partition Plan of 1947 assigned 56% of Palestine to the future Jewish state, while the Palestinian majority, 66%, were to receive 44% of the territory. 80% of the land in the programmed Jewish state was already owned by Palestinians, 11% had Jewish title. Before, during and after the 1947–49 war, hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed.Morris, Benny (2003).'' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , p. 604.Khalidi, Walid (Ed.) (1992). ''All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948''. Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies. . Geographic names throughout the country were erased and replaced with Hebrew names, sometimes derivatives of the historical Palestinian nomenclature, and sometimes new inventions. Numerous non-Jewish historical sites were destroyed, not just during the wars, but in a subsequent process over a number of decades. For example, over 80% of Palestinian village mosques have been destroyed, and artefacts have been removed from museums and archives. A variety of laws were promulgated in Israel to legalize the expropriation of Palestinian land.

Statelessness and denationalization

The creation of Palestinian statelessness is a central component of the Nakba and continues to be a feature of Palestinian national life to the present day. All Arab Palestinians became immediately stateless as a result of the Nakba, although some took on other nationalities. After 1948, Palestinians ceased to be simply Palestinian, instead becoming either Israeli-Palestinians,

Palestinians, West Bank-Palestinians, and Gazan-Palestinians, in addition to the wider Palestinian diaspora who were able to achieve residency outside of historic Palestine and the refugee camps. The first

Israeli Nationality Law Israeli citizenship law details the conditions by which a person holds citizenship of Israel. The two primary pieces of legislation governing these requirements are the 1950 Law of Return and 1952 Citizenship Law. Every Jew in the world has ...

, passed on 14 July 1952, denationalized Palestinians, rendering the former Palestinian citizenship "devoid of substance", "not satisfactory and is inappropriate to the situation following the establishment of Israel".

Fracturing of society

The Nakba was the primary cause of the Palestinian diaspora; at the same time Israel was created as a Jewish homeland, the Palestinians were turned into a "refugee nation" with a "wandering identity". Today a majority of the 13.7 million Palestinians live in the diaspora, i.e. they live outside of the historical area of

, primarily in other countries of the

Arab world The Arab world ( ar, اَلْعَالَمُ الْعَرَبِيُّ '), formally the Arab homeland ( '), also known as the Arab nation ( '), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, refers to a vast group of countries, mainly located in Western A ...

. Of the 6.2 million people registered by the UN's dedicated Palestinian refugee agency,

, about 40% live in the West Bank and Gaza, and 60% in the diaspora. A large number of these diaspora refugees are not integrated into their host countries, as illustrated by the ongoing tension of

Palestinians in Lebanon Palestinians in Lebanon include the Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Palestine War, their descendants, the Palestinian militias which resided in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and Palestinian nationals who moved to Leban ...

or the 1990–91 Palestinian exodus from Kuwait. These factors have resulted in a Palestinian identity of "suffering", whilst the

deterritorialization In critical theory, deterritorialization is the process by which a social relation, called a ''territory'', has its current organization and context altered, mutated or destroyed. The components then constitute a new territory, which is the proces ...

of the Palestinians has created a uniting factor and focal point in the desire to return to their lost homeland.

Terminology

The term Nakba was first applied to the events of 1948 by

Constantin Zureiq Constantin K. Zurayk ( ar, قسطنطين زريق) was a prominent and influential Syrian Arab intellectual who was one of the first to pioneer and express the importance of Arab nationalism. He stressed the urgent need to transform stagnant A ...

, a professor of history at the

American University of Beirut The American University of Beirut (AUB) ( ar, الجامعة الأميركية في بيروت) is a private, non-sectarian, and independent university chartered in New York with its campus in Beirut, Lebanon. AUB is governed by a private, aut ...

, in his 1948 book ''Ma^cnā an-Nakba'' (''The Meaning of the Disaster''). Zureiq wrote that "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history." Prior to 1948, the "Year of the Catastrophe" among

Arabs The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 31635, DIN 31635: , Arabic pronunciation: ), also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Wester ...

referred to 1920, when European colonial powers partitioned the Ottoman Empire into a series of separate states along lines of their own choosing. The word was used again one year later by the Palestinian poet Burhan al-Deen al-Abushi. Zureiq's students subsequently founded the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1952, one of the first post-Nakba Palestinian political movements. In a six-volume encyclopedia ''Al-Nakba: Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis Wal-Firdaws al-Mafqud'' (''The Catastrophe: The Catastrophe of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise'') published between 1958–60,

Aref al-Aref Aref al-Aref ( ar, عارف العارف, 1892–1973), variously spelled as Arif el Arif, 'Arif el-'Arif, etc., was a Palestinian journalist, historian and politician. He served as mayor of East Jerusalem in the 1950s during the Jordanian anne ...

wrote: "How Can I call it but Nakba? When we the Arab people generally and the Palestinians particularly, faced such a disaster (Nakba) that we never faced like it along the centuries, our homeland was sealed, we ereexpelled from our country, and we lost many of our beloved sons."

Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari ( ar, محمد نمر الهواري; 1908 - July 11, 1984) was a Nazareth-born Palestinian who studied law in Jerusalem, graduating in 1939. Al-Hawari served in the British Mandate administration as chief interpreter in ...

also used the term Nakba in the title of his book ''Sir al Nakba'' (''The Secret behind the Disaster'') written in 1955. The use of the term has evolved over time. Initially, the use of the term Nakba among Palestinians was not universal. For example, many years after 1948,

Palestinian refugee Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1947–49 Palestine war ( 1948 Palestinian exodus) and the Six-Day War ( 1967 Palestinian exo ...

s in

Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south, while Cyprus li ...

avoided and even actively resisted using the term, because it lent permanency to a situation they viewed as temporary, and they often insisted on being called "returnees". In the 1950s and 1960s, terms they used to describe the events of 1948 included ''al-'ightiṣāb'' ("the rape"), or were more euphemistic, such as ''al-'aḥdāth'' ("the events"), ''al-hijra'' ("the exodus"), and ''lammā sharnā wa-tla'nā'' ("when we blackened our faces and left"). Nakba narratives were avoided by the leadership of the

Palestine Liberation Organization The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; ar, منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية, ') is a Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian nationalist political and militant organization founded in 1964 with the initial purpose of establ ...

(PLO) in Lebanon in the 1970s, in favor of a narrative of revolution and renewal. Interest in the Nakba by organizations representing refugees in Lebanon surged in the 1990s due to the perception that the refugees'

right of return The right of return is a principle in international law which guarantees everyone's right of voluntary return to, or re-entry to, their country of origin or of citizenship. The right of return is part of the broader human rights concept freedom of ...

might be negotiated away in exchange for Palestinian statehood, and the desire was to send a clear message to the international community that this right was non-negotiable. Since the late 1990s, the phrase “

ongoing Nakba "Ongoing Nakba" ( ar, النکبة المستمرة, al-nakba al-mustamirra) is a term used to describe the still unfolding Palestinian " Nakba" or "catastrophe" in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and concurrent expulsion and flight of Pales ...

” ( ar, النکبة المستمرة, al-nakba al-mustamirra) has emerged to describe the "continuous experience of violence and dispossession" experienced by the Palestinian people. This term enjoins the understanding of the Nakba not as an event in 1948, but as an ongoing process that continues through to the present day.

Israeli perspectives

Israeli narrative

The period of the Nakba is the " other side of the coin" of the period which many Jewish Israelis refer to as the birth of the state of Israel and their "War of Independence". Jewish Israelis commonly perceive the 1948 war and its outcome as an equally formative and fundamental event – as an act of justice and redemption for the Jewish people after centuries of historical suffering, and the key step in the "

negation of the Diaspora The negation of the Diaspora ( he, שלילת הגלות, ''shlilat ha' galut'', or he, שלילת הגולה, ''shlilat ha'golah'') is a central assumption in many currents of Zionism. The concept encourages the dedication to Zionism and it is u ...

". As a result, the narrative is extremely sensitive to the Israeli identity. As one paper on the subject puts it: "Silence on the Nakba is also part of everyday life in Israel."

State funding penalties for Nakba commemoration

In May 2009, Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would outlaw all Nakba commemorations, with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance. Following public criticism, the bill draft was changed, the prison sentence dropped and instead the

Minister of Finance A finance minister is an executive or cabinet position in charge of one or more of government finances, economic policy and financial regulation. A finance minister's portfolio has a large variety of names around the world, such as "treasury", " ...

would have the authority to reduce state funding for Israeli institutions found to be "commemorating Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning". The new draft was approved by the

Knesset The Knesset ( he, הַכְּנֶסֶת ; "gathering" or "assembly") is the unicameral legislature of Israel. As the supreme state body, the Knesset is sovereign and thus has complete control of the entirety of the Israeli government (with ...

in March 2011. The implementation of the new law unintentionally promoted knowledge of the Nakba within Israeli society, an example of the

Streisand effect Attempts to hide, remove, or censor information often have the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information via the Internet. This is called the Streisand effect. It is named after American singer and actress Barbra Streis ...

In films and literature

Farha, a film about the Nakba directed by Jordanian director Darin Sallam, was chosen as Jordan’s official submission for the 2023 Academy Awards International Feature Film category. In response, Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Finance Minister, ordered the treasury to withdraw government funding for Jaffa’s Al Saraya Theater where the film is scheduled for projection.

Long-term implications

The most important long-term implications of the Nakba for the Palestinian people were the loss of their homeland, the fragmentation and marginalization of their national community, and their transformation into a stateless people.

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

* * * * (Original Arabic version: ) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * {{Subject bar , portal1=Palestine , portal2=Politics, portal20=History, commons=Nakba , wikt=Nakba , q=Nakba , n=y , s=y , b= y , v= y 1940s neologisms Arabic words and phrases History of Palestine (region) Society of the State of Palestine Statelessness History of the Palestinian refugees National symbols of the State of Palestine Anti-Arabism 1948 Palestinian exodus