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Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world, numbering about
12.4 million, mark the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, referring to the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of
Palestinian society in 1948.

The Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland is
69 years old this year.

On that day, the State of Israel came into being. The creation of
Israel was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish
a Jewish-majority state, as per the aspirations of the Zionist
movement.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9
million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state.
Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine,
ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and
killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities,
including more than 70 massacres.

Though May 15, 1948, became the official day for commemorating the
Nakba, armed Zionist groups had launched the process of displacement
of Palestinians much earlier. In fact, by May 15, half of the total
number of Palestinian refugees had already been forcefully expelled
from their country.

Israel continues to oppress and dispossess Palestinians to this day,
albeit in a less explicit way than that during the Nakba.

What caused the Nakba?

The roots of the Nakba stem from the emergence of Zionism as a
political ideology in late 19th-century Eastern Europe. The ideology
is based on the belief that Jews are a nation or a race that deserve
their own state.

From 1882 onwards, thousands of Eastern European and Russian Jews
began settling in Palestine; pushed by the anti-Semitic persecution
and pogroms they were facing in the Russian Empire, and the appeal of
Zionism.

In 1896, Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl published a pamphlet that
came to be seen as the ideological basis for political Zionism – Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State”. Herzl concluded that the remedy to centuries-old anti-Semitic sentiments and attacks in Europe was the
creation of a Jewish state.

Though some of the movement’s pioneers initially supported a Jewish
state in places such as Uganda and Argentina, they eventually called
for for building a state in Palestine based on the biblical concept
that the Holy Land was promised to the Jews by God.

In the 1880s, the community of Palestinian Jews, known as the Yishuv,
amounted to three percent of the total population. In contrast to the
Zionist Jews who would arrive in Palestine later, the original Yishuv
did not aspire to build a modern Jewish state in Palestine.

After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1517-1914), the British
occupied Palestine as part of the secret Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916
between Britain and France to divvy up the Middle East for imperial
interests.

In 1917, before the start of the British Mandate (1920-1947), the
British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to help the
“establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, essentially vowing to give away a country that was not theirs to give.

Central to the pledge was Chaim Weizmann, a Britain-based Russian
Zionist leader and chemist whose contributions to the British war
effort during World War I (1914-1918) made him well-connected to the
upper echelons of the British government. Weizmann lobbied hard for
more than two years with British former Prime Minister David
Lloyd-George and former Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour to publicly
commit Britain to building a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

By giving their support to Zionist goals in Palestine, the British
hoped they could shore up support among the significant Jewish
populations in the US and Russia for the Allied effort during WWI.
They also believed the Balfour Declaration would secure their control
over Palestine after the war.

From 1919 onwards, Zionist immigration to Palestine, facilitated by
the British, increased dramatically. Weizmann, who later became
Israel’s first president, was realising his dream of making Palestine
“as Jewish as England is English”.

Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to
nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of
thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought
land from absentee landlords.

Leading Arab and Palestinian intellectuals openly warned against the
motifs of the Zionist movement in the press as early as 1908. With the
Nazi seizure of power in Germany between 1933 and 1936, 30,000 to
60,000 European Jews arrived on the shores of Palestine.

In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched a large-scale uprising against the
British and their support for Zionist settler-colonialism, known as
the Arab Revolt. The British authorities crushed the revolt, which
lasted until 1939, violently; they destroyed at least 2,000
Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps and
subjected them to violent interrogation, including torture, and
deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders.

At least ten percent of the Palestinian male population had been
killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned by the end of the revolt.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948

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