Nakba

Full Description

Arabic for “catastrophe,” the term used by Palestinians to describe the displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes and villages — over 400 of which were destroyed — and were subsequently barred from returning by Israeli law. The Nakba is the foundational trauma of Palestinian national consciousness and the direct cause of the Palestinian refugee crisis that remains unresolved.

Critical Perspective

Israeli “new historians” including Benny Morris documented in the 1980s and 1990s that Palestinian flight in 1948 was not exclusively voluntary — that expulsions, massacres (including at Deir Yassin), and deliberate terror were components of a military strategy to clear Arab populations from areas designated for the Jewish state. Morris’s conclusion — that the expulsion was a necessary evil for Israeli statehood — was rejected by Palestinian historians who argued it normalised ethnic cleansing as the price of national survival.