Exhibition

The Record of 1948

The Nakba, documented

A guided walk through the year that remade Palestine: the villages emptied, the survivors who testified, the documents that answer the denials.

8 stops · curated by FALASTEEN.AI

1948 is the year everything in this archive orbits. This exhibition does not ask you to take anyone’s word for it. It walks you through the record — the UN documents, the village files, the testimony recorded within days of the events, and the findings of historians on every side, including Israel’s own intelligence assessments.

Move slowly. Every stop links to sources.

  1. 01The Nakba1948Begin with the event itself: what happened between the partition vote and the armistice.More than 700,000 Palestinians are expelled or flee from their homes during the war surrounding Israel's establishment; over 400 villages are depopulated or destroyed.
  2. 02NakbahistoryThe word and its weight — what Nakba means, precisely.The Nakba — Arabic for 'catastrophe' — is the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel, when more than 700,000 Palestinians, over half of Palestine's Arab population, fled or were expelled from their homes and were never permitted to return.
  3. 03Deir YassinJerusalemThe village whose April 1948 massacre accelerated the flight.Deir Yassin, a small village west of Jerusalem, was the site of the best-known massacre of the 1948 war, when Irgun and Lehi fighters killed more than a hundred villagers on 9 April 1948. Its name became shorthand for the terror that drove Palestinian flight.
  4. 04Fahimi ZeidanFahimi Zeidan was twelve. This is her testimony, from the British CID dossier.A twelve-year-old survivor of the 9 April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin describes the killing of her family, in a statement recorded by British police officers days after the attack.
  5. 05The Palestinians left voluntarily in 1948, because Arab leaders told them to leavehistoryThe most repeated claim about 1948 — and the documentary answer, including Israel's own intelligence assessment.Israel's own intelligence service concluded in June 1948 that about 70% of the Palestinian exodus was caused by Jewish military action and only some 5% by orders from Arab institutions — and no blanket Arab-leadership evacuation order has ever been found in the archives examined by Israeli and other historians.
  6. 06JaffaCentral coast, historic Jaffa DistrictThe Bride of the Sea: seventy thousand people, and the ~four thousand who remained.Jaffa — Yafa, the Bride of the Sea — was Palestine's gateway and its orange capital until 1948, when most of its seventy thousand people were driven out by land and sea. A Palestinian community endures in Ajami, and the city's name still opens every account of the Nakba.
  7. 07TanturaHaifaThe village on the coast whose story was documented, denied, and documented again.Tantura, a coastal village south of Haifa, was captured in May 1948, when scores of its residents were killed — a massacre documented in Teddy Katz's contested thesis and revisited by Alon Schwarz's 2022 documentary "Tantura." The site now lies beneath the beaches of Dor.
  8. 08All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948Walid Khalidi (ed.)The definitive record: Walid Khalidi's village-by-village documentation.A monumental village-by-village record of the more than four hundred Palestinian communities depopulated in 1948 — the definitive documentary reference on the Nakba.

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