Nakba

The displacement unfolded in stages between late 1947 and early 1949. After the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine in November 1947, fighting between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish forces escalated into full war with the end of the British Mandate, the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, and the entry of neighboring Arab armies. By the armistice agreements of 1949, more than 400 Palestinian villages had been destroyed or depopulated, and most of the Arab residents of cities such as Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lydda, and Ramla were gone. Their lands and homes were absorbed by the new state, and the refugees were barred from returning.

The refugees and their descendants — today numbering in the millions registered with UNRWA — settled in camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and in a wider diaspora. As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called in Resolution 194 for the refugees’ return, restitution of property, and compensation; the demand remains unmet and sits at the core of the unresolved conflict.

Palestinians mark the Nakba each year on 15 May. The word names not only the events of 1948 but what many Palestinians describe as a continuing process of dispossession — through settlement, eviction, and denial of return. In 2023 the United Nations commemorated the Nakba’s seventy-fifth anniversary at the General Assembly for the first time, and it has done so annually since.

Sources

• About the Nakba — United Nations, Question of Palestine
• The Nakba — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)