Naksa

In the war of 5–10 June 1967 — known in Israel and the West as the Six-Day War — Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and took control of the remaining parts of Mandate Palestine it had not captured in 1948, along with Egyptian and Syrian territory. In November 1967 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict in exchange for peace; its implementation has remained contested ever since.

For Palestinians, the Naksa brought a second wave of displacement: estimates range from roughly 250,000 to 400,000 people who fled or were driven out, many of them refugees of 1948 displaced for a second time. It also placed more than a million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli military occupation — an occupation that has now lasted well over half a century — and opened the way for the settlement enterprise that followed.

The word itself carries a deliberate understatement: where nakba names a catastrophe, naksa — reportedly favored by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in announcing the defeat — names a setback, implying something from which one might recover. Palestinians commemorate it each year on 5 June as the beginning of the occupation.

Sources

• June 1967 War — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Six-Day War — Encyclopaedia Britannica