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Nakba
The 59 year Catastrophe – al-Nakba
Fifty-nine years is a long time to wait to return home, yet the Palestinian refugees have waited, and waitedresolutely. However, despite every international law that recognises their right to return home, despite
the universal consensus that has affirmed that right over 130 times in the UN, despite the humanitarian
organisations that urge their return, despite the reams of authoritative papers and books documenting
their 1948 existence, dispossession and displacement, and despite the global grassroots movements
protesting their plight, the Palestinians have been left out in the cold. In fact, they have been living the
catastrophe that saw them uprooted from their homes and homeland in 1948 ever since.
Today, there are 7.2 million Palestinian refugees. That number has escalated considerably from the
original 750,000 Palestinians who fled in terror in the events leading up to the declaration of the new
state of Israel on 14 May 1948, as well as in the weeks and months after. As the years slipped into each
other and the world did nothing, Israel acted as if it had no responsibility for this despairing mass of
humanity. Instead, it launched a devious campaign of myths and lies to convince a world still smarting
after the revelations of the Holocaust in Europe that these refugees were really a nomadic people drifting
in and out of desert land with no attachments at all to that place. This then became the barren land gifted
by God to the Jews and so was born the catchcry “a land without people for a people without land”.
Perhaps the world forgot the reason for the 1947 UN Partition in the first place.
Yes, there were Palestinians there. But, they were not prepared for the attacks on their civilian life by the
Zionist terrorist groups – the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang – the highly organised and illicitlyarmed
Zionist insurgents who had infiltrated Palestinian society during the British Mandate period. They
attacked without warning and without mercy – both the English who controlled Palestine and the
Palestinians. Villages and towns were raided and people terrorised and killed. Out of these groups, the
founders of Israel were able to create a substantial military force which they increased by recruiting
Jewish men and women from overseas. When war was officially declared by the surrounding Arab states
on 15 May, Israel was more than ready to take on the weak and disorganised Arab armies which operated
with no real central coordinating command. Like the Palestinians, they themselves had only just emerged
from colonial occupations. However, the subsequent armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab
states did not include the Palestinians even though the haggling done by both sides was over Palestinian
land. It was then that Israel succeeded in acquiring 78 per cent of Palestine instead of the 55 per cent
given to it under the 1947 UN Partition. From that moment, Palestine officially ceased to exist. It was a
monumental betrayal of Palestinian rights by the Western powers and their own Arab neighbours. The
Palestinians - both inside and outside of Palestine - were put in limbo and have remained so to this day.
Remembering al-Nakba exposes the lie of Israel’s beginnings, and brings the whole modern day conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians back to the unresolved problem of the refugees. They are the crux of
the conflict – the 1948 expulsion gave Israel territorial integrity of most of the land and the 1967 expulsion
allowed Israel to control the remainder. Today, expulsions, transfers and prohibitions are creating a new
generation of refugees. In this way, al-Nakba is being constantly perpetuated. The longer Israel can draw
out the conflict the more it can create “permanent” facts on the ground that would make it difficult to
displace the Jews without outrage. That in itself raises the inequity of the Palestinian refugee situation
because there is no outrage for them. Shame on a world that finds it easier to accept that 750,000
Palestinians never really lived in a land called Palestine than to be troubled by the 59-year forcible
uprooting of a people from their homes and land to make way for a purely Jewish state.
The Palestinian al-Nakba has been extensively researched and documented by Israeli scholars whose
works add weight to the Palestinians’ own narrative. UCLA history professor Professor Gabriel Piterberg
says “There’s no question that there was substantial expulsion in 1948. I call it ethnic cleansing, and I am
not the only Israeli to do so. People were removed from their homes, massacred, raped and lost their
property on the basis of ethnic belonging . . . because they were Palestinian-Arabs.” Israeli Professor Ilan
Pappe is another academic who has recently written an eye-opening book on the subject – “The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine”. Lest anyone think that this has no relevance today, there is good precedence for
remembering the victims of crimes against humanity. Jewish Holocaust museums, films and books are
still proliferating around the world with no suggestion being made of laying the past to rest after more
than 60 years. Remembering al-Nakba for the Palestinians is as important to them as remembering the
Holocaust is for the Jews. The only difference is that the Palestinian refugees are a living reminder not
only of Israel’s past crimes, but of the crimes Israel is carrying out today. It is time to end the
catastrophe. - Sonja Karkar
PO Box 2099, Hawthorn 3122 Melbourne – Australia
Tel: +61 3 9882 9236 Fax: +613 9882 9301
Email: enquiries@womenforpalestine.com
Website: www.womenforpalestine.com