Have you ever heard of the term Al-Nakba? This literally translates in Arabic to mean, the "catastrophe" or the "disaster." However, we will not use this term in Arabic to just describe any disaster. Instead, it is used to describe what happened to the Palestinians in 1948 and the years leading up to it where more than 750,000 people were expelled from their homes.
In the US, we are not educated about this in school and therefore many Americans know nothing about it. To know how we got to where we are today, we have to educate ourselves about the past, and this is just one place to start. This is Al-Nakba from the Palestinian point of view.
In 1948 when Israel became it's own nation, people in the US cheered their independence. The horror of the Holocaust was VERY fresh in everyone's minds and without access to information like we have today, most people were oblivious to what was happening to the people who had already lived in the land for centuries under occupation--the Palestinians both Christians and Muslims, along with a minority of Jews.
On May 14, 1948 the Bristish Mandate expired and Zionist military forces took over. In the year leading up to Nakba and the year following, the Zionist military forces expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, destroyed major Palestinian cities, 530 villages, and killed more than 15,000 people including women and children in mass killings and a dozen massacres. Men were brought into the street in villages, lined up and shot. Women and children hiding in schools were killed. One of the most infamous massacres took place in Deir Yassan, a small village outside of Jerusalem, where more than 100 men, women and children were murdered.
The fate of the refugees: thousands upon thousands went into neighboring countries like Jordan, Iraq, and Syria. The military forces took 78% of the land, and the remaining 22% became the Gaza strip and the West Bank where many Palestinian refugees were pushed into.
Yesterday, when Netanyahu ordered civilians from the North of Gaza to evacuate to the south, imagine how deeply triggering this was to families who were forced from their homes in 1948. Many of these families (we know them in Jordan also), still hold the keys to the homes and the deeds to their lands in what is now Israel. This is why you might hear on the news, a "second Nakba worse than the first." Yesterday, hospitals were given 2 hours to evacuate patients--this is impossible! And more than 70 people died in transit evacuating due to Israeli bombings. The atrocities don't end.
Watch very closely to what happens in the coming months. Will these people actually be able to return to their homes and property even though they will be mostly destroyed? Or will the government of Israel now take the northern half of Gaza and keep it for themselves displacing another 1.1 million people? Watch closely and listen to the narrative you are being told.
Now you know.
*This historical account is in my own words after more than 15 years of studying this issue from books by both Jewish and Arab historians, documentaries, speaking with and knowing many Palestinians, and my studies at the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice.
