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In commemoration of the 58th anniversary of the Nakba, this page provides links to sites and articles about the Palestinian Nakba. Address to World Conference Against Racism by Hanan Ashrawi, in Durban , South Africa Arab Jaffa Seized Before Israel's Creation in 1948 Nakba in Hebrew - a Letter on 1948 Labor Camps by Salman Abu Sitta, May 19, 2002 "Fifty years of dispossession" by Edward Said. Al Ahram Weekly Online, May 13, 1998 "Destroyed Villages" [by district], on Jerusalemites website "Land Ownership in Palestine/Israel" by Nasser Abufarha. The Nakba: Then and Now - On the 58th anniversary of the Nakba, or the "Catastrophe," prominent Palestinians share their thoughts on the day when more than 700,000 of their brethren became refugees.
******** "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the boooks not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." ************************ From "Occupation and Antisemitism" by Jerome Slater, in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing , edited by Michael Lerner. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco , 2001. (ISBN 0-7879-5972-3) Almost all Jews of my generation, coming of age in America in the 1930s and 1940s, personally experienced anti-Semitism, thought of themselves as passionate Zionists, and rejoiced in the establishment of the State of Israel and its 1948 and 1967 victories over its Arab enemies. […] I say all this as a partial explanation for the depth of disillusion and outrage that I and so many other Jews feel over what we regard as the Israeli betrayal of the humanism and liberal values of the Jewish tradition, especially in its relationship with the Palestinians. Sadly, most Israelis and many American Jews feel no such disillusion, partially because they remain ignorant – or rather, in many cases, they willfully choose to remain ignorant – of the real Israeli-Palestinian story, and partially because their focus on historical anti-Semitism and Jewish impotence is so deep-rooted that they are simply impervious to new realities. […] The demythologized history of the Arab-Israeli conflict challenges the standard version in a number of ways. To begin with, Ben-Gurion and other leading Zionists did not truly accept the UN partition in any meaningful sense. On the contrary, the historical evidence is incontrovertible that Ben-Gurion agreed to the UN plan as a necessary tactical step that would later be reversed: "when we become a strong power after the establishment of the state." Later Ben-Gurion told the Zionist congress, "we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine ." […] [E]ven before the Arab invasion in the spring of 1948, and continuing well after Israel won the war, some 600,000-700,000 Palestinians were deliberately driven out of their country, their homes, and their villages, in what prominent Israeli and American Jewish historians (e.g., Meron Benvenisti and Ian Lustick) are beginning to acknowledge was nothing less than "ethnic cleansing." Emotionally loaded as that term is, it is justified by the Israeli psychological warfare, economic pressures, artillery bombardments, political assassinations, terrorist attacks, and even massacres that forced the Palestinians to flee. […] To begin with, the Arab intervention in Palestine was far too ill-coordinated and small to destroy Israel – the Israelis both outmanned and soon outgunned the combined total of the Arab armies, which was only about 13,000 men. Secondly, it cannot be excluded that the intervention was also at least in part a reaction to the Jewish massacres and expulsions of the Palestinians, as well as the Israeli seizure of territory outside the UN-designated boundaries. Even if it were true that the autocratic Arab states of Egypt , Syria and Jordan cared nothing about the fate of the Palestinians, they could not completely ignore the emotional response of the Arab masses to the 1947-48 events in Palestine . None of this is to deny that, at the time and for many years afterward, the Israelis and, for that matter, the Jewish deaspora around the world had plenty of reason to fear that they were being attacked by powerful countries frantically dtermined on their destruciton. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, how could they have felt differently? Even so, more than fifty years after the event, serious historians cannot avoid the responsibility of correcting the historical record tha is now much clearer - or, at least, much more complex - than it appeared to be in 1948. [...] Palestinian outrage or even hatred of the Israelis is not a consequence of a generalized, a priori "anti-Semitism," but of the Zionist dispossession of the Palestinians and over fifty years of Israeli injustice, repression, and violence. Furthermore, it has not been Israeli "powerlessness" that has been the problem, but precisely the opposite. Blinded by their ideology and mythology, the Israelis have not been significantly constrained in their treatment of the Palestinians by considerations of justice or morality. In such situations, constraints will exist only when dictated by self-interest, meaning the presence of countervailing power: precisely what has been missing in the conflict between the Palestinian David and the Israeli goliath. […]
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