How Palestinians were expelled from their homes

The borders of Palestine have been changed forcefully over time. But historically, this region has been home to Palestinians for centuries with hundreds of villages and thriving cities. One of them being the central city of Jerusalem... with holy sites important to Jewish Christian and Muslim people. By the late Ottoman Empire, Palestinians living here were overwhelmingly Muslim with minority Christian and Jewish native populations, too. But regardless of religion Palestinians were often referred to as Arabs. People of the Arabic speaking world despite their distinctive culture.

Palestinians have long distinguished themselves as Ahl Filastīn... or the people of Palestine. They developed a distinctive Arabic accent. They developed regional food, regional dress, and family ties. But by the time World War I began... several key political forces were competing for control of these lands. First, there was a growing Arab political movement... looking for independence from the Ottoman Empire in hopes of a unified Arab state that would include Palestine. Then there were Zionists a political group that had one main goal: The creation of a Jewish state. Zionism was a response to an increasingly brutal climate for Jewish people, particularly in Europe and Russia... where there was a massive wave of antisemitism... including large scale attacks in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

After briefly considering other areas for a new state including Uganda and Argentina... Zionist leaders decided on Palestine because of its connection to early religious history. But there was a third key group with political interests here. The British. Control of the region would allow them to expand their spheres of influence and protect trade routes to India. During World War I, since both the British and the Arab independence movement wanted Palestine... they decided to go after the Ottomans together with an important pledge. Through a series of letters in 1916 an Arab leader and a British official agreed that if Arabs would help the British fight the Ottomans and give the British economic and other foreign privileges in Arab lands... in return, the British would recognize and support an independent Arab state.

Soon the Arabs started doing their part in revolting against the Ottomans making it easier for the British to move in. But the next year the British issued a new declaration and betrayed the Arabs. “In 1917, Lord Allenby conquered the Holy Land... and the Jews were promised a national home in Palestine.” Without consulting the native Palestinian population... the British issued what's known as the Balfour Declaration: Supporting the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. So instead of supporting the idea of Palestine as part of a unified and independent Arab state... the British pledged to help secure this land for Zionists.

It was a strategic move. This declaration opened up a pathway for Britain to gain power in Palestine. Under the guise that it was supporting the self-determination of another people... of a people in Palestine... who don't reside there yet. As for Palestine's majority Arab population the declaration referred to them as non-Jewish communities... who would be given civil and religious rights... but not political rights. A few years later, after World War I ended Britain gained control of Palestine through a mandate... that also required them to put the Balfour plans for Jewish settlement in motion. And they did. Between 1922 and 1931 the Jewish population more than doubled.

The migration helped the Zionist movement gain steam. And a slogan took off. “A land without people for, a people without land.” And it sends a message to Western leaders... that the people who had been living in Palestine for generations... could just be easily moved elsewhere. The idea was that those inhabitants weren't a people with ties to that land. Palestine was, of course, a land with a people. In 1931, there were more than 850,000 Palestinian Arabs in the region, still the vast majority. But with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in particular... “Hate became a rallying call.” Jewish flight from Europe became even more urgent. And Palestine started to see the biggest wave of Jewish emigration yet.

Violence broke out, rooted in tensions over land. Jewish settlers purchased swaths of fertile land and evicted tenant farmers creating a crisis of hundreds of thousands of landless, dispossessed Palestinian-Arabs. Though Palestinians fiercely rebelled against both British colonial forces and Jewish settlers they were brutally crushed by the British. They put in Palestine more troops to repress that rebellion than they had stationed in India at that time. All of India. These troops killed thousands of Palestinians including many of their leaders and the British began training and arming Zionist militias to suppress the rebellion, too. But the rebellion continued. So, in an attempt to prevent further Palestinian resistance... the British began to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine.

This ended up angering Zionist extremists leading to more violence. So, in 1947, after decades of trying to manipulate both Palestinian Arabs and Zionists to keep their control over Palestine... Britain gave up... and handed the question of Palestine to someone else. They figured, here is this new thing called the United Nations. Here. In your lap. Palestine. First gift. So, the United Nations has now to figure out how do you disentangle this thing... that the British who helped create. A UN special committee proposed the land be divided into two states... a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem as a separate UN-controlled entity. It was called the Partition Plan of 1947. The plan shocked Palestinians.

But the plan proposed giving over half the land and often the most fertile areas to the Jewish state. From a purely pragmatic perspective... the partition plan didn't make much sense for Palestinian Arabs. That wasn't the only problem with the plan. Within this proposed area of the Jewish state... were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs... including both Muslims and Christians who had lived there for generations. On a moral level... the idea of making hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs minorities in their own homeland... seemed unjust and unfair. In November 1947, the UN put the plan to a vote. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and after lobbying from US leaders and Zionists the UN voted in favor of partition. “And finally, a momentous decision to partition the Holy Land’s 10,000 square miles.”

Britain announced their mandate over Palestine would end on May 15th, 1948. Even as Palestinians continued to reject the UN's decision to partition the land. After the partition took place, in 1947..., they really were scared that something might happen to them. By the end of 1947 Zionists had several well-developed paramilitary forces... the largest one known as the Haganah. And more extremist militias like Irgun. On March 10th, a couple of months before the British mandate would end the Haganah adopted what was called Plan Dalet. Or Plan D.  On paper, the main goal was to gain control of the Jewish state as laid out in the partition plan, while also defending Jewish settlements outside of the borders. In reality, that's where the majority of these operations took place... outside of the UN's proposed Jewish state. Some carried out by Haganah and others by more radical militias.

Many of these operations focused on isolating Jerusalem and the roads to it. A set of brutal instructions called for the destruction of Arab villages by setting fire to blowing up and planting mines. Especially those population centers which were difficult to control. In case of resistance, it called for the population to be expelled outside of the borders of the state... villages emptied and for the occupation and control of Arab villages along main transportation arteries. One of the most widely publicized village massacres happened in Deir Yassin.

91-year-old Dawud Assad was there the day of the massacre and was 18 at the time. On April 9th, 1948, extremist Zionist forces executing Plan D closed in on Deir Yassin... even though the village had made a local peace pact with neighboring Jewish settlements. “Friday morning, they attacked us.” He speaks. Dawud escaped through a trench. “I went down, all the way down here like this. So about 4 hours walking to Jerusalem.” To this day, the archive of the Israeli army refuses to release many of the images and intelligence reports on Deir Yassin. But one UN report detailed circumstances of great savagery... including women and children stripped, lined up... photographed and slaughtered.

Roughly 100 people, largely children and the elderly were killed in the village. As for Dawud, he later reunited with the group of Deir Yassin captives in Jerusalem, including his sister and mother. “My mother says... So everywhere there’s a commotion, you know?” News of what happened in Deir Yassin spread quickly with far reaching effects. The Zionist militias used it as a propaganda tool to tell people about it everywhere. The idea was that if you don't leave... we will do to you what happened in Deir Yassin. Stories came out about women being raped about babies being killed and induced a great deal of fear among the Palestinian Arab population many of them fleeing as a result.

After taking Deir Yassin Zionist paramilitary groups cleared major cities including Haifa and Jaffa and took hundreds of smaller villages and towns, too. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee pouring into neighboring states as refugees. Plan D became the blueprint for carrying out the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine to make room for a new state. And on May 14th, the day before the British mandate ended... Zionist declared the state as Israel. But the creation of Israel didn't end the Nakba. Neighboring Arab countries that were overwhelmed by Palestinian refugees immediately went to war with Israel.

The fighting lasted for months. Arab armies eventually lost, while Palestinians continued to be killed and forced out throughout that time. Palestinians who fled often carried only enough to stay away for a few weeks hoping they'd eventually return home. A lot of them locked their doors put their key in their pocket and then moved to safer ground. When you leave the house and you take your keys with you it’s because you're planning to go home. In the case of the Palestinians those refugees weren't allowed to return. Refugees trying to return were often shot at. Zionist paramilitary operations also tried to prevent them from returning again by destroying the villages. That act of preventing their return compounded the Nakba. So, the Nakba is both the forcible displacement of Palestinians from their homes and lands and country... as well as preventing them to return once the fighting was over.

Palestinian society was dismembered, crushed. More than half of the Palestinian people became refugees, stateless, dispossessed of their land. Over time, the state of Israel covered up the physical evidence of an Arab Palestine. Place names were often changed from Arabic ones to Hebrew ones. The Jewish National Fund embarked on a massive effort to plant thousands of acres of pine forests and recreational areas on top of hundreds of ruined Palestinian villages. Even though these forests have now grown into big pine trees Palestinians have not forgotten their homelands.

While we know that roughly 6,000 Israelis lost their lives in the violence of the Nakba... records for Palestinian deaths weren't kept. It's estimated to be around 15,000. By the end of the Nakba roughly 750,000 Palestinians had been forcefully expelled... and more than 500 villages destroyed. Though the UN’s partition plan allotted Israel 56% of the land through the Nakba, Israel captured 78% of the land. It was everything except what's now known as the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today, that's up to at least 85% of the total area. Turning 6 million Palestinians into refugees without a homeland. It's why around the same time that Israelis are celebrating Independence Day... Palestinians are out protesting on May 15th. Holding up keys as a symbol of the homes they lost and the hope to return. For them, the Nakba isn't just a moment in history. It's a catastrophe that never really ended.