The Nakba: the Palestinian exodus

Between late 1947 and 1949, during the fighting that followed the United Nations vote to partition Palestine and the first Arab-Israeli war, about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in the territory that became Israel. The United Nations describes this as the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population. Palestinians call these events al-Nakba, Arabic for 'the catastrophe'. Refugees ended up in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel did not allow them to return, although the UN General Assembly's Resolution 194 of December 1948 called for return, restitution and compensation. Today more than 5 million Palestinians, most of them descendants of the original refugees, are registered as Palestine refugees with the UN.¹²³

Why the exodus happened remains deeply contested. Departures began in the civil war that broke out after the partition vote in November 1947, and grew into a mass flight in April to June 1948 as Jewish forces captured Haifa, Jaffa and hundreds of villages and Palestinian society collapsed. News of killings, such as at Deir Yassin in April 1948, spread fear. In July 1948 Israeli troops expelled the Arab inhabitants of Lydda and Ramla. The Israeli historian Benny Morris concluded that 'war and not design, Jewish or Arab' created the problem: he documented expulsions and atrocities by Jewish and Israeli forces, alongside flight caused by fear, fighting and the breakdown of leadership. He also found that the Arab Higher Committee and local Arab commanders ordered women, children and the elderly removed from some villages, but no general Arab order telling Palestinians to leave. Palestinian historians such as Walid Khalidi argue that the expulsions were planned and point to the Haganah's Plan Dalet.²³⁵

The mainstream Israeli view holds that the displacement was a consequence of a war started by the Arab side, which rejected partition and was joined by invading Arab armies, and pro-Israel writers stress cases in which Arab leaders urged residents to leave until Arab forces had won. Israeli governments have rejected a mass return as a threat to the Jewish character of the state, though Israeli academic writing has come to acknowledge a greater share of Israeli responsibility. For Palestinians, the Nakba is a deliberate dispossession at the center of their national identity, and the right of return remains a core demand. Israelis also point out that hundreds of thousands of Jews left or were driven from Arab countries after 1948, many of them settling in Israel. In 2023 the UN commemorated the Nakba officially for the first time.¹⁴⁶