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Part of a series on the
Nakba
Precipitating events Background Mandatory Palestine 1947 partition plan Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine 1948 Palestine war Civil war in Palestine Plan Dalet Deir Yassin massacre Battle of Haifa Israeli Declaration of Independence Arab–Israeli War Timeline Expulsion from Lydda and Ramle Transfer Committee
1948 expulsion and flight Palestinian refugees Camps Palestinian return to Israel Right of return Present absentee UN Resolution 194 UNRWA Hebraization of Palestinian place names Paraguay plan
Discourse Causes New Historians Nakba denial Nakba Law
Notable writers Aref al-Aref Yoav Gelber Efraim Karsh Rashid Khalidi Walid Khalidi Nur Masalha Benny Morris Ilan Pappé Edward Said Tom Segev Avraham Sela Avi Shlaim Constantin Zureiq
Symbols and memory Palestinian key Handala Nakba Day Land Day Great March of Return March of Return (Israel)
Ongoing Ongoing Nakba Palestinian genocide accusation Gaza genocide
Lists List of depopulated towns and villages Estimates of the number of Palestinians who fled
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The Nakba (Template:Lang-ar), also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian people. The term is also used to describe the ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.

The foundational events of the Nakba took place during and shortly after the 1947–1949 Palestine war, including 78% of the geopolitical entity then known as Palestine being declared as Israel, the exodus of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and subsequent geographical erasure, the denial of the Palestinian right of return, the creation of permanent Palestinian refugees and the "shattering of Palestinian society".

Yasser Arafat decided that Palestinians should mark the 50th anniversary of the Nakba declaring May 15, the day after Israeli independence in 1948, as Nakba Day. Israel marks events by the Hebrew calendar so the two events may not fall on the same day.

The Nakba greatly influenced the Palestinian culture and is a foundational symbol of Palestinian identity, together with "Handala" and the symbolic key. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba.

Components

The Nakba encompasses the displacement, dispossession, statelessness and fracturing of Palestinian society.

Displacement

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Dispossession and erasure

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Statelessness and denationalization

The creation of Palestinian statelessness is a central component of the Nakba, and continues to be a feature of Palestinian national life to the present day. All Arab Palestinians became immediately stateless as a result of the Nakba, although some took on other nationalities. After 1948, Palestinians ceased to be simply Palestinian, instead becoming either Israeli-Palestinians, UNRWA Palestinians, West Bank-Palestinians, and Gazan-Palestinians, in addition to the wider Palestinian diaspora who were able to achieve residency outside of historic Palestine and the refugee camps.

The first Israeli Nationality Law, passed on the 14 July 1952, denationalized Palestinians, rendering the former Palestinian citizenship "devoid of substance," "not satisfactory and is inappropriate to the situation following the establishment of Israel".

Fracturing of society

The Nakba was the primary cause of the Palestinian diaspora; at the same time Israel was created as a Jewish homeland, the Palestinians were turned into a "refugee nation" with a "wandering identity. Today a majority of the 13.7 million Palestinians live in the diaspora, i.e. they live outside of the historical area of Mandatory Palestine, primarily in other countries of the Arab world. Of the 6.2 million people registered by the UN’s dedicated Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, about 40% live in the West Bank and Gaza, and 60% in the diaspora. A large number of these diaspora refugees are not integrated into their host countries, as illustrated by the ongoing tension of Palestinians in Lebanon or the 1990–91 Palestinian exodus from Kuwait.

These factors have resulted in a Palestinian identity of “suffering”, whilst the deterritorialization of the Palestinians has created a uniting factor and focal point in the desire to return to their lost homeland.

Terminology

The term Nakba was first applied to the events of 1948 by Constantin Zureiq, a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, in his 1948 book Ma'na al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster). Zureiq wrote that "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history."

The word was used again one year later by the Palestinian poet Burhan al-Deen al-Abushi. Zureiq's students subsequently founded the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1952, one of the first post-Nakba Palestinian political movements. In a six-volume encyclopedia Al-Nakba: Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis Wal-Firdaws al-Mafqud (The Catastrophe: The Catastrophe of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise) published between 1958-60, Aref al-Aref wrote: "How Can I call it but Nakba? When we the Arab people generally and the Palestinians particularly, faced such a disaster (Nakba) that we never faced like it along the centuries, our homeland was sealed, we expelled from our country, and we lost many of our beloved sons."

Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari also used the term Nakba in the title of his book Sir al Nakba (The Secret behind the Disaster) written in 1955. Use of the term has evolved over time.

Denial and memoricide

In May 2009 Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would outlaw all Nakba commemorations, with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance. Following public criticism the bill draft was changed, the prison sentence dropped and instead the Minister of Finance would have the authority to reduce state funding for Israeli institutions that hold the commemorations. The new draft was approved by the Knesset in March 2011. The implementation of the new law unintentionally promoted knowledge of the Nakba within Israeli society, an example of the Streisand effect.

Long term implications

The most important long term implications of the Nakba for the Palestinian people were the loss of their homeland, the fragmentation and marginalization of their national community, and their transformation into a stateless people.

Notes

1. Note: The 6.2 million is composed of 5.55 million registered refugees and 0.63m other registered people; UNRWA's definition of Other Registered Persons refer to "those who, at the time of original registration did not satisfy all of UNRWA’s Palestine refugee criteria, but who were determined to have suffered significant loss and/or hardship for reasons related to the 1948 conflict in Palestine; they also include persons who belong to the families of other registered persons."

References

1. ^ Honaida Ghanim (2009). "Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, gender, and social change among Palestinian poets in Israel after Nakba". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol. 22. pp. 23–39.
2. ^ Webman 2009, p. 29: "The Nakba represented the defeat, displacement, dispossession, exile, dependence, insecurity, lack of statehood, and fight for survival of the Palestinians."
3. ^ Sa'di 2002, p. 175: "for Palestinians, Al-Nakbah represents, among many other things, the loss of the homeland, the disintegration of society, the frustration of national aspirations, and the beginning of a hasty process of destruction of their culture."
4. Hanan Ashrawi, Address by Ms. Hanan Ashrawi, Durban (South Africa), 28 August 2001. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances: "a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba, as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, "apartheid, racism, and victimization" (original emphasis).
5. Saeb Erekat, 15 May 2016, Haaretz, Israel Must Recognize Its Responsibility for the Nakba, the Palestinian Tragedy, "The two-part makeup of the Nakba was borne through the destruction of Palestine and the construction of Israel. It encompasses around 350,000 internally displaced Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is seen through a racist legislative framework which legitimized the theft of Palestinian refugee land as enumerated in the Absentee Property Law... For Palestinians worldwide, the Nakba was not merely a day in history 68 years ago, but an entire system of daily forced subjugation and dispossession culminating in today’s Apartheid regime."
6. Sa'di & Abu-Lughod 2007, p. 10: "For Palestinians, still living their dispossession, still struggling or hoping for return, many under military occupation, many still immersed in matters of survival, the past is neither distant nor over. Unlike many historical experiences discussed in the literature on trauma, such as the Blitz, the merciless bombing of Hamburg and Dresden by the Allies at the closing stage of World War II, the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, or the World Trade Center attack, which lasted for a limited period of time (the longest being the Algerian war of independence, lasting eight years), the Nakba is not over yet; after almost sixty years neither the Palestinians nor Israelis have yet achieved a state of normality; the violence and uprooting of Palestinians continues."
7. Manna' 2013, p. 87: "Contrary to what many think, particularly in Israel, the Nakba was not a one-time event connected to the war in Palestine and its immediate catastrophic repercussions on the Palestinians. Rather, and more correctly, it refers to the accumulated Palestinian experience since the 1948 war up to the present. After the Oslo agreements in 1993, there were hopes that the stateless Palestinian people would soon earn freedom and independence. However, the failure of the peace process to end the Israeli occupation and allow the birth of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel pushed the Palestinians back to square one. Furthermore, the erup- tion of a new cycle of violence which began in September 2000 added new dimensions to the disintegration of Palestinian society. For many Palestinians, these more recent events are adding new chapters and new meanings to the long-lived catastrophe since 1948."
8. Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 33, footnote 4: "In Palestinian writings the signifier “Nakba” came to designate two central meanings, which will be used in this volume interchangeably: (1) the 1948 disaster and (2) the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestine that reached its peak in the catastrophe of 1948"
9. Masalha 2012, p. 3.
10. Dajani 2005, p. 42: "The nakba is the experience that has perhaps most defined Palestinian history. For the Palestinian, it is not merely a political event — the establishment of the state of Israel on 78 percent of the territory of the Palestine Mandate, or even, primarily a humanitarian one — the creation of the modern world's most enduring refugee problem. The nakba is of existential significance to Palestinians, representing both the shattering of the Palestinian community in Palestine and the con- solidation of a shared national consciousness."
11. Sa'di & Abu-Lughod 2007, p. 3: "For Palestinians, the 1948 War led indeed to a "catastrophe." A society disintegrated, a people dispersed, and a complex and historically changing but taken for granted communal life was ended violently. The Nakba has thus become, both in Palestinian memory and history, the demarcation line between two qualitatively opposing periods. After 1948, the lives of the Palestinians at the individual, community, and national level were dramatically and irreversibly changed."
12. Khalidi, Rashid I. "Observations on the Right of Return." Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1992, pp. 29–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2537217 "Only by understanding the centrality of the catastrophe of politicide and expulsion that befell the Palestinian people - al-nakba in Arabic - is it possible to understand the Palestinians' sense of the right of retum"
13. "Mideast turmoil: the Overview; 9 Palestinians Die in Protests Marking Israel's Anniversary". NYT. 15 May 1998. Retrieved 5 April 2021. We are not asking for a lot. We are not asking for the moon. We are asking to close the chapter of nakba once and for all, for the refugees to return and to build an independent Palestinian state on our land, our land, our land, just like other peoples. We want to celebrate in our capital, holy Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem.
14. "What Is Nakba Day? A Brief History". Haaretz. 14 May 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2021.
15. Bowker, Robert (2003). Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. Lynne Rienner Publishers. ISBN 1-58826-202-2, p. 96.
16. Masalha 2012, p. 11.
17. Masalha 2012, p. 137.
18. Sa'di & Abu-Lughod 2007, p. 136.
19. Butenschon, N.A. Ed.; Davis, U. Ed.; Hassassian, M. Ed. "Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications" (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 204.
20. Lauterpacht, Sir H., Ed. "International Law Reports 1950" (London: Butterworth & Co., 1956), p.111
21. Kattan, V. (2005). The Nationality of Denationalized Palestinians, Nordic Journal of International Law, 74(1), 67-102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/1571810054301004
22. Schulz 2003, p. 1–2: "One of the grim paradoxes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that the foundation of the state of Israel, intended to create a safe haven for the ‘archetypical’ Jewish diaspora, spelt the immediate diasporisation of the Arab Palestinians. The territorialisation of the Jewish diaspora spurred a new ‘wandering identity’ and the Palestinians became a ‘refugee nation’. To the Palestinians, the birth of Israel is thus remembered as the catastrophe, al-nakba, to imprint the suffering caused by dispersal, exile, alienation and denial... The nakba is the root cause of the Palestinian diaspora."
23. Schulz 2003, p. 1-3.
24. Annual Operational Report 2019
25. Schulz 2003, p. 2: "Although the PLO has officially continued to demand fulfilment of UN resolution 194 and a return to homes lost and compensation, there is not substantial international support for such a solution. Yet it is around the hope of return that millions of Palestinian refugees have formed their lives. This hope has historically been nurtured by PLO politics and its tireless repetition of the ‘right of return’—a mantra in PLO discourse. In addition, for hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of Palestinian refugees, there are no prospects (or desires) for integration into host societies. In Lebanon, the Palestinians have been regarded as ‘human garbage’ (Nasrallah 1997), indeed as ‘matters out of place’ (cf. Douglas 1976), and as unwanted.”
26. Schulz 2003, p. 2-3: "Fragmentation, loss of homeland and denial have prompted an identity of ‘suffering’, an identification created by the anxieties and injustices happening to the Palestinians because of external forces. In this process, a homeland discourse, a process of remembering what has been lost, is an important component… Therefore the dispersal (shatat in Arabic) and fragmentation of the Arab population of Palestine have served as uniting factors behind a modern Palestinian national identity, illuminating the facet of absence of territory as a weighty component in creations and recreations of ethnic and national identities in exile. Deterritorialised communities seek their identity in the territory, the Homeland Lost, which they can only see from a distance, if at all. The focal point of identity and politics is a place lost.”
27. Zureiq 1948.
28. Masalha 2012, p. 213-214.
29. Webman 2009, p. 30: Quoting Azmi Bishara in 2004: "This is our stone of Sisyphus, and the task of pushing it has been passed on from one movement to another, and in each case no sooner has a movement's ideologues exclaimed, 'I found it!' than the stone comes rolling down with a resounding crash... Our definition of the nakba has changed with every new ideology and every new definition that necessitated a change in means."
30. Boudreaux, Richard. "Israeli legislation raises loyalty issue", Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2009.
31. "חוק הנכבה". Retrieved 24 April 2016.
32. Vescovi 2015, p. 13.
33. Shenhav, Yehouda (4 December 2018). "The Palestinian Nabka and the Arab-Jewish Melancholy". In Shai Ginsburg; Martin Land; Jonathan Boyarin (eds.). Jews and the Ends of Theory. Fordham University Press. pp. 78–. ISBN 978-0-8232-8201-2. By banning, sanctioning, and erasing, the Israeli legislature succeeded in achieving the exact opposite. This may be a perfect example of Max Weber's "unexpected consequence of human action."
34. Manna' 2013, p. 91.

Bibliography

• Vescovi, Thomas (15 January 2015). La mémoire de la Nakba en Israël: Le regard de la société israélienne sur la tragédie palestinienne. Editions L'Harmattan. ISBN 978-2-336-36805-4.
• Baumgarten, Helga. "The Three Faces/Phases of Palestinian Nationalism, 1948–2005." Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 34, no. 4, 2005, pp. 25–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2005.34.4.25. Accessed 2 Apr. 2021.
• Zureiq, Constantin (1956). The Meaning of the Disaster. Khayat's College Book Cooperative. (Original Arabic version: Zureiq, Constantin (1948). وصف الكتاب. دار العلم للملايين.)
• Sa'di, Ahmad H.; Abu-Lughod, Lila (2007). Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-13579-5.
• Nashef, Hania A.M. (30 October 2018). Palestinian Culture and the Nakba: Bearing Witness. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-351-38749-1.
• Masalha, Nur (9 August 2012). The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. Zed Books Ltd. ISBN 978-1-84813-973-2.
• Bashir, Bashir; Goldberg, Amos (13 November 2018). The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-54448-1.
• Wermenbol, Grace (31 May 2021). A Tale of Two Narratives: The Holocaust, the Nakba, and the Israeli-Palestinian Battle of Memories. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-84028-6.
• Neil Caplan. "Victimhood in Israeli and Palestinian National Narratives." Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/187853012x633508. Accessed 2 Apr. 2021.
• Khoury, N. (2020). Postnational memory: Narrating the Holocaust and the Nakba. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 46(1), 91–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453719839448
• Sa'di, Ahmad H. (2002). "Catastrophe, Memory and Identity: Al-Nakbah as a Component of Palestinian Identity". Israel Studies. 7 (2): 175–198.
• Manna', Adel (2013). "The Palestinian Nakba and Its Continuous Repercussions". Israel Studies. 18 (2): 86–99.
• KOLDAS, U. (2011). The "Nakba" in Palestinian Memory in Israel. Middle Eastern Studies, 47(6), 947-959. Retrieved April 2, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23054253
• Sayigh, Rosemary. "On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the 'Trauma Genre'". Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jps.2013.43.1.51. Accessed 2 Apr. 2021.
• Lentin, Ronit (19 July 2013). Co-memory and melancholia: Israelis memorialising the Palestinian Nakba. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-84779-768-1.
• Al-Hardan, Anaheed (5 April 2016). Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-54122-0.
• Dajani, Omar (2005). "Surviving Opportunities". In Tamara Wittes Cofman (ed.). How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate: A Cross-cultural Analysis ofthe Oslo Peace Process. US Institute of Peace Press. ISBN 978-1-929223-64-0.
• Webman, Esther (25 May 2009). "The Evolution of a Founding Myth: The Nakba and Its Fluctuating Meaning". In Meir Litvak (ed.). Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity. Springer. ISBN 978-0-230-62163-3.
• Schulz, Helena Lindholm (2003). The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-26821-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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