The Tragic True Story Of The 1948 Palestinian Displacement

For many Palestinians, al-Nakba not only refers to the forced expulsion from 1947 to 1949 but evokes the entire history of Palestinian displacement, which is still occurring in 2021. Forced displacement of Palestinians was occurring even during British colonization, and between 1936 and 1939, British authorities destroyed up to 5,000 Palestinian homes.

From its inception, the Zionist project has sought to create a nation through colonialism, made apparent by organizations such as the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. And as noted by Hadar Cohen, this violence has been committed and continues to be committed in the name of Judaism, despite the fact that for many, "displacing and oppressing others is antithetical to [their] Jewishness."

As of 2021, Palestinian people continue to fight for their right to self-determination and their right to return. Meanwhile, countries like the United States continue to provide billions of dollars of aid to Israel, effectively funding the continued forced displacement of Palestinian people. This is the tragic true story of the 1948 Palestinian displacement.

Following waves of pogroms and anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe starting in 1881, thousands of Jewish people emigrated. While the majority immigrated to the United States, up to 25,000 Jewish people immigrated to Palestine between 1882 and 1884, known as the First Aliyah. The Second Aliyah lasted from 1904 to 1914, and roughly 40,000 Eastern European Jewish people immigrated to Palestine.

According to "Yemenites in Israel," by Nitza Druyan, Yemenite Jews also immigrated to Palestine at the time, and by 1914, "Yemenite Jews were about six percent of the Jewish population in Palestine, while in the Jewish world they were less than one-half of one percent." This occurred partly because "many of the European Jews who set up religious settlements in Palestine gave up after a few months and returned home, often hungry and diseased," reports The New York Times.

Up to World War I, the Jewish communities that were immigrating to Palestine maintained their various ethnic traditions. "Jewish cultural pluralism was part of the pre-Zionist and the pre-State era. Moreover, one's ethnic heritage was recognized as a legitimate expression of Jewish identification in Eretz Israel." However, after World War I, Zionist leaders adopted the position that it was necessary "to create a new image of the Jew as an individual and of the Jewish society as a whole." This involved letting go of the "degenerate lifestyle of the Diaspora."

Organizations involved in acquiring land in Palestine included the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Jewish National Fund, the Palestine Land Development Company, and the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA).

According to "Land, Law, and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories," by George E. Bisharat, European Zionists trying to buy land in Palestine appealed to the Ottoman sultan "based on promises that Jewish financial resources would be mobilized globally to lend assistance to his financially strapped empire." Ultimately, "this appeal fell flat," and the Ottoman Empire maintained their restriction on Jewish land purchases and immigration to Palestine. An appeal was also made "to induce the German Emperor to endorse the creation of a Chartered Land Development Company, which would be operation by Zionists in Palestine under German protection," writes Fayez A. Sayegh in Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.

Once Britain took over Palestine, Zionists successfully lobbied the British government into establishing a Jewish 'National Home' in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration.

In response to U.N. Resolution 181, a civil war broke out in Palestine between Palestinians and Zionists. Haganah, Irgun, and LHI were three of the main Zionist paramilitary forces that fought against Palestinians, who had "gained extensive training and arms from fighting alongside Britain in World War II."

British soldier Orde Wingate trained one division of Haganah commanders that became known as "the special night squads," since they trained in the dead of night. Since this group was outside the formal military chain of command, their actions were "wild and uncontrollable," such as one incident that involved forcing villagers to eat sand until they vomited. According to military historian Matthew Hughes, "British SNS brutality prompted Jewish soldiers, taught them how to deal with insurgency and insurgents and set this within a colonial legal framework of collective punishment and punitive action that normalized draconian action."

And although the three Zionist paramilitary organizations had been briefly united against British authority from 1945 to 1946, once the British withdrawal from Palestine was official, they focused their attentions on the Palestinian people and launched a program of ethnic cleansings.

Ultimately, many of the methods used by the later Israeli army, formed out of the Haganah, would mirror those that the British had used against Palestinians in the 1930s, including house demolitions and indefinite internment.

After ordering the Deir Yassin village inhabitants to leave via a loudspeaker, the Irgun and LHI Zionist forces proceeded to slaughter everyone who remained. According to Middle East Monitor, between 100 to 250 Palestinian people, including children, were murdered over the course of several hours. This despite the fact that Deir Yassin had signed a nonaggression pact with the neighboring Jewish Givat Shaul settlement "and had stuck to it." Ultimately, it was the residents of Givat Shaul who showed up and stopped the slaughter once they heard about it.

Yehuda Feder, who participated in the massacre, wrote how in addition to executing children "against a wall," the village was promptly looted. "We confiscated a lot of money and silver and gold jewelery fell into our hands."

During the pogrom all the village inhabitants were killed or driven out, homes were destroyed with explosives, and after the massacre, the dead bodies were burned. After the massacre, some of the survivors were taken to Jerusalem for a "victory parade."

Despite the fact that the Deir Yassin massacre was well-recorded, many Zionist organizations claim that the Deir Yassin massacre is a fabrication. And as of 2021, the IDF and the Defense Ministry continue to refuse to publish the photographs of the Deir Massacre that it has in its archives.

Between February and July 1949, the Arab-Israeli War slowly drew to a close as the various countries signed their own armistice agreements. However, as MDC notes, the agreements were only signed between Israeli and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, "without Palestinian involvement and without Iraq, which took part in the fighting but refused to countenance any agreement with the new state of Israel."

Known as the Rhodes Agreements, many Palestinians were angered by the agreements, especially those who found themselves in Israeli territory not because Zionist forces had succeeded in occupying their communities but "as a result of border adjustments made between Israel and Jordan."

The Green Line was also established as the demarcation lines between Palestine and Israel, separating the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as Palestinian territory and giving roughly 78% of historic Palestine to the Zionist Israeli state. As a result of the demarcation lines, Palestine was cut off from the Red Sea as well as the city of Jaffa, "the Palestinian state's major Mediterranean Sea port," and Gaza also "lost its connection to the wheat fields of the Negev."

And according to Al Jazeera, the armistice didn't stop the forced displacements of Palestinians by Zionist forces. In 1950, "2,500 Palestinian residents of the city of Majdal were forced into the Gaza Strip, about 2,000 inhabitants of Beer el-Sabe were expelled to the West Bank, and some 2,000 residents of two northern villages were driven into Syria."

Between December 1947 and the first half of 1949, roughly 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and made refugees. According to Middle East Eye, some fled their villages thinking that they would be able to come back to thresh the wheat. But while some farmers were able "to salvage whatever crops, livestock, or goods they could from their abandoned homes," others were murdered by Zionist militias in the process.

Many were forced to flee from village to village as Zionist militias persisted in their attacks until they ended up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or one of the neighboring countries. However, according to The New Humanitarian, Jordan was the only country that "granted Palestinian refugees full citizenship rights, except for 120,000 people who originally came from the Gaza Strip." As of 2021, over 1 million Palestinian people remain living in refugee camps.

And in addition to denying Palestinians the right to return, according to Al-Haq, "the 1950 Absentee Property Law became the main legal instrument of dispossession and was used by Israel to confiscate the property of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons."

These forced displacements didn't end in 1949. As of 2021, Sheikh Jarrah is just one of the latest site of Palestinian forced displacement.

Palestinians who remained in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip effectively became second-class citizens. During the first 18 years of Israel's existence, Palestinians were subject to a military rule, which has since shifted to a "policy of institutional containment that deals with the Palestinians as a security and demographic threat to the Zionist character of the state and to Jewish majority rule," writes the Institute for Palestine Studies.

According to Haaretz, since 1948 Palestinians have been subjected to political suppression, surveillance, land confiscation, and unfair laws that have created apartheid in Israel. And in 1967, a second Nakba occurred when between 250,000 and 420,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. Many were forced to "sign a document declaring that they were leaving voluntarily," writes Orient XXI.

Israeli forces have also continued their program of displacement and ethnic cleansing up through the 21st century. Between 2000 and 2014, 87% of those who lost their lives in the fighting were Palestinian. Between 2018 and 2019, almost 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli snipers as they protested for Palestinian right to return.

Buildings are also often leveled by air raids with the excuse that they are organizational points for Hamas, a Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist organization. While there has been "no evidence to back up the claims," as of May 16, 2021, almost 200 Palestinian people have been killed by Israeli air strikes.