Nakba

 The 1947-1949 war was fought between Israel and Palestine was under British mandate.  In Israel it is called The War of Independence.  To Arabs it is called the Nakba, which means Catastrophe.  In 1948 the Palestinian exodus occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of pre-war Palestine's Arab population – fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war.  During this war, the British Empire withdrew from Mandate Palestine, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire until 1917. The war culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel by the Jews and saw a complete demographic transformation of the territory the Jews occupied, with the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs and the destruction of most of their urban areas. Many Palestinian Arabs ended up stateless, displaced either to the Palestinian territories captured by Egypt and Jordan or to the surrounding Arab states; many of them, as well as their descendants, remain stateless and in refugee camps.

 The territory that was under British administration before the war was divided between the State of Israel, which captured about 78% of it, the Kingdom of Jordan (then known as Transjordan), which captured and later annexed the area that became the West Bank, and Egypt, which captured the Gaza Strip, a coastal territory on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in which the Arab League established the All-Palestine Government. The British Empire scheduled its withdrawal and abandonment of all claims to Palestine from 14 May 1948. On that date, when the last remaining British troops and personnel departed the city of Haifa, the Jewish leadership in Palestine declared the establishment of the State of Israel. This declaration was followed by the immediate invasion of Palestine by the surrounding Arab armies and expeditionary forces in order to prevent the establishment of Israel and to aid the Palestinian Arabs, who were on the losing side at that point, with a large portion of their population already fleeing or being forced out by the Jewish militias.

 On 14 May 1948, the day before the expiration of the British Mandate, David Ben-Grunion declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel Both superpower leaders, U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, immediately recognized the new state, while the Arab League refused to accept the UN partition plan, proclaimed the right of self-determination for the Arabs across the whole of Palestine, and maintained that the absence of legal authority made it necessary to intervene to protect Arab lives and property. Over the next few days, contingents of four of the seven countries of the Arab League at that time, Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and Syria, invaded the former British Mandate of Palestine and fought the Israelis. They were supported by the Arab Liberation Army and corps of volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen. The Arab armies launched a simultaneous offensive on all fronts: Egyptian forces invaded from the south, Jordanian and Iraqi forces from the east, and Syrian forces invaded from the north. Cooperation among the various Arab armies was poor.

 In the three years following the war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Europe and Arab lands, with one third of them having left or been expelled from their countries of residence in the Middle East. These refugees were absorbed into Israel in the One Million Plan. Since the war, Israeli and Arab historiographies have interpreted the events of 1948 differently. In Western historiography, the majority view was that the vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped Jews fended off the massed strength of the invading Arab armies; it was also widely believed that the Palestinian Arabs left their homes on their leaders' instructions. Palestinian and Arab historians have also provided context, but their work tends to be apologetic, relying on subjective sources, and assign blame for the Arab defeat. Palestinian historians since the 1960s who have used historical methodologies have not had the same impact on Arab society as Israeli New Historians did in Israeli society. This is due, in part, to fear that critical analysis of their role in the war might weaken the Palestinian position in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Unlike Israel and Britain, Arab governments have not released relevant primary sources from their archives.

Sunday, 16^th May 2021