# The Nakba and Creation of Israel

Demographics of Mandatory Palestine Before 1948

To understand the Nakba — the Arabic word meaning "catastrophe" — it is necessary to understand what Palestine looked like before 1948. Mandatory Palestine, administered by Britain after World War I under a League of Nations Mandate, had a population of approximately 1.9 million people by the mid-1940s. Of these, roughly 1.3 million were Arab — predominantly Muslim but with a significant Christian minority — and approximately 600,000 were Jewish, the great majority of whom had immigrated during the preceding decades as part of the Zionist settlement project. The Arab population had inhabited the land continuously for centuries, farming, trading, and maintaining towns, villages, and cities from Gaza in the south to Haifa and Acre in the north.

The Arab population lived in cities like Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, as well as hundreds of rural villages. Agriculture, trade, and crafts sustained a society that, while not industrially developed on a European scale, had its own coherent social structures rooted in Islamic and Christian tradition, tribal ties, and centuries of settled community life. The Palestinian Arab population regarded itself, with complete historical justification, as the indigenous people of the land.

The UN Partition Plan and Its Rejection

When the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, recommending partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, the Arab population and the Arab League states unanimously rejected it. The partition plan allocated approximately 56% of Mandatory Palestine to the proposed Jewish state despite Jews comprising only about one-third of the population. The Arab Higher Committee and Arab League argued, on grounds of self-determination and majority rights, that the plan was unjust.

The Jewish Agency accepted the plan as a foundation from which to proceed. Violence between Jewish and Arab communities, which had been building since the 1920s, intensified immediately after the vote. Britain announced it would evacuate Palestine by May 1948 without implementing the partition, leaving a power vacuum.

Operation Dalet and Military Operations

Beginning in April 1948, the Haganah (the main Jewish paramilitary organization) launched Plan Dalet (Plan D), an operational framework designed to control the territory allocated to the Jewish state under the partition plan and secure lines of communication. Historians debate the plan's precise intent — whether it constituted a deliberate policy of expulsion or primarily a military security measure — but its consequences were the large-scale displacement of Arab civilians from dozens of towns and villages.

Operations were conducted across the country. Haifa fell on April 22-23, 1948, with approximately 70,000 of its Arab residents fleeing within days under circumstances still disputed by historians. Jaffa, the largest Arab city in Mandatory Palestine, fell in early May; its population of 70,000 largely fled before and during the fighting. Acre fell in mid-May. The Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem were evacuated. In total, the military operations of the pre-state period (December 1947 to May 14, 1948) and the subsequent war drove the displacement of the majority of Palestinian Arab refugees.

The Deir Yassin Massacre

On April 9, 1948, fighters from the Irgun and Lehi (Jewish paramilitary organizations not under Haganah command) attacked the village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem. The village had signed a non-aggression agreement with the Haganah. In the fighting and its aftermath, approximately 107 Palestinian villagers were killed, including women and children. Some accounts document executions of prisoners after the fighting ended.

The Deir Yassin massacre became known across Palestine within days, spread by radio broadcasts and word of mouth. The psychological impact was enormous — it contributed to the climate of fear that accelerated Arab flight from other villages and towns in subsequent weeks. Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi and Israeli historian Benny Morris both document the massacre's role in the dynamics of displacement, though they differ on its precise scope and significance.

Lydda and Ramle: Documented Expulsions

While the causes of Palestinian displacement in 1948 were varied — some fled voluntarily out of fear, some were expelled at gunpoint, some left at the urging of Arab radio broadcasts or community leaders — the expulsions from Lydda and Ramle in July 1948 represent one of the clearest documented cases of organized expulsion by Israeli military forces.

On July 12-13, 1948, Israeli forces under the command of Yitzhak Rabin (later Prime Minister of Israel) expelled the populations of Lydda and Ramle — between 50,000 and 70,000 people. The expelled population was ordered to march eastward in summer heat toward Jordanian lines. An unknown number died along the way from heat, exhaustion, and lack of water. The event is corroborated in Israeli military records declassified decades later, including Rabin's own memoirs (in which a passage describing the expulsions was initially censored from the published Israeli edition). Yitzhak Rabin wrote: "We walked them out... Driving out 'a population' sounds terrible... Moshe Dayan [gave the order]: 'Expel them!'"

The Scale of Displacement: 700,000 Refugees

By the time the armistice agreements were concluded in 1949, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — approximately 85% of the Arab population in what became Israel — had been displaced. They had fled to the Gaza Strip (then under Egyptian administration), the West Bank (then under Jordanian administration), Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Over 400 villages were depopulated; many were physically destroyed or repopulated with Jewish immigrants in the months and years following.

The United Nations established UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) in 1949 to provide emergency assistance and manage the refugee situation, which was assumed to be temporary. It has operated continuously ever since. By the early 21st century, UNRWA served over five million registered Palestinian refugees and their descendants — the largest and longest-running refugee population in the world.

The refugees retained their land deeds, keys to their homes, and the legal documents of their former properties. The symbolic act of holding the key to a house that may no longer exist has become one of the most recognizable symbols of Palestinian identity and the demand for the right of return.

Israel's Law of Return vs. Palestinian Right of Return

On July 5, 1950, Israel passed the Law of Return, granting every Jewish person worldwide the right to emigrate to Israel and receive citizenship. The law has no restriction based on the immigrant's prior connection to the land. In the same period, Palestinian refugees' requests to return to their homes and lands were refused. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948 had stated that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date." Israel was admitted to the United Nations in May 1949 in part on the strength of commitments to implement Resolution 194, which was never honored.

The asymmetry — an unlimited right of return for Jewish immigrants from anywhere in the world, and a complete denial of return for the indigenous Arab population — has remained at the center of Palestinian grievances ever since and is recognized in international law as a fundamental injustice.

Islamic and Scholarly Response

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt established brigades that fought alongside Arab armies in the 1948 war. The Brotherhood's founder, Hasan al-Banna, had organized fundraising and recruitment for Palestinian defense throughout the 1940s. Al-Azhar al-Sharif, the oldest Islamic university in the world, issued statements supporting Palestinian rights and framing the defense of Palestine — including Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem — as a religious obligation for Muslims.

Arab League states made declarations affirming Palestinian rights, but their military effort in 1948 was poorly coordinated and ultimately failed to prevent the establishment of Israel or stop the displacement of the Palestinian population. The 1948 defeat — called al-nakba — became a permanent wound in Arab and Islamic political consciousness, the defining event of modern Arab history.

The question of Palestine was established in 1948 as a central Islamic cause, not merely a Palestinian or Arab nationalist one. The presence of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in occupied Jerusalem, and their significance as sacred sites in Islam, meant that the Palestinian cause had a religious dimension that transcended national politics.

The 1949 Armistice Lines and the Green Line

The 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors established ceasefire lines that became known as the "Green Line" (drawn in green ink on the armistice maps). Israel controlled approximately 78% of Mandatory Palestine — significantly more than the 56% allocated in the UN partition plan. The West Bank was administered by Jordan, and Gaza by Egypt. No peace treaties were signed; these were armistice lines, not recognized borders.

The Green Line remained the de facto boundary until the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, bringing the remaining 22% of historic Palestine under Israeli military control. The 1949 lines remain the internationally recognized basis for a two-state solution — an Israeli state within pre-1967 borders and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital — a framework endorsed by the UN, Arab League, and the majority of the international community but not yet implemented.

Legacy and Ongoing Significance

The Nakba of 1948 is not merely a historical event but a living reality for millions of Palestinians whose families were displaced and who continue to live as refugees or under occupation. The Palestinian people's aspiration for return, statehood, and justice in Jerusalem remains one of the defining unresolved questions of contemporary international affairs and Islamic political consciousness.

The suffering of 700,000 people displaced from their homes, the destruction of their villages, and the denial of their right to return constitute a humanitarian catastrophe whose consequences are felt in every generation of Palestinians born since. For the global Muslim community, the cause of Palestine and the liberation of Al-Aqsa Mosque remain obligations of solidarity and advocacy — grounded in the sacred status of Jerusalem in Islam and the duty to stand with the oppressed.

Sources: Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006); Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (Free Press, 1986); UNRWA, Palestine Refugees: An Overview