After 1948, under emergency laws that remained in force until the 1967 war, Israeli citizens of Arab origin were subject to severe restrictions on movement and freedom of expression. State propaganda was omnipresent. Professors who dared to speak out for the expulsion of Palestinians, whether Jewish or Arab, risked their jobs.
More than three-quarters of the Arab population in the territories that became part of the new state of Israel were expelled through massacres of civilians, the deliberate destruction of their homes, and all manner of violence, including water poisoning, the killing of herds of cattle, and the burning of crops, with the aim of destroying the economy of a society still based on agriculture and animal husbandry. This was the episode known as the “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning catastrophe, which marks the expulsion of Palestinians between late 1947 and early 1949. Some 750 Palestinians were expelled, while fewer than 250 remained within the borders of the newly created Jewish state. Was this a premeditated plan for ethnic cleansing?
“The expulsion of the Palestinians has been part of Zionist ideology since its inception, long before the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948,” writes Israeli historian Benny Morris, one of the most prominent voices on the period. “However, at the beginning of the war that broke out after the Arab states rejected the land partition plan (under UN Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947), there was still no clear and announced plan for mass expulsion. It was only after the first massacres of Arabs, in December 1947 and early 1948, that Zionist political and military leaders realized that the flight of Arab residents served their objectives.”
In early April of that year, the leaders of the Haganah, the main military force affiliated with the Israeli Labor camp, drafted the Dalet Plan, which envisaged the mass expulsion of the Arab population, including from territories designated for a Palestinian state by the UN. In addition, extremist formations of nationalist Zionism, such as the Irgun and Lehi, were also operating, using violence and terror as a means of emptying entire Regions of the Arab population.
After 1948, under emergency laws that remained in place until the 1967 war, Israeli citizens of Arab origin were subject to severe restrictions on movement and freedom of expression. State propaganda was omnipresent. Professors who dared to speak out for the expulsion of Palestinians, whether Jewish or Arab, risked their jobs. The dominant official narrative claimed that the Palestinians had left of their own accord, betrayed by the Arab governments of the Region, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, who had deceived them with promises of easy victory and a quick return to their homes. This narrative was accompanied by the image of Jews who, having escaped the Holocaust, had triumphed over a much more powerful enemy, like David facing Goliath, and that the return of refugees would constitute an internal threat, a “fifth column” that would undermine the Israeli state.
Even in the early 80s, Israeli state and military archives remained closed or censored. Scholars, coming across endless letters from doctors, teachers, imams, priests, and mayors seeking to return from refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, struggled to understand what had really happened. What were the untold truths of Israel’s birth? What did this historic moment hide?
Things began to change with the emergence of Israeli intellectual “new historians” born in the more liberal climate of the 80s, as well as the voices of Palestinian historians and writers from the European and American diaspora. The outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, a largely peaceful uprising in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, brought the “Palestinian question” back into the international spotlight.
Since then, comparisons and clashes between the Holocaust and the Nakba have become a constant topic of debate. Meanwhile, there has been no shortage of Arab voices, especially from Lebanon and Europe, that have condemned Holocaust denial, as have Israeli intellectuals and diaspora Jews who reject Zionist propaganda and the official narrative. Historians such as Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, question the historical continuity between the ancient Jewish kingdoms and the modern state of Israel. Others have challenged the myth of Israel’s weakness in the face of its powerful neighbors, even investigating Israel’s responsibilities in what has been called the “second Nakba,” after the 1967 war.
Today, the Nakba has been brought back into focus after the massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023. This is also due to the immediate statements of some representatives of the Israeli far right, who called for the expulsion of all Palestinians, not only from Gaza, but also from the West Bank.
This project, with ancient roots, gained momentum after the 1967 war and was further fueled by the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. This hard line culminated in the assassination of Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, with the aim of stopping the peace process initiated by the 1993 Oslo Accords. In this light, the epilogue appears dark and repetitive: each project to expand Israel’s borders is accompanied by a new “Nakba” – another catastrophe for the Palestinian people. (Corriere della Sera)
