Belgian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
 

 
 

Palestine Mandate ─ Nakba ─ Naksa ─...

(1) Resources:
(2) Articles: below (latest first)

  • « Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt warn against fascism in Israel » (Jewish Voice for Labour, Dec 4, 2023): click here!
    JVL Introduction: The letter below, published 75 years ago today in the New York Times, was prescient. Signed by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt among others, it describes the emergence “in the newly created state of Israel” of “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”.
  • AL HAQ: « Position Paper: British Reparations Owed to the Palestinian People » Authors: Shawan Jabarin, General Director, Al-Haq, & Ralph Wilde, Faculty of Laws, University College London (29 September, 2023, pdf, 10p.): click here!
    This position paper was delivered as a lecture to the UK Balfour Project, and is based on arguments set out in greater detail, with full citations, in an article published in the Journal of the History of International Law, both by the second author.
  • Sarah AZIZA, « Forest Against the Trees. » Zionist monocrops erase Palestinian history (The Bafler N° 70, September 2023): click here!
    My legs throbbed, joining my lungs and back in aching protest. I squinted under a flood of Mediterranean sun. Before me, a massive palm tree stood alone, its crown caressing the sky. Its warped, S-shaped trunk was my only anchor in the unmarked, grassy field. This is the place. The thought was a prayer, a drum I tapped continuously, trying to ward off panic. Here. Here. Here.
  • Ofer ADERET, « 'We Threw Bodies': Researchers Say Four Mass Graves Dot Site of Arab Village in Israel" » (Haaretz, May 26, 2023): click here!
    New research at Tantura includes the analysis of historical aerial photographs and testimonies from eyewitnesses during the 1948 war. The study was conducted by Forensic Architecture, a research group at Goldsmiths, University of London, under Israeli architect Eyal Weizman: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/executions-and-mass-graves-in-tantura-23-may-1948/. The group uses highly advanced technology to document human rights violations around the world, with the findings sometimes serving as evidence in court. Forensic Architecture’s researchers say they located mass graves at Tantura by comparing historical aerial photos to current ones. They also collected testimonies, created computerized models and conducted a land survey, also noting the few buildings remaining in the village. According to the study, two mass graves are under the beach's parking lot, with one perhaps containing 70 to 140 bodies, the other 40 to 80 bodies. A third mass grave is believed to lie where the village’s main Muslim cemetery once was, with the fourth on the beach. The Adalah rights group, which initiated the study, wants the authorities to fence off these sites and place signs there.
  • « Israëlische documenten uit 1948 rekenen af met mythen rond de Nakba » (The Rights Forum, 23 mei 2023):: click here!
    Nog voordat David Ben-Gurion op 14 mei 1948 de staat Israël uitriep verjoegen Joodse strijdgroepen 30 procent van de Palestijnse bevolking, blijkt uit Israëlische documenten van dat jaar.
  • Adam RAZ, archive of articles in Haaretz, October 2018-January 2022: click here!
  • "1948 Remember... al-Nakba: the Palestinians' Catastrophe, the Palestians Today" (YouTube, ICAHD Videos, May 12, 2023): click here!
    ICAHD remembers the Nakba on its 75th anniversary by giving voice to critical Israeli Jews who speak about Zionism, the ongoing ethnic cleansing and how it is time for all Israelis and Jews to acknowledge the Nakba and take responsibility for it. With Jeff Halper, Livnat Konopny, Anat Matar, Gideon Levy, Rachel Beitarie, Tom Pessah, and Haim Bresheeth.
  • « Project48 » : click here!
    Project48 delivers the history and ongoing realities of the Nakba and its impact on Palestinian lives. ─ Project48 provides educational material, eyewitness testimonies, images, videos and artifacts that bring to life the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic), its generational impact, and the struggle for return of Palestinian refugees... Project48 was created to center Palestinians in the telling of their own history, to raise the voices of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees whose stories have been silenced or denied, the steadfast Palestinians who were able to remain, as an oppressed minority, “strangers in their own homeland,” and to those living under Israeli occupation who “teach life” each day, living for over half a century without their basic human rights...
  • Ralf WILDE, « Tears of the Olive Trees: Mandatory Palestine, the UK, and Reparations for Colonialism in International Law. » in: Journal of the History of International Law (23 December 2022): click here!
    Abstract: The Palestinian people seek a reckoning for the failure of the UK to enable their self- determination during the League of Nations Mandate period and in 1948. The common view of international lawyers is that the law of self-determination only became applicable to colonial peoples in the second half of the 20th Century. Consequently, the UK, and the League Council, had a free hand on the question of the status of the Palestine Mandate. This is mistaken. The special clause of the League Covenant applicable to Palestine, providing for provisional independence, could not be lawfully bypassed. The UK’s failure to comply with this was a violation of international law with ongoing consequences, thereby serving as a basis for contemporary accountability. This case study reveals the existence and potential of legal avenues for colonial reparations rooted in not generally-applicable legal norms but sui generis rules specific to the case at hand.
  • John QUIGLEY, « Britain and Its Mandate over Palestine. Legal Chicanery on a World Stage. » Anthem Press, September 2022, 220p. click here!
    This book makes four new points about Britain’s role in Palestine. Britain had no legal basis for its tenure in Palestine. No right to self-determination for the Jewish people was recognized by the international community. The mandate document that Britain composed was not legally valid. The League of Nations gave no rights either to Britain or to the Jewish people. Book review by: Hannah Buinsma, Legal Researcher at Law for Palestine, October 2023: click here!
  • "Palestine Remembered." Mission Statement: click here!
    Purpose: "To emphasize that the CORE issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are the DISPOSSESSION and ETHNIC CLEANSING (compulsory population transfer) of the Palestinian people for the past seven decades. Therefore, the conflict is deeply political and not about antisemitism that the Western world have experienced; and it would've been at the same level of intensity even if both parties had been Jewish, Muslim, or Christian...click here!
  • "MARKING THE NAKBA. From Betrayals and Warnings to Future Visions" (AL-SHABAKA, May 2018, 91p.): click here!
    A selection of Al-Shabaka analysis that reviews the past 100 years, dissects the present, and looks ahead to a better future.
  • "ZOCHROT - From Nakba to Return" : click here!
  • "The Nakba Files: The Nakba, the Law, and What Lies In Between". A joint project of Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University (2016-2018). click here!
  • "In pictures: Palestinian villages before the Nakba" (MEE Staff, June 24, 2022): click here!
    Hundreds of villages, some inhabited since ancient times, were depopulated of their Palestinian inhabitants to make way for the state of Israel.
  • Hebh JAMAL, "Khan Yunis: Remembering the Forgotten Palestinian Massacre" (The Palestine Chronicle, Nov 9, 2021): click here!
    Palestinian memory holds years and dates close. The Nakba was in 1948, the Naksa in 1967, Sabra and Shatila September 1982, the Intifada ‘87. November 3, 1956, however, does not live in infamy. Despite being one of the greatest massacres of Palestinians, the Khan Yunis massacre that brutally took the lives of hundreds of Palestinian men and boys, has only received a footnote in history- a mere few lines in a UN report.
  • Munir NUSEIBAH, "The Second Nakba: Displacement of Palestinians in and after the 1967 Occupation" (OrientXXI, 1 june 2017): click here!
    June 1967, an Endless Six-Day War · Nineteen years after the Nakba (1947-1949), Israel carried out a second wave of expulsions of Palestinians from their homeland during and after the 1967 war. Without hope of return, they were forcibly displaced from the Latroun area, East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to Jordan.
  • "Modern History of Israel: The Assassination of Count Bernadotte (Sept 17, 1948)" (Jewish Virtual Library): click here!
  • Charles GLASS: "The Mandate years: colonialism and the creation of Israel" (The Guardian, May 31, 2001): click here!
    Charles Glass reappraises British rule in Palestine and a century of Zionism in this exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books
  • William James MARTIN: "The Deir Yassin Massacre" (Counterpunch, May 13, 2004): click here!
    On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells.

  • -------------------------------------------------
    Articles (latest first):
    • Meron RAPOPORT: « The ‘second Nakba’ government seizes its moment » (+972, January 2): click here!
      Israeli leaders are explicit about reusing the methods of 1948 in Gaza today. But what didn’t quell the Palestinians then will not do so now.
    • AL HAQ: « Position Paper: British Reparations Owed to the Palestinian People » (Haaretz, Sept 23, 2023, pdf, 10p.): click here!
      This position paper was delivered as a lecture to the UK Balfour Project, and is based on arguments set out in greater detail, with full citations, in an article published in the Journal of the History of International Law, both by the second author. This position paper was also published on the Opinio Juris blog on 29 September 2023).
    • Ariel DAVID: « Digging Up the Nakba: Israeli Archaeologists Excavate Palestinian Village Abandoned in 1948 » (Haaretz, Sept 13, 2023): click here!
      The first-of-its-kind project uncovered the ruins of Qadas, a Palestinian village near Lebanon, which Israel bulldozed so that refugees would have no home to return to.
    • Marion KAWAS: « My Palestinian mother-in-law and the generation of survivors » (Mondoweiss, Sept 3, 2023): click here!
      My mother-in-law recently passed away at age 97. Her generation, the Nakba survivors, are quickly leaving us, along with their important historical legacy.
    • Ofer ADERET: « Golda Meir Was ‘Open' to a Palestinian State, 1970 Minutes Reveal » (Haaretz, Aug 1, 2023): click here!
      Golda Meir has gone down in history as someone who rejected the idea that there was a Palestinian people at all, yet newly disclosed minutes show that she briefly entertained the notion of an independent state alongside Israel.
    • Gideon LEVY: « 'Silent transfer': How Israeli settlers are launching a second Nakba » (Middle East Eye, June 14, 2023): click here!
      The recent displacement of Bedouin Palestinians from Ein Samia village is part of a systematic scheme that serves the settlers’ vision to ultimately remove all Palestinians from the West Bank.
    • Hadeel ASSALI « Palestinians in Paraguay » (London Review of Books, Vol. 45 No. 10 · 18 May 2023): click here!
      Re-published, with intro, in: Jewish Voice for Labour (18 June, 2023), click here!
    • Anne PAQ: « Seventeen camps in four days to show pictures from home » (The Electronic Intifada, 14 June, 2023): click here!
      Photographer Ahmad al-Bazz was asking questions of himself as he placed a large bucket of homemade glue in the trunk of his small white Fiat parked in front of his Nablus home. “I can’t believe I stayed up until 3 am to make this glue! Will it work? Should I buy the silicon glue? But this is an Israeli product.”
    • Yumna PATEL: « 56 years of occupation: Explaining the Palestinian ‘Naksa’ » (Mondoweiss, June 5, 2023): click here!
      When Palestinians commemorate the Naksa, they are not only commemorating a historic loss of life and land, but the ongoing military occupation that every day, strips them of their rights to life, freedom, dignity, and self determination.
    • Mitchel PLITTNICK: « Nakba denial is at the heart of pro-Israel lobbying » (Mondoweiss, May 21, 2023): click here!
    • ELSC Statement: « No to the Nakba Demo Bans, End Germany’s Criminalisation of Palestinian Existence » (ELSC, May 19, 2023): click here!
      In another act of state repression, the Berlin police banned all events commemorating 75 years of ongoing Nakba. Following the demonstration ban from 2022, the police disrupted a Palestinian cultural event on 13 May in Neukölln, banning any political public speech, attempting to stop the distribution of books on Palestine on a discretionary basis, and preventing attendees from dancing the traditional Dabka, claiming that it was a form of “political expression”.
    • Ramona WADI: « The Symbolic Nakba Commemoration at the UN Showed Discomfort with the Truth that Israel Expelled the Palestinians » (Informed Comment, May 19, 2023): click here!
      “The thought that an international organisation could mark the establishment of one of its member states as a catastrophe or disaster is both appalling and repulsive,” wrote Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan when asking UN diplomats to refrain from attending the unprecedented UN General Assembly’s commemoration of the 1948 Nakba.
    • Dotan HALEVY & Maayan HILLEL - The Social History Workshop: "Six Basic Facts About the Nakba Everyone Should Know" (Haaretz, May 18, 2023): click here!
      A few weeks ago, Israel celebrated its 75th Independence Day. On May 15, Nakba Day was observed, with the UN commemorating it for the first time. Several facts need to be understood in order to grasp the lasting significance of its anniversary.
    • Richard SILVERSTEIN: "Nakba Denialism and Israel’s Battle for Hearts and Minds" (Tikun Olam, May 18, 2023): click here!
      As the Nakba gains recognition, the Israel Lobby redoubles efforts to erase it.
    • Samah SALAIME: "How the Nakba’s second generation absorbed their parents’ trauma" (+972, May 17, 2023): click here!
      From the food we ate to the work we chose, the Nakba permeated everything in the lives of the children of Palestinian refugees displaced in their homeland.
    • « Five Israeli landmarks built on the remains of Palestinian communities » (Middle East Eye, May 16, 2023): click here!
      The Nakba saw the expulsion of hundreds of Palestinians from their home villages and the erasure of their presence there.
    • AL MEZAN: "Nakba survivors in Gaza mark 75 years of ongoing refugeehood, settler-colonialism and apartheid amid Israel’s renewed military assault on the Strip" (May 15, 2023, pdf, 8p.): click here!
    • Amandas ONG: « ‘My village’: Destroyed in the Nakba, rebuilt memory by memory » (AlJazeera, May 15, 2023): click here!
      Bayt Nabala was among 530 Palestinian villages destroyed at Israel’s birth. Its people still dream of returning home.
    • Mohammed EL-KURD: "Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of a Nakba That Never Ended" (The Nation, May 15, 2023): click here!
      In the decades since the event Palestinians know as “the Catastrophe,” dispossession has become a timeless theme of the Palestinian experience.
    • Iqbal JASSAT: "Al-Nakba 75: A Challenge to Defeat Colonizers of Palestine" (The Palestine Chronicle, May 15, 2023): click here!
      As most of the world recoils in horror watching deliberately calculated Israeli brutality and cold-blooded killing of Palestinians, many who are outraged would be asking: when will Zionist-led pogroms end? After all, Palestinians have for decades now, faced the savagery of Zionist policies by Israeli thugs who masquerade as “leaders” of a mythical “democracy”.
    • Doron YACOV and Adi Golan BIKHNAFO: "From Salama to Kfar Shalem: How Mizrahim fit into the ongoing Nakba" (+972, May 15, 2023): click here!
      The expulsion of Salama’s Palestinians, the settling of Mizrahi Jews in their place, and the eviction of those residents decades later reveals the mechanism by which Israel continues to erase Palestinian existence.
    • Vera SAJWARI: "Sharifa’s Nakba: Retracing my family’s escape from Haifa " (+972, May 15, 2023): click here!
      +972 editor Vera Sajrawi sets out to uncover the hidden story of her grandparents' expulsion in 1948, walking the streets on which they used to live before being made refugees in their own homeland. (first part)
    • Nada ELIA: « "75 years of sumud. <» (+972, May 15, 2023): click here!
      As we commemorate 75 years of catastrophe, we also recognize 75 years of sumud, the Arabic word for “steadfastness” that captures Palestinians defiant resilience. Looking at developments on the ground in Palestine, from Sheikh Jarrah to Masafer Yatta to the Bedouin villages in al Naqab, and the violent rampages in Nablus and Huwara, it is impossible to deny that the Nakba is ongoing.
    • Dina MATAR: "The Nakba: 75 years after losing their home, the Palestinians are still experiencing the “catastrophe” " (The Conversation, May 12, 2023): click here!
      When Palestinians commemorate the Nakba (the catastrophe) on May 15, they are not only remembering a violent historical event that took place 75 years ago which led to the uprooting of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Nor just the destruction of more than 400 villages and towns and the killing of thousands others. They are also marking the fact that the Nakba did not end in 1948, but continues in different forms to this day.
    • Philip WEISS: "Jewish scholars dare to bring up the Nakba, at Center for Jewish History — to boos" (Mondoweiss, May 1, 2023): click here!
      When scholar Omer Bartov described the "brutal" expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba, he was heckled and booed at the Center for Jewish History. Some shouted "Shame!" and one person walked out.
    • Ramzy BAROUD: "Erasure vs. Sumud: How the Nakba Came to Define the Collective Palestinian Identity" (The Palestine Chronicle, April 26, 2023): click here!
      On May 15, 2023, the Palestinian Nakba will be 75 years old. Palestinians all over the world will commemorate the tragic occasion, known as the ‘Catastrophe’, when nearly 800,000 Palestinians were made refugees and nearly 500 towns and villages were ethnically cleansed of their inhabitants in historic Palestine between late 1947 and mid-1948. The depopulation of Palestine carried on for months; in fact, years after the Nakba was supposedly concluded. But the Nakba has never actually concluded.
    • Jonathan COOK: "'The Holy Land And Us': BBC Nakba series obscures ethnic cleansing of Palestine" (Middle East Eye, Feb 22, 2023): click here!
      The documentary hides the real villains: Western governments that left Jews with only one credible escape route from European antisemitism, by dispossessing Palestinians... Will Palestinians have to wait another 75 years to hear the BBC concede that they live under Israeli apartheid rule, just as they have had to wait 75 years for the BBC to admit that the Nakba lies at the root of the Israel-Palestine “conflict”? For the sake of Palestinians and Israelis, let us fervently hope not.
    • Ilan PAPPÉ: "Using the Right Language: The ‘Incremental Genocide’ of the Palestinians Continues" (The Palestine Chronicle, Feb 16, 2023): click here!
      I am writing this op-ed on March 10, 2023. Seventy-five years ago, on this date, the military command of the Zionist leadership publicized Plan Dalet, or Plan D, which, among other guidelines, instructed the Zionist forces on their way to occupy hundreds of Palestinian villages and several towns and neighborhoods in historical Palestine, to carry out: “Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously...
    • Kathryn SHIHADAH: "Netanyahu purveyed a fictional history of Israel to Jordan Peterson" (Israel-Palestine News, February 24, 2023): click here!
      Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is peddling a fanciful narrative of Israel’s history that bears no resemblance to the truth. We provide the real facts here, comprehensively annotated and easily verifiable.
    • Shay HAZKANI: "Who’s Afraid to Reveal the Palestinian ‘Secrets’ of 1948?" (Haaretz, Dec 4, 2022): click here! Accessible via Jewish Voice for Labour (with an Introduction), click here!
      When the Israel State Archives refuses to release material looted from the Palestinians on the pretext that this would “undermine national security,” it’s clear that this is cover for a completely different fear.
    • Ofer ADERET: "German-sponsored Event on the Nakba, Holocaust, and Cultural Memory in Tel Aviv Postponed After Outcry" (Haaretz, Nov 8, 2022): click here!
      The panel discussion was postponed over criticism for holding the event on the same day as the commemoration of Kristallnacht, but some Israeli critics have charged that comparing the Nakba and the Holocaust is unacceptable regardless.
    • Ofer ADERET: "‘Place the Material in the Wells’: Docs Point to Israeli Army’s 1948 Biological Warfare" (Haaretz, Oct 14, 2022): click here! [Reposted on Israel-Palestine News, Oct 17: click here! ]
      For decades, rumors and testimonies swirled about Jewish troops sent to poison wells in Arab villages. Now, researchers have located official documentation of the ‘Cast Thy Bread’ operation.
    • Yossi MELMAN: "Israel's Secret Poisonings in 1948" (Haaretz, Oct 6, 2022): click here! [Reposted on Israel-Palestine News, Oct 17: "Israel’s history of biological warfare & poisoning – violations of int’l law", click here! ]
      New article by Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar indicates that well before the botched assassination attempt 25 years ago on Hamas' Meshal, Israel attempted mass poisoning during the war in 1948.
    • Benny MORRIS & Benjamin Z. KEDAR: "‘Cast thy bread’: Israeli biological warfare during the 1948 War" (Middle Eastern Studies, Oct 19, 2022, via archive.org): click here!
      This article describes Israel's bacteriological warfare campaign during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Over the decades following that war rumours circulated that Israel had used bacteria, alongside conventional weaponry, in its battle against Palestine's Arabs and the surrounding Arab states. The declassification of files in the Israeli military archives, our discovery of a crucial letter in private hands, and the publication of a handful of memoirs relating to 1948 have enabled us to bridge the divide between rumour and fact; to explain the campaign's origins; to reconstruct its stages, beginning in April 1948; to identify who was involved – including Israel's prime minister, David Ben-Gurion and the Israeli army's de facto chief of general staff, Yigael Yadin, as well as leading Israeli scientists – and who actively opposed it; and to delineate and assess what the campaign actually achieved or failed to achieve. In sum, this study helps to understand various aspects of the 1948 War.
    • Tom BATEMAN: "UK apology sought for British war crimes in Palestine" (BBC News, Oct 6, 2022): click here!
      (a detailed report outlining British atrocities in Palestine during its period of Colonial occupation)
    • Rudy KISLER: "Tantura: New documentary sparks debate about Israel and the Palestinian Nakba" (The Conversation, Sept 11, 2022): click here!
      A new documentary, released earlier this year, is shining light on a violent and controversial episode in Israeli and Palestinian history.
    • Adam RAZ: "Why Israel Secretly Decided to Erase the Green Line" (Haaretz, Sept 9, 2022): click here!
      Minutes of top-secret cabinet meetings in 1967 reveal how the decision to erase the Green Line from Israel’s official map was made. And it wasn't the only thing that was erased.
    • Haaretz Editorial: "End the Concealment" (Haaretz, Aug 22, 2022): click here!
      Three years ago, Hagar Shezaf revealed that since the early 2000s, Defense Ministry staffers had combed through archives across the country and removed historical documents (Haaretz, July 4, 2019). These documents were then stored in vaults.
    • Alon SCHWARZ: "How to Cover Up a Massacre" (Haaretz, Aug 12, 2022): click here!
      Zionism must evolve in order to survive, writes the director of the documentary 'Tantura.' Israelis should be strong enough to acknowledge the suffering of the other side. Recognizing the Nakba is a first step toward a future of peace.
    • Gideon LEVY: "Israelis Refuse to Be Haunted by the Ghosts of Massacres Past. What Does It Mean for the Future?" (Haaretz, Aug 3, 2022): click here!
      Making a bomb out of a molehill. Not the bomb we should have wished for, but a much more dangerous one – the release of the Kafr Qasem transcripts didn’t even raise an eyebrow. The media, except for Haaretz, barely commented, the public yawned, the matter is dead.
    • Motasem A DALLOUL: "Kafr Qasim was not just a massacre, but part of an ethnic cleansing plan" (MEMo, August 1, 2022): click here!
      Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and others massacred Palestinians and shed plenty of Palestinian blood and they are being referred to by Israelis and non-Israelis as heroes. Even today's Israeli leaders are doing the same. Current Israeli Defence Minister, Benny Gantz, who took pride in bombing Gaza to the Stone Age, is still portrayed as a 'dove of peace'.
    • Tom SEGEV: "Israeli Soldiers in 1956 Kafr Qasem Massacre Believed They Were Doing the Right Thing" (Haaretz, July 31, 2022): click here!
      Newly declassified transcripts of the trial that followed the murder of 53 people in Kafr Qasem reveal an inconvenient truth on the marginal role war crimes have played in the formation of Israel's core values.
    • MEE Staff: "Court documents shed new light on Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Kafr Qasem" (Middle East Eye, July 29, 2022): click here!
      Testimony shows how Israeli soldiers sought to use the massacre of unarmed civilians to drive Palestinians from their homes.
    • Ofer ADERET: "Transcripts of Kafr Qasem Massacre Trial Revealed: ‘The Commander Said Fatalities Were Desirable’" (Haaretz, July 29, 2022): click here! Reposted in: Israel-Palestine News (Aug 2, 2022), click here!
      The Kafr Qasem massacre transcripts were kept secret until now, under the claim that revealing them would jeopardize Israel' national security.
    • "In pictures: Palestinian villages before the Nakba" (MEE Staff, June 24, 2022): click here!
      Hundreds of villages, some inhabited since ancient times, were depopulated of their Palestinian inhabitants to make way for the state of Israel.
    • Jonathan COOK: "Israel calls the Nakba a lie. So why do its leaders threaten a second one?" (J.C., June 14, 2022): click here!
      Ex-government minister’s recent warning to Palestinian flag-wavers of another forced expulsion exposes the lie at the heart of Israel’s founding.
    • Ofer ADERET: "55 Years Later: A Censored Kibbutz Decision About Arab Land Is Revealed" (Haaretz, June 14, 2022): click here!
      The comrades at a kibbutz were so concerned about the sensitive minutes of a meeting on the fate of nearby Arab villages following the Six-Day War that they sealed the pages.
    • Yousef M. ALJAMAL: "Debunking Israeli Myths about the Nakba: Denial Does Not Overwrite History" (Politics Today, May 15, 2022): click here!
      The Nakba continues today with Palestinian families still scattered across the globe, with most Palestinian families not having met in a single place since 1948.
    • Seraj ASSI: "This Is the Biggest Myth About Israel and the Nakba" (Haaretz, March 3, 2022): click here!
      It is one of the most enduring myths surrounding the 1948 war: The epic battle between a fearsome Arab Goliath and a newborn Israel to liberate Palestine. And it’s a fable that continues to inflict harm today.
    • Sheren Falah SAAB: "Palestinians Have Talked About the Tantura Massacre, but a Jewish Film Made It Fact" (Haaretz, Jan 25, 2022): click here!
    • Adam RAZ: "There's a Mass Palestinian Grave at a Popular Israeli Beach, Veterans Confess" (Haaretz, Jan 20, 2022): click here!
      The Israeli veterans of the 1948 battle at Tantura village finally come clean about the mass killing of Arabs that took place after the village's surrender.
    • Abe SILBERSTEIN: "A Logic of Elimination" (Jewish Currents, Jan 11, 2022): click here!
      Historian Lorenzo Veracini discusses settler colonialism, Zionism, and decolonial futures.
    • Adam RAZ: "Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew" (Haaretz, Dec 9, 2021): click here!
      Testimonies continue to pile up, documents are revealed, and gradually a broader picture emerges of the acts of murder committed by Israeli troops during the War of Independence. Minutes recorded during cabinet meetings in 1948 leave no room for doubt: Israel's leaders knew in real time about the blood-drenched events that accompanied the conquest of the Arab villages.
    • Tom PESSAH: "Who fought in 1948? " (+972, Sept 22, 2021): click here!
      A new book uncovers letters by Jewish and Arab fighters from the 1948 war, highlighting the personal lives of those who fought to establish Israel and those who tried to defend Palestine.
    • Michael MILSHTEIN: "The Trauma of the Nakba Is Here to Stay " (Haaretz, June 25, 2021): click here!
      Contrary to the prevailing view, the Palestinians have never forgotten the trauma of Israel's creation in 1948 – a fact that has been brought home again recently. A trenchant critical discussion by both sides is urgent.
    • Kaleem HAWA: "The Nakba Demands Justice " (Jewish Currents, May 14, 2021): click here!
      Reckoning with the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe means giving the land back.
    • Haaretz Editorial: "Recognize, Apologize and Educate About the Kafr Qasem Massacre" (Haaretz, Oct 27, 2020): click here!
      In contrast to other bloody stains in the history of Zionism, which remain fertile ground for ideological disputes between the left and right, no one disputes that Kafr Qasem was a shameful crime.
    • Ofer ADERET: "Jewish Soldiers and Civilians Looted Arab Neighbors' Property en Masse in '48. The Authorities Turned a Blind Eye " (Haaretz, Oct 3, 2020): click here!
      Refrigerators and caviar, champagne and carpets – a first-ever comprehensive study by historian Adam Raz reveals the extent to which Jews looted Arab property during the War of Independence, and explains why Ben-Gurion stated: ‘Most of the Jews are thieves’.
    • Nadi ABUSAADA: "Jaffa: The Rise and Fall of an Agrarian City" (Institute for Palestine Studies, Sept 20, 2020): click here!
      “The gateway to Palestine”, as it was often called, Jaffa was the primary entryway for travellers who arrived to the country by sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For many biblical scholars and pilgrims who wrote about their voyages to the Holy Land, the anguish of “landing at Jaffa” was their opening scene.
    • Steven ZIPPERSTEIN: "Diaries reveal overwhelmed British officials in Palestine wanted to go home" (Times of Israel, June 13, 2020): click here!
      Sarcastic, exasperated entries show Mandate-era leaders appalled by Arab violence, repulsed by Jewish ‘arrogance,’ espionage; sides seen as ‘childish,’ heralding today’s conflict.
    • Ramzy BAROUD: "How Britain Destroyed the Palestinian Homeland" (Days of Palestine, June 10, 2020): click here!
      When I was a child growing up in a Gaza refugee camp, I looked forward to November 2. On that day, every year, thousands of students and camp residents would descend upon the main square of the camp, carrying Palestinian flags and placards, to denounce the Balfour Declaration.
    • Salman ABU SITTA: "Massacres as a weapon of ethnic cleansing during the Nakba" (Mondoweiss, June 12, 2020): click here!
      From April 1st to May 14, 1948 -- before Israel was declared, before the British left, and before any Arab soldier entered Palestine to save it -- Zionist militias essentially conquered Palestine.
    • "Massacres and Atrocities During the Nakba" (Table 3.2 in the Atlas of Palestine 1917-1966) (list of 232 incidents, Google Sheets).
    • Ofer ADERET: "Assassinations, Terror Attacks and Even Castration – the Hidden Actions of Israel’s Pre-state Militia" (Haaretz, June 13, 2020, via AURDIP): click here!
      This month marks the 100th anniversary of the formation of the forerunner of the Israeli army. While the Haganah boasts of its heroic acts and looks down on similar right-wing groups, its history also includes dark operations it would prefer not to mention.
    • Yara HAWARI: "Remembering 72 years of the Nakba in the shadow of annexation" (The New Arab, May 15, 2020): click here!
      When Palestinians commemorate the Nakba they are not simply remembering a past event. They are marking a continued process of erasure and dispossession.
    • Ofer ADERET: "Who Ratted Out Zionist Militia Leader Yair Stern to His Killers 78 Years Ago?" (Haaretz, Feb 21, 2020): click here!
      Moshe Svorai, a partly exonerated fellow Lehi member, inadvertently disclosed the commander’s hideout, scholar says.
    • Johan DEPOORTERE: "De Verdwenen Dorpen van Palestina" (Salon van Sisyphus, Jan 24, 2019): click here!
      Naar aanleiding van het Eurovisie songfestival in Israël in mei van dit jaar organiseert de Academische BDS (Boycot, Divestment, Sanctions) een reeks activiteiten om te protesteren tegen deze propagandastunt van de zionistische apartheidstaat. In samenwerking met de overheidsvakbond ACOD stel ik vanaf dinsdag 29 januari mijn fotoreeks “De verdwenen dorpen van Palestina” ten toon in de gebouwen van de VRT.
    • Adam RAZ: "The Secret Letter Detailing Israel's Plan to Expel Arabs, 'Without Unnecessary Brutality'" (Haaretz, Dec 21, 2018): click here!
      Six months after the War of Independence ended, David Ben-Gurion sought to expel more than 10,000 Arabs from the north, for unspecified 'security reasons.' Why was a long-declassified letter describing that plan recently hidden again from public view?
    • Nir HASSON: "Hundreds of Photos Found From When Israel’s War of Independence Raged" (Haaretz, Dec 9, 2018): click here!
      From a burning photography store, Moshe Carmel rescued four albums whose bounty starts with the Muslim-Jewish riots of 1929. The pictures are now on display in Jerusalem.
    • Seraj ASSI: "In Palestine, World War I Has Never Really Ended" (Haaretz, Nov 14, 2018): click here!
      Widely seen as a European war, WWI's impact on the Middle East was both devastating and transformative. But there's been no armistice: A century later, Arabs and Jews still fight over the land liberated from the Ottoman Empire.
    • Ofer ADERET: "General's Final Confession Links 1956 Massacre to Israel's Secret Plan to Expel Arabs" (Haaretz, Oct 11, 2018): click here!
      'Yiska' Shadmi, the highest IDF officer tried for the Kafr Qasem massacre, admitted before his death that his trial was staged to protect military and political elites. Historian Adam Raz believes that behind the horrific 1956 event was a secret plan to transfer Israel's Arabs.
    • Jonathan LIS & Ofer ADERET: "Netanyahu Likely to Extend Secrecy of Some 1948 War Documents 20 More Years" (Haaretz, Oct 4, 2018): click here!
      Defense establishment asked to lengthen classification period to 90 years, from 70, for material on Deir Yassin massacre, among other events.
    • Seth ANZISKA: "Sabra and Shatila: New Revelations" (The New York Review of Books, Sept 17, 2018): click here!
      This essay is adapted from "Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo", published by Princeton University Press, click here!
    • Ofer ADERET: "Why Is Israel Still Covering Up Extrajudicial Executions Committed by a Jewish Militia in '48?" (Haaretz, July 6, 2018): click here!
      Seven decades after a report documented executions by Israel's pre-state army of Poles and Arabs – as well as incidents of torture and looting – the authorities are still censoring the documents.
    • Tim ANDERSON: "The European Colony in Palestine " (American Herald Tribune, May 30, 2018): click here!
      Israel was created as a rather conventional European colony, to meet the demands of the European Zionist movement and to keep a western foothold in the Arab world. Built on an invented racial ideology which parallels that of the Nazi persecutors of European Jews, Israel almost managed to convince the world that it is a legitimate nation. But Palestinian resistance is putting an end to that.
    • Dina KRAFT: "Palestinians Uncover History of the Nakba, Even as Israel Cuts Them Off From Their Sources" (Haaretz, April 20, 2018): click here!
      For Palestinian historians researching the 1948 exodus of their people, the greatest challenge is getting access to the few surviving documents of the period: most are locked away in Israeli archives.
    • Eitan BRONSTEIN APARICIO & Eleonore Merza BRONSTEIN: "Israël et la Nakba, de la reconnaissance au déni" (OrientXXI, 19 avril 2018): click here!
      Israël célèbre son soixante-dixième anniversaire. Pour les Palestiniens, il s’agit plutôt de la Nakba, la catastrophe qui les a frappés et contraints à l’exil. Si la Nakba était reconnue par de nombreux responsables et intellectuels israéliens durant les premières années du jeune État, elle a été par la suite contestée officiellement, alors que les preuves des exactions commises par l’armée israélienne en 1947-1949 et de l’épuration ethnique dont furent victimes les Palestiniens s’accumulaient.
    • Jonathan COOK: "‘A place I do not recognise’: Palestinians mark 70 years of Israeli injustice" (JC, April 19, 2018): click here!
      In 2011, in a sign of the mounting mood of intolerance, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu passed the Nakba Law to penalise public institutions, including schools, universities and libraries, that marked the Nakba. But in practice the law has backfired, with greater attention on the Nakba than ever before.
    • Ari SHAVIT: "Entretien avec Benny Morris" (ISM France, 9 janvier 2004): click here!
      Benny Morris dit qu’il a toujours été sioniste. Les gens se sont mépris quand ils l’ont catalogué de post-sioniste.
    • "The Nakba in numbers: Displacement of the Palestinians and destruction of their villages" (Moving Forward, April 7, 2018): click here!
      ​In 1948, the State of Israel was created on land that only a year before had been a majority Palestinian population with a majority of Palestinian villages.
    • Chemi SHALEV: "As Israel Commemorates Its 70th, 1948 Is Groundhog Day for Palestinians" (Haaretz, Jan 23 2018): click here!
      Palestinians are dispirited, divided and disillusioned, and now face a year of Israel pouring salt on their wounds by celebrating Jewish victories that were also Palestinian catastrophes.
    • Adam RAZ: "'We Look at Them Like Donkeys': What Israel's First Ruling Party Thought About Palestinian Citizens" (Haaretz, Jan 13 2018): click here!
      Israel's first ruling party, Mapai, was torn about the status of Arabs who remained in the country after the War of Independence; almost 70 years later, the 'Arab question' has yet to be answered.
    • Nir HASSON: "A Fight to the Death, and Betrayal by the Arab World: The Most Disastrous 24 Hours in Palestinian History" (Haaretz, Jan 4 2018): click here!
      The losing of the battle for Al-Qastel, led by the legendary Arab commander and terrorist Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, marked the launch of the Nakba in '48.
    • Nir HASSON: "When the Ottomans Surrendered Jerusalem Four Times in One Day" (Haaretz, Dec 14 2017): click here!
      In 2004, the office of the custodian general in the Justice Ministry sent a small package containing a framed piece of white fabric to the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem.
    • Calder WALTON, "Coat Bomb and Explosive Prosthesis: British Intel Files Reveal How the Zionist Stern Gang Terrorized London" (Haaretz, Dec 2, 2017): click here!
      MI5's dossiers on the group released this week cast the Cold War's early years in a stark new light: Terrorism, not the Soviet Union, was the main threat.
    • Adèle RIBUOT & Naday JOFFE: "Les forêts, piliers de la colonisation en Palestine" (orientxxi, 28 nov 2017): click here!
      La conquête et le contrôle de la terre, l’éjection du peuple autochtone, le soutien d’une métropole puissante sont finalement les ingrédients en lien avec l’installation de colons. Et l’afforestation, une arme au service de la colonisation.
    • Ofer ADERET: "When Jewish Taxis Were Barred From Jerusalem – for Fear of Jewish Terror Attacks" (Haaretz, Nov 23, 2017): click here!
      After the 1947 UN partition vote (as well as before) both Arabs and Jews were slaughtering each other’s innocents.
    • Rammzy BAROUD: "70 Years of Broken Promises: The Untold Story of the Partition Plan" (The Palestine Chronicle, Nov 22, 2017): click here!
      In a recent talk before Chatham House think-tank in London, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, approached the issue of a Palestinian state from an intellectual perspective.
    • Jeremy SALT: "Ugly Truths Behind Balfour and Beersheba" (The Palestine Chronicle, Oct 23, 2017): click here!
      The population of Beersheba about 6000 was entirely Palestinian, including sedentary or semi-sedentary beduin: the population of the Beersheba district was about 110,000, almost all driven out of their villages and the town itself.
    • Dalia KARPEL: "'A story of survival and rebirth' The Palestinians Who Didn't Flee During the Nakba" (Haaretz, Sept 19, 2017): click here!
      When he was in the fourth grade in elementary school in the Arab town of Majd al-Krum in Upper Galilee, Adel Manna took part in the preparations to celebrate Israel’s 10th Independence Day.
    • "In color: Amazing photos of Palestine from 19th century" (Medium, Sept 7, 2017): click here!
      The National Library’s photo collections include two albums whose pictures were produced at the end of the 19th century using the process known as photochrom. What was this method and why do the photos resemble oil paintings more than the black-and-white originals?
    • Daniel BLATMAN: "For the Nakba, There's No Need of an 'Expulsion Policy'" (Haaretz, Aug 4, 2017): click here!
      In contrast to what Benny Morris claimed, Adel Manna's 'Nakba and Survival' is an inspiring book, noteworthy for its methodical approach in presenting a credible, multifaceted history of the Palestinian tragedy of 1948.
    • Daoud KUTTAB: "Archives belie Israel's narrative of Palestinian conflict" (Al-Monitor, Aug 1, 2017): click here!
      Early members of the Zionist movement and later Israelis have consistently attempted to control the narrative of the conflict with the Palestinians, including by seizing photographic evidence of Palestine and the Palestinians' history.
    • Stuart LITTLEWOOD: "The Balfour Declaration: Time to say sorry. Time we made amends" (Redress Information & Analysis, July 23, 2017): click here!
      In a letter to a local newspaper about Brexit and the way Prime Minister Theresa May is handling it, I happened to mention in passing the Balfour Declaration, criticising her plans to celebrate the centenary “with pride” and invite Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to the fun.
    • Ofer ADERET: "Testimonies From the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre: 'They Piled Bodies and Burned Them'" (Haaretz, July 16, 2017 ): click here!
      A young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man shot in back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun. The testimonies collected by filmmaker Neta Shoshani about the massacre in Deir Yassin are difficult to process even 70 years after the fact.
    • David CRONIN: "How Britain brought waterboarding to Palestine" (EI, July 10, 2017 ): click here!
      Norman Bentwich was the chief legal officer with the British administration in Jerusalem between the two world wars. A committed Zionist, he drafted many of the ordinances that enabled Jewish settlers to seize land which indigenous Palestinians had farmed for generations.
    • Ofer ADERET: "Why Are Countless Palestinian Photos and Films Buried in Israeli Archives?" (Haaretz, July 1, 2017 ): click here!
      Palestinian photos and films seized by Israeli troops have been gathering dust in the army and Defense Ministry archives until Dr. Rona Sela, a curator and art historian, exposed them. The material presents an alternative to the Zionist history that denied the Palestinians’ existence here, she says.
    • "‘We cannot bear the repeated Nakba anymore'" (MEMo, June 21, 2017 ): click here!
      Abou Omar is a Palestinian refugee who lived in Yarmouk camp in Syria before fleeing the country when the war broke out. Laila Ben Allal interviews him on becoming a refugee once again in Greece, and the incredible journey he made to get there.
    • "Al-Buraq Revolution: Legacy, Continuing Struggle and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement" (Samidoun, June 18, 2017 ): click here!
      17 June marks the anniversary of the execution of three of the earliest martyrs of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement – Fouad Hijazi, Atta al-Zeer and Mohammed Khalil Jamjoum – by British colonial occupiers, in Akka prison.The execution of these Palestinian strugglers has remained for years an ongoing story of resistance.
    • Ilan PAPPÉ: "Israel’s occupation was a plan fulfilled" (EI, June 6, 2017 ): click here!
      In June 1967, I was 12 years old. I recall helping to fill sandbags to fortify the entrance to our home in Haifa in preparation for war. The army was already geared towards war and official Israel terrified its society and supporters around the world, as Zionist leaders did in 1948, with warnings of another Holocaust.
    • Nadia HIJAB & Mouin RABBANI: "Tracking the Trends of the Palestinian Cause Since 1967" (Al-Shabaka, June 5, 2017 ): click here!
      The Palestinian cause today has in some respects reverted to where it stood before the 1967 War. It is worth retracing this trajectory to understand how we reached the current situation, and derive insights on where to go from here.
    • Karma NABULSI: "La génération de la Nakba" (Pour la Palestine, 5 juin, 2017 ): click here!
      L’histoire de la révolution palestinienne a longtemps été ignorée, soutient Karma Nabulsi, c’est pourquoi l’auteure rassemble des érudits pour élaborer un nouveau cours pédagogique. Ce qui suit est le premier d’une série de 12 chapitres.
    • Uzi BENZIMAN: "The Real Reason Israel Annexed East Jerusalem " (Haaretz, May 25, 2017 ): click here!
      Haaretz’s Jerusalem correspondent covered the story of the city’s unification in the wake of the Six-Day War. Fifty years later he revisits the the dramatic decision that changed the face of the Middle East.
    • Amira HASS: "A New Palestinian Generation" (Haaretz, May 17, 2017 ): click here!
      Nakba Day, which was observed this week, marks the 69th year of the Palestinian nation’s disaster, but also of its dignity, capabilities and strength.
    • "69 years on, Palestinians see Nakba as 'ongoing journey of pain, loss, and injustice'" (Ma'an, May 15, 2017 ): click here!
      As Palestinians marked on Monday 69 years since the beginning of the Nakba -- or “catastrophe” -- officials and activists denounced the human rights violations Palestinians have endured since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
    • "BDS: Upholding our Rights, Resisting the Ongoing Nakba" (BNC, May 15, 2017 ): click here!
      May 15, 2017 marks the 69th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist paramilitaries, and subsequently Israeli forces, made 750,000 to one million indigenous Palestinians into refugees to establish a Jewish-majority state in Palestine.
    • "Focus On: Palestinian Refugees" (Al-Shabaka, May 13, 2017 ): click here!
      This collection of some of the most compelling pieces Al-Shabaka has published contextualizes and discusses the unique difficulties of Palestinian refugees displaced across the Middle East.
    • Ramzy BAROUD: "Palestinian and Jewish Voices Must Challenge Israel’s Past Together " (The Palestine Chronicle, April 26, 2017 ): click here!
      Israel has resorted to three main strategies to suppress Palestinian calls for justice and human rights, including the Right of Return for refugees. One is dedicated to rewriting history; another attempts to distract from present realities altogether and a third aims at reclaiming the Palestinian narrative as essentially an Israeli one.
    • Mondoweiss Editors: "‘Why do I not cry out for the right of return?’ — an exchange between Uri Avnery and Salman Abu Sitta" (Mondoweiss, April 21, 2017 ): click here!
      Uri Avnery is a co-founder of the Israeli “peace bloc”, Gush Shalom, a former Knesset member and a journalist. In his youth, he was a member of the paramilitary group the Irgun, known for its terrorist attacks on Palestinians and the British Mandate authorities.
    • Maryam NABBOUT: "Palestine's annual Nakba march is blocked by Israel for the first time ever" (Step Feed, April 10, 2017 ): click here!
      For Palestinians, Yawm El Nakba or the "day of catastrophe," refers to Israel's creation after "hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed in 1948."
    • Jonathan COOK: "Why is Israel afraid of the Nakba's March of Return?" (Al-Jazeera, April 10, 2017 ): click here!
      For the first time, Israeli police block the annual march to commemorate the Palestinian 'catastrophe' of 1948.
    • Donna NEVEL: "What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About The Nakba" (Forward, March 29, 2017 ): click here!
      In recent weeks, I have been paying particular attention to the arguments in favor of Zionism from those who call themselves progressive Zionists and call for a two-state solution, support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and express criticism of some of Israel’s policies and actions. More precisely, I have been paying attention to what is NOT being discussed in these arguments, namely, anything about the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land before and during Israel’s creation. If we are talking about Zionism, then we are also necessarily talking about the Nakba.
    • "Deir Yassin Remembered" (Deir Yassin Remembered): click here!
      Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State.
    • Ofer ADERET: "When Arabs and Mizrahi Jews dreamed of a joint homeland" (Haaretz, March 19, 2017): click here!
      Before Israel’s establishment in 1948, some Jews and Arabs saw each other as ‘brothers’ and had a utopian vision of a shared future.
    • Aaron TORDJMAN: "Israël est, par définition, une colonie européenne" (Union juive française pour la paix, UJFP, 6 février, 2017): click here!
      Comment se fait-il que la Palestine, partie intégrante du Moyen-Orient, et morceau de terre habité depuis l’Antiquité par une population orientale ayant adopté, depuis plus d’un millénaire, la culture et la langue arabe, à l’instar de la Syrie, de l’Égypte ou de l’Algérie, soit, en une centaine d’années, devenue un État peuplé de migrants venus du monde entier ?
    • Samah JABR: "Quand Israël et la Grande-Bretagne célèbrent le traumatisme historique des Palestiniens " (Pour la Palestine, 3 février, 2017): click here!
      Après cent ans, la Grande-Bretagne semble en être au même stade moral que lorsque le secrétaire britannique aux Affaires étrangères, Arthur Balfour, écrivait à un dirigeant de la communauté juive britannique, le baron de Rothschild, lui promettant l’établissement d’un « foyer national » pour le peuple juif en Palestine.
    • Robert FISK: "Theresa May wants British people to feel 'pride' in the Balfour Declaration. What exactly is there to be proud of?" (Independent, March 2, 2017): click here!
      Balfour initiated a policy of British support for Israel which continues to this very day, to the detriment of the occupied Palestinians of the West Bank and the five million Palestinian refugees living largely in warrens of poverty around the Middle East, including Israeli-besieged Gaza. Surely we should apologise
    • Fathi NEMER: "Finders Keepers in the Holy Land: So who was there first?" (Mondoweiss, Feb 2, 2017): click here!
      2017 will undoubtedly be a critical year for Palestine. We are standing at the crossroads of many different possibilities that could have serious implications for the future of the area.
    • Sandrine MANSOER: "L’identité palestinienne au début du XXe siècle" (interview, 2 mars, 2017): click here!
      Loin d’être un désert, comme l’affirmera le sionisme plus tard, la Palestine d’avant la déclaration Balfour de 1917 est un carrefour culturel très riche. Au début du XXe siècle, cette terre commence à affirmer son identité, arabe puis palestinienne, face à la férule ottomane.
    • Gideon LEVY & Alex LEVAC: "Despicable terrorist? Bedouin village in Israel's south mourns a beloved teacher" (Haaretz, Jan 26, 2017): click here!
      No one in Umm al-Hiran believes Yakub Musa Abu al-Kiyan, a father of 13, intentionally ran over a police officer; residents remember his calls against violence: 'Let them demolish the house, only let no one be hurt.'
    • Jonathan COOK, “In Umm al-Hiran, it is 'a continuing Nakba'“ (Al Jazeera, 22 Jan 2017): click here!
      Israel has advanced plans to raze the village of 150 homes and replace it with a town for Israeli Jews.
    • Gal LEVY: "How the 'Israeli Arab' was created" (Haaretz, Jan 15, 2017): click here!
      Between the end of Israeli military administration over its Arab citizens in 1966 and plans for educational integration in 1968, a new definition was born.
    • Yoav LITVIN: "The mainstreaming of Palestinian genocide" (Mondoweiss, Jan 6, 2017): click here!
      The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldier and medic Elor Azaria, who was filmed last March (by Imad Abu Shamsiya, a Palestinian B’Tselem volunteer) executing an incapacitated Palestinian man, Fattah al-Sharif, in cold blood has been convicted of manslaughter. He is now the modern Israeli hero, “the child of all of us” as many Israelis refer to him.
    • Tom SUAREZ: "Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won" (Mondoweiss, Jan 1, 2017): click here!
      Our topic is of course the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, a tragedy that has dragged on for so long that it feels static, indeed almost normalised. But unlike other deadly conflicts, this one is wholly in our power to stop—“our” meaning the United States and Europe. It is in our power to stop it, because we are the ones empowering it.
    • Richard FALK: "2017: A year to recall three bleak Palestinian anniversaries" (Middle East Eye, Dec 27, 2016): click here!
      Only nonviolent resistance of Palestinians to their prolonged ordeal and transnational civil society activism seem to have any capacity to exert positive change to the status quo.
    • David SHULMAN: "Palestine: The End of the Bedouins?" (The New York Review of Books, Dec 7, 2016): click here!
      One way to tell the story of the Middle East as a whole is to describe the endemic struggle between peripatetic nomads and settled peasant farmers—a struggle attested already in ancient Mesopotamian documents.
    • Ofer ADERET: "The Politics Behind the Drafting of the Balfour Declaration" (Haaretz, Nov 6, 2016): click here!
      Ninety-nine years after it was written, the British document supporting the formation of a 'national home for the Jewish people' is back in the news. But it caused unrest among some British Jews at the time, too.
    • Ramzy BAROUD: "How Britain Destroyed the Palestinian Homeland" (AlJazeera, Nov 2, 2016): click here!
      Ninety-nine years since Balfour's "promise", Palestinians insist that their rights in Palestine cannot be dismissed.
    • Aimee SHALAN: "One Hundred Years and Counting: Britain, Balfour, and the Cultural Repression of Palestinians" (Al Shabaka, Oct 28, 2016): click here!
      If Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour passes over the perimeter of her home’s driveway in her village of Reineh in the Galilee, an alarm will sound at the British multinational security firm G4S and the Israeli authorities will be alerted. Israeli police arrested Tatour in the early hours of October 11, 2015 for her poem, “Qawem ya sha‘abi qawemhum” (Resist My People, Resist Them), which was posted to her YouTube account earlier that month. On November 2, Israel charged her with incitement to violence and support for a terrorist organization.
    • Daniel BLATMAN: "Yes, Benny Morris, Israel Did Perpetrate Ethnic Cleansing in 1948" (Haaretz, Oct 14, 2016): click here!
      A good historian always examines his conclusions. If he comes to the conclusion that things he wrote previously require a reassessment, he is obligated to face that. But a historian who, at the start of his career, determined that Israel is responsible for the mass flight of the Palestinians in 1948 and later changed his views until he became the darling of the settler right, is a pathetic phenomenon. Benny Morris has followed that path.
    • Jonathan OFIR: "‘Ethnic cleansing’ becomes ‘No ethnic cleansing’ in Israeli history by Benny Morris" (Mondoweiss, Oct 10, 2016): click here!
      Winston Churchill quipped at the House of Commons in 1948, “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history”.
    • Benny MORRIS: "Israel Conducted No Ethnic Cleansing in 1948" (Haaretz, Oct 10, 2016): click here!
      Prof. Daniel Blatman distorts history when he says the new State of Israel, a country facing invading armies, carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs.
    • Amjad ALQASIS: "Decolonizing the Vocabulary of Palestinian Human Rights Work" (The Nakba Files, Oct 3, 2016): click here!
      Israeli practices and policies are a combination of apartheid, military occupation, and colonization. This regime is not limited to the Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but it also targets Palestinians residing on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Line, as well as those living in forced exile.
    • Daniel BLATMAN: "Netanyahu, This Is What Ethnic Cleansing Really Looks Like" (Haaretz, Oct 3, 2016): click here!
      Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that the removal of settlers from the West Bank would be ‘ethnic cleansing’ is utter nonsense. If he wants to know what ethnic cleansing, he has to revisit 1948, not 2005.
    • Sarah IRVING: "Mapping the Palestinian struggle" (The Internet Intifada, Sept 27, 2016): click here!
      "Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir" by Salman Abu Sitta, American University in Cairo Press (2016).
    • Philip WEISS: "Abbas and Levy issue calls to end Nakba denial" (Mondoweiss, Sept 23, 2016): click here!
      Yesterday, coincidentally, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli columnist Gideon Levy both spoke of the burden of the Nakba on their societies, and the world. Excerpts below.
    • Yotam BERGER: "Secret Documents Reveal How Israel Tried to Evade International Scrutiny of Occupation" (Haaretz, Sept 20, 2016): click here!
      In two cables from '67 and '68, Foreign Ministry officials admit violations of Geneva Conventions, instruct diplomats how to evade need for compliance by eschewing use of the word ‘occupation.’
    • Thayer HASTINGS: "Palestinian Oral History as a Tool to Defend Against Displacement" (Al Shabaka, Sept 15, 2016): click here!
      Oral history has a long precedent in Arab and Palestinian culture that stems from a broader oral tradition. 1 In the years immediately following the Nakba of 1948 the Arab tradition of the hakawati (storyteller) was used, according to Nur Masalha, to shore up a defense against erasure of culture and memory among Palestinians.
    • Ahmad TIBI: "Palestinians, Not Israeli Settlers, Are Victims of Ethnic Cleansing " (Haartez, Sept 11, 2016): click here!
      If Mr. Netanyahu really wants to know what ethnic cleansing means, he should ask the Palestinian citizens of Israel. 85% of the Palestinians living in what is now Israel were forced out in the 1948 Nakba - just because they weren't Jews.
    • "The dynamiting of Palestine" (Crimes of Britain, August 27, 2016): click here!
      Throughout the Arab uprising of 1936-39 the British used collective punishment against the Palestinian people. The destruction of property was central to British military repression in Palestine, such tactics are today used by the colonial settler state that the British paved the way for.
    • "The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective" (Center for Constitutional Rights, Aug 25, 2016): click here!
      While there has been recent criticism of those taking the position that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, there is a long history of human rights scholarship and legal analysis that supports the assertion. Prominent scholars of the international law crime of genocide and human rights authorities take the position that Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people could constitute a form of genocide.
    • Lauren BANKO: "A Brief History of Banning Arabs from Palestine" (The Nakba Files, Aug 23, 2016): click here!
      A central and enduring consequence of the Nakba has been the near-total ban on the entry to Israel of Palestinian Arab refugees who lost their homes in 1948. The exclusion of non-Jewish immigration from neighboring Arab countries is also taken for granted as an enabling condition of Zionism. The systematic exclusion of Arab migration from Israel/Palestine, however, did not begin in 1948. Instead, it is rooted in specific understandings of race and nationality enshrined in the international legal agreements that laid the framework for the colonial state of the British Mandate of Palestine, the state inherited by the Zionist movement.
    • "Refugees drew their destroyed villages " (Zochrot, 2016): click here!
    • Susan ABULHAWA: "Israel's desalination miracle, Santa Claus and other fairy tales" (Middle East Eye, Aug 9, 2016): click here!
      The 'making the desert bloom' myth has long masked Israel's occupation and degradation of Palestinian natural resources.
    • Odeh BISHARAT: "Israel Is Tasking Saudi Arabia With Subduing the Palestinians" (Haaretz, Aug 8, 2016): click here!
      The Palestinians, who have long suffered at the hands of their Arab 'brothers,' are well aware of the nature of the medieval Saudi regime.
    • Tamara NASSAR: "My family’s Nakba story" (Mondoweiss, July 22, 2016: click here!
      My paternal grandparents were expelled from their homeland in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. Absence has since been embroidered in the fabric of what came to be a family born in a memory of an unattainable land.
    • PR: "The Supreme Court permits the transfer of a library and archaeological artifacts from the Rockefeller Museum to West Jerusalem after rejecting an appeal by the Emek Shaveh organization" (Emek Shaveh, July 21, 2016: click here!
      ...The Supreme Court decided to turn down the appeal, claiming that the Antiquities Authority is licensed to transfer them from Rockefeller museum to West Jerusalem. The Supreme Court further claimed that the Israeli law in East Jerusalem overrides international law, which prohibits the removal of cultural property from occupied territories.
    • Suhad BISHARA: "Discourse and Dispossession" (The Nakba Files, June 15, 2016: click here!
      The Nakba dispossesses Palestinians: not only of land and territory, but also at the level of political discourse. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, the country’s judiciary has worked to constrict the space for Palestinian political activity – both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary – through various methods.
    • Jonathan COOK: "Why Israel is blocking access to its archives" (Al Jazeera, June 9, 2016): click here!
      Israel is concealing vital records to prevent darkest periods in its history from coming to light, academics say.
    • Natasha ROTH: "Wiping Palestinian history off the map in Jaffa" (+972, June 4, 2016): click here!
      A tourist map of Jaffa presents a reimagined, Zionist version of the city: Jaffa 2.0 is a boutique neighborhood of Tel Aviv, with a smattering of ‘local’ (read: native) color. But the map itself simply represents a much broader process of destruction and reconstruction.
    • Ofri ILANY: "Israel Systematically Denies 1,400 Years of Muslim History" (Haaretz, May 26, 2016): click here!
      The education system, the media and the tourism industry all collaborate in erasing the country's Palestinian past.
    • Silvia BOARINI: "Retracing Jaffa’s erased Palestinian history" (The Electronic Intifada, 24 May 2016): click here!
      In mid-May, when Israeli Jews celebrate Independence Day, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of people from cities and villages across Palestine that began in December 1947 and intensified throughout 1948, both before and after the declaration of the State of Israel.
    • Ben WHITE: "Nakba Day: A 'clear challenge' to Israeli establishment" (Al Jazeera, 16 May 2016): click here!
      While the Nakba Law threatens publicly-funded institutions, there are signs of optimism at the grassroots level.
    • Joseph MASSAD: "Resisting the Nakba" (The Electronic Intifada, 16 May, 2008): click here!
      One of the most difficult things to grasp in the modern history of Palestine and the Palestinians is the meaning of the Nakba.
    • Yara HAWARI: "Ethnic cleansing is an everyday reality" (The Electronic Intifada, May 16, 2016): click here!
      Thousands marched last week to commemorate the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Held in the southern Naqab (Negev) region for the first time in 19 years, the 2016 March of Return is being hailed as the largest such event for Palestinians living inside present-day Israel. Organized by the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced, the 12 May protest emphasized that the Nakba — Arabic for catastrophe — continues today.
    • Eitan BRONSTEIN APARICIO: "A brief history of the ‘Nakba’ in Israel" (Mondoweiss, 16 May, 2008)): click here!
      This text describes the discourse on the Nakba — mostly the concept but also the historical event — in Israel. When did it appear? When did it decline and was repressed? What caused these changes? The attempt here is to describe historical moments, a periodization, from the founding of the state until today, in order to describe the relation to the term in each period and the changes it went through
    • Miko PELED: "Thoughts on Nakba Day: 68 years of Zionist rape and pillaging of Palestine" (American Herald Tribune, May 16, 2016): click here!
      Sixty-eight years after the occupation of Palestine began people refer to the Zionist rape and pillaging of Palestine as a “conflict.” It is the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” or the Israeli Palestinian “Issue” some even call it a “dispute” and others, a “question.”
    • Ahmad Samih KHALIDI: "As Palestinians mourn their Nakba, the UK must acknowledge its responsibility" (The Guardian, May 15, 2016): click here!
      Next year is the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. It behooves the UK to face up to its role in the dispossession of the Palestinians.
    • Saeb EREKAT: "Israel Must Recognize Its Responsibility for the Nakba, the Palestinian Tragedy" (Haaretz, May 15, 2016)): click here!
      For true reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel must recognize what it has done to the Palestinian people over the last 68 years.
    • Nada ELIA: "Palestinians on Nakba Day 2016 — Defiant, Undeterred and Organizing" (Mondoweiss, May 13, 2016): click here!
      Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people seems indeed relentless. The gloves have come off, the masquerade of the peace talks is finally seen by most as a futile waste of time, as Israel bares its unadorned face as an expansionist settler-colonial state. Thus the new deputy foreign minister recently declared “this land is ours. All of it is ours,” while a growing number of Israeli politicians finally acknowledge what Palestinians have been saying for years: it is apartheid.
    • Ben WHITE: "The Nakba: From 1948 to Today" (Palestine Solidarity Campaign, April 28, 2016)): click here!
      The Nakba – From 1948 to Today – is an article specially commissioned by Palestine Solidarity Campaign. This article is part of the resources produced as part of the "PSC Nakba Week 2016 www.palestinecampaign.org/nakbaweek" and is included in our Nakba Week Resource Pack.
    • Jonathan COOK: "A history of silencing Israeli army whistleblowers – from 1948 until today" (Mondoweiss, March 23, 2016)): click here!
      Israel’s politicians hoped then that the Palestinians could be quickly terrorised from their lands. Decades later, the atrocities continue – and to the same end. But Israel must face facts: the days when such systematic brutality could be kept under wraps are now over.
    • Thomas S. HARRINGTON: "Zionism’s long and rich history of delegitimizing Palestinians" (Mondoweiss, March 17, 2016)): click here!
      ...the real question when it comes to Israel (and every other national polity for that matter) is under what specific legal and moral conditions — both in relation to its geographical neighbors and all those subject to its forms of organized power — can and should be permitted and/or encouraged to perpetuate its present modes of existence?
    • Tom PESAH: "How colonialism and climate change displace the Negev's Bedouin" (+972, March 14, 2016)): click here!
      A new book examines the ways in which Israel’s policies of displacement in the Negev are also drastically changing the environment where hundreds of thousands live.- The desert was never empty, but it was emptied of an estimated 90 percent of its Bedouin inhabitants between 1948 and 1953 in what the authors term the “Bedouin Nakba.” This involved massacres and widespread destruction of livestock and property.
    • Jonathan OFIR: "The Tantura massacre of 1948 and the academic character assassination of Teddy Katz" (Mondoweiss, March 3, 2016)): click here!
      The Tantura massacre in May 1948, committed by Haganah forces just days after the declaration of the State of Israel, is not only one of the worst massacres of 1948, but its cover-up is also, in itself, a story, showing us just how effective silence can be in obscuring crimes against humanity.
    • David MOSHMAN: "Palestinians Erased from Space and Consciousness" (Huffington Pos, Feb 24, 2016)): click here!
      Noga Kadman is a licensed Israeli tour guide. She is also the author of a book, based on her masters thesis, that tells us about each and every one of the 418 Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948 in order to make Israel a Jewish country.
    • Walid KHALIDI: "Before Their Diaspora. A photographic history of the Palestinians, 1876-1948" (Digital Edition, Institute for Palestine Studies): click here!
    • Jonathan OFIR: "‘Barbarism by an educated and cultured people’ — Dawayima massacre was worse than Deir Yassin" (Mondoweiss, Feb 7, 2016): click here!
      “There was no battle and no resistance (and no Egyptians). The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs [including] women and children. The children were killed by smashing of their skulls with sticks. Is it possible to shout about Deir Yassin and be silent about something much worse?” For the first time ever, a letter quoting one of the Israeli soldiers who were part of the Al-Dawayima massacre in October 1948 is published in full.
    • Jonathan OFIR: "An Arab is an Arab" (Mondoweiss, Jan 31, 2016): click here!
      The British accepted the idea that Jews were not merely a religiously defined people, but an ethnically defined people. As opposed to this, they regarded the local Palestinian population under one ethnic-linguistic term: Arabs – despite Palestinian religious diversity, dialect and traditions, which differ from other Arabs.
    • Gideon LEVY: "Hating the Occupation, Not the Jews" (Haaretz, Jan 29, 2016): click here!
      They set out to stab or run people over by car because they’re conquerors. They set out to kill their conquerors. They chose violence as a means of resisting a more pernicious violence, that of the occupation. They wanted to hurt Israelis, especially soldiers and settlers, because of the occupation, not because they’re Jewish. Their Jewishness has nothing to do with it. For the Palestinians, there’s no difference between a soldier who’s Jewish, Druze or Bedouin and a settler from the tribe of Menashe... The thought that dozens of Palestinians have already set out to commit spontaneous acts of stabbing or car-ramming, with hundreds, maybe thousands or tens of thousands considering doing the same, should have provoked some thinking in Israel. Not the thinking of a victim who is being attacked again, but a consideration of what drives desperate children and adults to do this, in the knowledge that their chances of survival are slim. But this might only raise questions that Israelis run away from as is from a fire.
    • Ramzy BAROUD: "Defined by Nakba and Exile: The Complex Reality of ‘Home’ for Palestinians" (The Palestine Chronicle, Jan 19, 2016): click here!
      When ISIS militias swept into Mosel, Iraq, in June 2014, Ibrahim Mahmoud plotted his flight, along with his whole family, which included 11 children. Once upon a time, Ibrahim was himself a child escaping another violent campaign carried out by equally angry militias.
    • Joel BEININ: "Destruction and Appropriation of Palestinian History and Cultural Property: The Responsibilities of Historians" (January 15, 2015), in: Sherna Berger Gluck, ed. (Sept 2015): click here!
      "Israel as a state and society is premised on the destruction of the history and living society of the Palestinian Arab people and the effacement of the multiple histories of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for most of the last 1,400 years - since the Muslim conquest of the Byzantine province of Palæstina in 640".
    • Jonathan COOK: "Why Israel has silenced the 1948 story of Nazareth’s survival" (Mondoweiss, Jan 12, 2016): click here! Trad. fr.: "Pourquoi Israël a occulté l’histoire de la survie de Nazareth en 1948"(pourlapalestine.be): click here!
      A rarely told story of the 1948 war that founded Israel concerns Nazareth’s survival. It is the only Palestinian city in what is today Israel that was not ethnically cleansed during the year-long fighting. Other cities, such as Jaffa, Lydd, Ramleh, Haifa and Acre, now have small Palestinian populations that mostly live in ghetto-like conditions in what have become Jewish cities. Still others, like Tiberias and Safad, have no Palestinians left in them at all.
    • Nu'man ABD AL-WAHID: "How Zionism helped create the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" (Mondoweiss, Jan 7, 2016): click here!
      The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British imperialism. The problem is the study of British imperialism has very few students.
    • Ilan PAPPÉ: "La destruction d’al-Aqsa n’a rien d’une théorie de la conspiration " (Pour la Palestine, 12 nov 2015): click here!
      « Il est inutile », affirme le personnage du ‘colonisateur’ du pamphlet classique d’Albert Memmi, « Le colonisateur et les colonisés », « d’essayer de prévoir les actions des colonisés (‘Ils sont imprévisibles ! Avec eux, on ne sait jamais !’). » Il semble, aux yeux du colonisateur, qu’« une impulsivité étrange et dérangeante contrôle les colonisés ».
    • Fact Sheet: "Notorious massacres of Palestinians between 1937 & 1948" (Medium, 13 May, 2015): click here!
    • Ian BLACK: "Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 Palestine back on the map" (The Guardian, May 2, 2014): click here!
      Zochrot aims to educate Israeli Jews – through tours and a new phone app – about a history obscured by enmity and denial.
    • Saeb EREKAT: "Israel Can't Erase the Nakba From History" (Haaretz, May 15, 2013): click here!
      Palestine recognized Israel's right to exist in 1988, but Israel's government is asking Palestinians to deny the existence of our people and the horrors that befell us in 1948.



     
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