Gaza: Whispers of the Shattered Sky

Chapter: 1

How it Started

The year 2023, marks seventy-four years of the Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of their land. In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs—about half of the prewar mandatory Palestinian Arabs—had to flee their homes or were expelled by force to leave their land and become refugees in different Neighboring States, such as Tiberias, Haifa, Safed, Jaffa, Acra, and Beersheba, Hundreds of other small towns and villages which had the palestinian population were either depopulated or expelled by Zionist forces.

The British Mandate and the departure of the British forces were followed by the Israeli army taking over complete control of the land to create a Jewish state on that land during the 1948 Israel-Arab War. A partition plan for Palestine was defined. The expansion, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian Society is known and written in history as the Nakba.

What Caused Nakba

There are different point of views about it, and also fundamental disagreement among historians about what was the actual cause.

The Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic, refers to the massive displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. In the 1930s, when Jewish immigration was increased and proceccustion was driven by Europe along with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, conflict intensified between Arabs and Jews. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem, the ancient holy city, under a UN administration.

The Arab world rejected the plan and called it unfair. Whereas different Jewish right-wing groups also wanted the whole land for themselves. They forced most of the Arab population out of their territory. That's how, In 1948, the situation escalated into a full-blown war between Israel and Arabs.

This event led to the establishment of the State of Israel. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land this means seventy-six percent of the land was taken over. Twenty-two percent of the land which remained was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

Till January 1949, the fighting continued, then an agreement between Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria was forged. This was called The Armistice Line, which is also known as the Green Line. It is a general recognized boundary between Israel and the West Bank. This Green Line is also referred to (Pre-1967 Borders). Meaning before Israel occupied the rest of Palestine in the June 1967 War. This conflict has continued to influence and shape the lives of generations of palestinian people. In simple words, the Nakba did not start or end in 1948. In the late 19th Century, the political ideology of Zionism became deep-rooted in Eastern Europe. The belief in the ideology was aimed at Jews being a nation, and they deserved to have their own state.

As per Historians, from 1882 onwards, thousands of Russian Jews and Eastern European Jews began to settle in Palestine. Calls for establishing a Jewish state started to get stronger than ever. The concept was based on the Biblical Concept that the Holy Land was promised to Jews by God. After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1517-1914), the British occupied the land of Palestine, and it became part of the secret Sykes Picot Treaty.

In 1917, before the start of the British Mandate (1920-1947), the British issued the Balfour Declaration. Which promised to help the establishment of Palestine as a national home of the Jewish people.

Every year on May 15th, Palestinians around the world mark the Nakba and refer to it as the ethnic cleaning of the Palestinian people in 1948.

What is the Oslo Accords?