The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the forced displacement and dispossession of nearly 800,000 Palestinians during and after the 1948 Arab Israeli War. The Nakba remains a deeply significant and contentious event in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though the Nakba is central to how Palestinians view the origins of their conflict with Israel, its existence is denied by Israeli political officials, who continue to claim that the Palestinians voluntarily left the country in 1948 without the threat of violence.

Ethnic cleansing is a systematic and intentional process aimed at removing a particular ethnic or religious group from a specific geographic area by force. Ethnic cleansing involves the deliberate targeting of a population based on their ethnic or religious identity to create a homogeneous demographic composition in the affected region. Ethnic cleansing is widely condemned as a violation of human rights and is considered a crime under international law.

The Zionist Movement emerged in the late 19th century as a political and ideological movement advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Zionists hoped to provide a haven for Jewish people to escape the persecution they had suffered in Europe. The Zionist Movement culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 in what had previously been British-occupied Palestine.