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.”

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.

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”.

“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.

As the Nakba gains recognition, the Israel Lobby redoubles efforts to erase it.

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”.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(a detailed report outlining British atrocities in Palestine during its period of Colonial occupation)

A new documentary, released earlier this year, is shining light on a violent and controversial episode in Israeli and Palestinian history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

Testimony shows how Israeli soldiers sought to use the massacre of unarmed civilians to drive Palestinians from their homes.

The Kafr Qasem massacre transcripts were kept secret until now, under the claim that revealing them would jeopardize Israel' national security.

Hundreds of villages, some inhabited since ancient times, were depopulated of their Palestinian inhabitants to make way for the state of Israel.

Ex-government minister’s recent warning to Palestinian flag-wavers of another forced expulsion exposes the lie at the heart of Israel’s founding.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Historian Lorenzo Veracini discusses settler colonialism, Zionism, and decolonial futures.

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.

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.

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.

Reckoning with the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe means giving the land back.

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.

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’.

“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.

Sarcastic, exasperated entries show Mandate-era leaders appalled by Arab violence, repulsed by Jewish ‘arrogance,’ espionage; sides seen as ‘childish,’ heralding today’s conflict.

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.

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.

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.

When Palestinians commemorate the Nakba they are not simply remembering a past event. They are marking a continued process of erasure and dispossession.

Moshe Svorai, a partly exonerated fellow Lehi member, inadvertently disclosed the commander’s hideout, scholar says.

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.

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?

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.

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.

'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.

Defense establishment asked to lengthen classification period to 90 years, from 70, for material on Deir Yassin massacre, among other events.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Benny Morris dit qu’il a toujours été sioniste. Les gens se sont mépris quand ils l’ont catalogué de post-sioniste.

​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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After the 1947 UN partition vote (as well as before) both Arabs and Jews were slaughtering each other’s innocents.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

For the first time, Israeli police block the annual march to commemorate the Palestinian 'catastrophe' of 1948.

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.

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.

Before Israel’s establishment in 1948, some Jews and Arabs saw each other as ‘brothers’ and had a utopian vision of a shared future.

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 ?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

Israel has advanced plans to raze the village of 150 homes and replace it with a town for Israeli Jews.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ninety-nine years since Balfour's "promise", Palestinians insist that their rights in Palestine cannot be dismissed.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

"Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir" by Salman Abu Sitta, American University in Cairo Press (2016).

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The 'making the desert bloom' myth has long masked Israel's occupation and degradation of Palestinian natural resources.

The Palestinians, who have long suffered at the hands of their Arab 'brothers,' are well aware of the nature of the medieval Saudi regime.

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.

...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.

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.

Israel is concealing vital records to prevent darkest periods in its history from coming to light, academics say.

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.

The education system, the media and the tourism industry all collaborate in erasing the country's Palestinian past.

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.

While the Nakba Law threatens publicly-funded institutions, there are signs of optimism at the grassroots level.

One of the most difficult things to grasp in the modern history of Palestine and the Palestinians is the meaning of the Nakba.

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.

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

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.”

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.

For true reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel must recognize what it has done to the Palestinian people over the last 68 years.

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.

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.

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.

...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?

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

"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".

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.

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.

« 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 ».

Zochrot aims to educate Israeli Jews – through tours and a new phone app – about a history obscured by enmity and denial.

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.