what happened in nakba

The Nakba, which means "catastrophe" in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive, and the result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population. The Nakba was a deliberate and systematic act intended to establish a Jewish majority state in Palestine. The roots of the Nakba and the ongoing problems in Palestine/Israel today lie in the emergence of political Zionism in the late 1800s when some European Jews, influenced by the nationalism then sweeping the continent, decided that the solution to antisemitism in Europe and Russia was the establishment of a state for Jews in Palestine.