The Nakba is a process that took place not only in 1947-48 but was in gestation for decades prior and continues to mutate.

Like all settler colonialist projects, the Nakba (catastrophe) is a Zionist version of expelling Palestinian natives from their historical homeland, appropriating assets and eradicating their heritage. Throughout its history, Zionism has been entangled with the colonial logic of dominant-inferior / worthy-wretched. The Zionists provided additional gravitas to the colonial rationale of civilising with the ‘originals’ returning home after being civilised. Turning the racist colonial differential of settler native upside down to those coming from over a millennium as original and the resident as alien.

The presence of Jews in Palestine is historical and aliyah (moving of Jews to Palestine) pre-political Zionism remained in the matrix of migrants. The Jews escaping persecution (mainly in Europe) or for religious reasons settled in Palestine to be part of a larger Palestinian community. Even today, the religious Neturei Karta identify themselves as Palestinian Jews. The antagonism with the Palestinians emerged as the Zionist doctrine eroded the possibility of coexistence in favour of a Jewish-only settler colony in Palestine.

The delivery of the theoretical Zionist Jewish-only settler colony was through the midwife Britain, most famously narrated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. When Britain, without having colonised Palestine or having any rights over it, offered it to the European Zionists for a Jewish homeland. However, the Balfour Declaration was only an opening salvo that was buttressed by three strategies once Britain colonised Palestine. The first was barring Jews from entering Britain. Even after the rise of Nazis, the British boast of admitting 80,000 but neglect to mention that ten times that number, over three quarter million Jews, were denied¹ entry. The second was the British colonialist Land Ordinance that favoured Zionists, particularly the Jewish National Fund’s acquisition of land while limiting Palestinian property holding. Finally, Britain favoured the economic and military capacity of the Zionists. By September 1944, Britain helped establish a 30,000-strong Jewish Brigade under its blue-and-white flag and trained it to high military standards.²

However, British assistance did not provide a pivotal demographic and political tipping point. By the beginning of the Second World War, the Zionists had only managed to increase the Jewish population in Palestine to around thirty percent and owned less than five percent of the land. In this sense, the Holocaust is considered a moment in the European Jews to consider the Zionist option. Again, Britain imposed Palestinians to surrender political self-determination on their historical land for the Jewish refugees created by Europe. A colonialist logic of the natives to make way for the European settler – even if it is refugees. Britains’ final push for the birth of Israel was to abandon the Palestinians to the newly formed western UN.

Without consulting the Palestinians, the UN decreed with a three-vote majority that fifty-five percent of the mandate of Palestine be given to the Zionists for creating a Jewish state when their population was thirty-seven percent and owned around seven percent of the land. The UN gift was a dilemma for the Zionists – how would a Jewish minority with minimal land claim ‘the’ Jewish state and acquire international political legitimacy for exclusivity?

To address the quandary, what followed was an acute phase of the Nakba. Accidentally or designed, over 500 Palestinian communities were destroyed. This emptied Palestine of seventy-five percent of its Native population, creating some 750,000 refugees. After the ethnic cleansing in 1948, Israel was declared on seventy-eight percent of mandate Palestine. The vast majority of expelled Palestinians were never allowed to return. Their properties and assets were confiscated by the ‘Jewish state’ and put to the service of settler colonialism. However, those few Palestinians who managed to return became ‘present absentees’ with their land and properties appropriated by Israel. In total, around 150,000 Palestinians remained in the colonised area. To bolster the Jewish population, exiling Palestinians was not enough. In 1950, The Law of Return was enacted, granting exclusive rights to Jews from around the world to obtain Israeli citizenship and settle anywhere within colonised areas.

The undermining and negation of Palestinian rights were imposed in all areas of life, from education, land acquisition, marriage, travel and housing. A Jew was governed through civil law, while the Palestinian Native was through special government departments and the military. This mirrors the white European settler in the Americas, where after having occupied the land, the body of the Natives became the target of control.

After 1967, to further its colonialist objectives, Israel occupied the remainder of the mandate Palestine, creating 350,000 more refugees and assumed control of an additional one million Palestinians. Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister of Israel, said, “in June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him”.³

In the nineteenth century, Native Americans were herded from their lands to reservations, isolating one community from another, seizing the majority of land and the government managing remainder. Today, the Zionist settler colonialist project has expanded to fracturing the West Bank and East Jerusalem with over 300 Jewish-only settler colonies occupied by 700,000 settlers. The noose around Palestinians is further tightened, through the 700km Wall, over 65 discriminatory laws, around 600 checkpoints and apartheid roads isolating Palestinians in reservations and stripping them of their identity.

Gaza is placed under air, sea and land blockade, with Israel even controlling the number of calories entering. As Dov Weisglass, a senior advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in 2016 explained that Israeli policy was designed “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. Palestinians are also subject to deadly violence from the Israeli military and settlers. There is collective punishment, mass imprisonments and merciless policing against Palestinians challenging the settler colonialist status quo. Even the British colonial favourite ‘pretrial detention’ against the Mau Mau has its own version, with the neologism of ‘administrative detention’, as Karim Yousef serving 40 years in Israeli Prison without trial demonstrates.

Yes, Palestinians in Israel are allowed to vote and even stand as members of Parliament but only and only if they do not question Israel as an exclusively Jewish settler colonial state. Israel has now gone further than any European settler colony abandoning assimilating the Natives and has also given up pretending to be democratic and equitable. In 2018 it enacted the Nation-State law that states “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people”. And “Jewish settlement as a national value”. This excludes all non-Jews as part of the Israeli nation and proclaiming the right to extend settlements in 1967 areas erodes any division between 1967 and areas occupied in 1947-48. The legislation is clear, non-Jews must accept to be second class or be expelled-killed.

Within Mandate Palestine, the past 75 years have witnessed the unfolding of the Nakba. 75 years ago, 1948, is also the juncture of dismantling European colonialist powers. In this sense, the Nakba – land theft, forced expulsions, house demolitions, massacres, ethnic cleansing and apartheid – announce Israel as the heir of European settler colonialism. With a difference, what lay latent in the most zealot European settler colonialist is now being manifest in the unfolding Nakba by Israel.

Additional References

¹ Louise, L. (2000) Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

² Morris, B. (1999) Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881– 1999, London: John Murray.

³ Chomsky, N. (1999) The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, London: Pluto Press.

Author’s bio

Ismail Patel is the Chair of Friends of Al-Aqsa. He is also visiting Research Fellow at The Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS), University of Leeds and author of The Muslim Problem: From the British Empire to Islamophobia and A Brief History of Palestine.