The Nakba
Part 5 of the series “The Palestine Question” · Section Two, Chapter Two (2)

The Nakba:
How Was 77% of Palestine Lost?

Until 1948 Palestinians owned 94% of their land. A few months later more than half of them were refugees. This part answers two questions that come up again and again: how did it happen? And did Palestinians really sell their land?

For high-school & university students4 themes · 30-minute readQuiz at the end

Timeline (1939–1948) · tap any point

Earliest on the left.

Five (1)

World War II: Two Sides, Two Different Fortunes

Palestinians came out of the revolt exhausted with their leadership scattered, while the Zionist project prepared for statehood.

The Palestinians

  • Hajj Amin fled to Iraq (1939), then Iran and Turkey, then Germany (1941) after the fall of Iraq’s anti-British nationalist government.
  • There he cooperated with Nazi Germany, Britain’s enemy, and sought to train an Arab force of a few hundred young men (announced November 1943). The author argues he “had no other choice”; this cooperation nonetheless remains one of the most criticized and contested aspects of his record.
  • After Germany’s defeat the French arrested him; he escaped and reached Egypt (June 1946), and Palestine celebrated, a sign of his popularity.
  • The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine was formed (June 1946) under him, but his disputes with the Jordanian and Iraqi governments, and his presence in British-influenced Egypt, restricted his movement.

The Zionist movement

  • It drew on the world’s sympathy after the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, insisting that the only safe refuge was a homeland in Palestine.
  • It moved its centre of gravity to the United States from the Biltmore Conference (1942), winning both parties’ support for scrapping the White Paper.
  • 26,000 Palestinian Jews served in the British army, most from the Haganah, becoming the core of the future army.
  • 92,000 immigrated (1939–1945) and 61,000 (1946–1948); they acquired 270,000 dunums and set up 73 new colonies.

The road to the United Nations

Partition Resolution 181

29 November 1947

An immigrant minority owning 6% of the land is given 55% of it.

Three questions, three numbersChoose a question to see the answer on one bar

How were the votes gathered?The majority wasn’t there. Flip the cards

The partition plan would almost certainly have failed had the vote been held on 26 November, but the Assembly’s president (Brazil’s delegate) postponed the session. A frantic campaign followed over the next days:

33for partition
13against
10abstained
Why does the author consider it void? General Assembly resolutions are not binding under the UN Charter. The resolution contradicts the right of peoples to self-determination on which the organization was founded. And the people of Palestine, who owned the land, were neither consulted nor asked in a referendum.
The 1948 war and its consequences

From 82% to 23%

Palestinians held out alone for six months. Then seven armies entered… and lost.

Balance of forces during the warThousands of fighters, according to Haytham al-Kilani’s study

Why did the Arab armies lose?

NumbersTogether they had no more than 24,000 fighters on entry, against over 70,000 Jewish fighters.
Coordination & terrainWeak coordination between them, and ignorance of the ground.
Defective weaponsOld and faulty arms that sometimes blew up in the Arab soldier’s face.
British influenceSome states were still effectively under British influence; one army had 45 British officers among its 50 senior officers.
Disarming PalestiniansSome were busy disarming Palestinians instead of arming them.

Popular enthusiasm, by contrast, was enormous: the “Holy Jihad” under Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini; the “Arab Liberation Army” of Arab and Muslim volunteers; and Hassan al-Banna, who in October 1947 offered ten thousand Muslim Brotherhood volunteers as a first batch. The Egyptian government allowed only a few hundred; they were arrested on their return, the group was dissolved, and al-Banna was assassinated on 12 February 1949. Volunteers also came from Jordan, Syria and Iraq, and some 250 Bosnians.

The Nakba in numbers

77%of Palestine’s land seized by force of arms
800,000driven out of the occupied territory: about 58% of the people (of 1,390,000), plus 30,000 displaced inside it
478 / 585villages destroyed out of those standing before the war
34massacres of civilians during the expulsions, the best known Deir Yassin (9 April 1948)
“There is not one single Jewish village in this country that was not built on the site of an Arab village.”
Moshe Dayan, Israeli chief of staff and later defence and foreign minister

The All-Palestine GovernmentAn attempt that was not allowed to live

Six

Did Palestinians Sell Their Land?

The most famous claim in Zionist propaganda, and the numbers say otherwise.

“A land without a people for a people without a land”?

Zionist propaganda since the 19th century held that Palestine was empty. But the first settlers found it full of a hard-working, rooted people. A well-known story says that Max Nordau, a close associate of Herzl, sent two rabbis to study the possibility of immigration, and they wrote in their report:

“The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”As the book relates it

Where did the land Jews acquired come from?Drag the slider through the sources

Sources of land in dunums (approximate, per the book)
Non-Palestinian absentee landlords living abroad (Mandate era)625,000
British government grants of state land (free or nominal rent)500,000
Ottoman era (mostly Lebanese landlords and auctions)420,000
Sold by Palestinians over the whole Mandateabout 260,000 (under 1%)

Villages sold over their people’s headsExamples from the book

The author holds these landlords responsible, but notes that Britain barred them from entering Palestine to invest their land on the grounds that they were “foreigners,” once Palestine had been separated from Syria and Lebanon by Sykes–Picot.

And which Palestinians sold?

About 260,000 dunums, under 1% of Palestine, over seventy years. Some sales came from the harsh conditions Britain imposed on farmers, some from expropriation by the High Commissioner’s decisions, and some from giving in to financial temptation. They were a small group, as in any people, but they were shunned and opposed, and many were boycotted or killed, especially during the Great Revolt.

Guardians of the land

Until 1948 Palestinians held about 94% of the land of Palestine. The land on which the state was built was not bought; it was taken by force of arms after the defeat of the Arab armies.The author’s conclusion

For group discussion

  1. Someone tells you, “The Palestinians sold their land.” Which three numbers would you use in reply?
  2. Palestinians held 82% of the land before the armies entered, then lost most of it afterwards. What does that teach us about relying on regimes versus peoples?
  3. How can a fateful decision about an entire people turn on gifts to diplomats’ wives and a rubber company’s threats? What does that say about “international legitimacy”?
Wrap-up

Test Yourself

12 questions on the Nakba and the land question. This completes Section Two of the book.