Good information, but you can't start history with the displaced Palestinians at the end of the 1948 war. The history of displaced Palestinians begins with the Zionist movement to colonize the territory Jews lost political control over more than two millennia ago and which hasn't be the center of the Jewish population since the second rebellion against Rome in the second century AD. Christians temporarily regained control of that land during the Crusades. when the Zionist movement, colonialism was a good thing, "the White Man's Burden" in the words of Rudyard Kipling. The US took control of the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American war. Though we may regret some or all of those actions today; they were certainly considered moral at the time. So was Zionism.

WWI and especial WWII ended the acceptability of colonialism and began the age of decolonialism. It also left the problem of providing a safe homeland for the Jews who had survived the Holocaust. By then, nearly a million Jews had sought sanctuary in Palestine. This made it easy for white Europeans (dying colonialists) to use the UN to take territory from the Palestinians to provide a homeland for the Jews they didn't want in Europe. They had the most votes in the new UN at the time.

The UN partition made Jerusalem and international city that was surrounded by territory dominated by Arabs. During the war, the Israelis did every possible to drive out the Arabs surrounding Jerusalem and other key positions, in some cases ethnically cleansing them. When Egypt, Syria and Jordan ask for a ceasefire after being mauled by the Israelis. these Arab nations ceded much territory to Israeli that he UN had granted to the Palestinians and kept the West Bank and Gaza for themselves. When they lost the 1967 war surrendered those territories to Israel in the cease, they became Israeli territory. When the Arab States decided the West Bank and Gaza should again belong to a Palestinian entity and denied any right to rule these territories, the Arabs living there technically and practically became stateless. Unlike the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 and became Israeli citizens, neither they nor Israeli nor any existing Arab State recognizes them as citizens of any existing country.

With this foundation in place, you can continue your history of the Nakba.

Oct 21
at
5:35 PM