The Nakba : The Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948:→ Part : 2- United Nations Plan and Israeli Independence Seeing the coming end of British control over Palestine, and the inevitably conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, the newly-created United Nations took up the issue in 1947. It came up with a plan known as the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. The plan advocated the creation of two states in what has historically been known as Palestine. One for Jews, known as Israel, and one for Arabs, Palestine. While the Jews in Palestine accepted the plan with enthusiasm, the Arabs vehemently rejected it. In their view, it took away land that had been a historically Muslim Arab land since the Crusades and gave it to the new Jewish minority in the country. Tensions rose again between the two sides. In the midst of this rising tension, Britain declared an end to the Mandate of Palestine, and withdrew from the country on May 14th, 1948. That day, the Zionist movement in Palestine declared the establishment of a new country, Israel. The following day, the neighboring Arab countries declared their rejection of the declaration and invaded Israel. Without going into the details of the war itself, the result of the 1948 war was an enormous increase in the size of Israel. The resulting state was much larger than the state proposed by the United Nations, capturing approximately 50% of the proposed Arab state. Expulsion of the Palestinians Perhaps the largest human impact of the 1948 War was the expulsion of much of the Palestinian population. Within the borders of the new State of Israel, there had been close to 1,000,000 Palestinian Arabs before the war. By the end of the war in 1949, between 700,000 and 750,000 of them had been expelled. Only 150,000 remained in Israel. Refugees are always an unfortunate side-effect of war. Throughout history, groups of people had fled to escape fighting and conquest. What makes the Palestinian refugees of 1948 unique, however, is why they became refugees. Since this is still very much a real conflict today, historians analyzing the causes of the Palestinian exodus are heavily influenced by politics and international relations. Historians (including Israeli historians) have however defined a few key reasons for the exodus:
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 04:11:06 +0000