CH STUDIO

Nakba Day

It's a date inked in infamy for generations of Palestinians.

Each year, on 15 May, millions mark the Nakba, or catastrophe, which refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.

In a premeditated military campaign, Zionist forces killed thousands of Palestinians, destroyed hundreds of villages and forcibly expelled 80 percent of the Palestinian population from their homeland. 

After more than a year of relentless violence, the newly created State of Israel captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. 

The remaining 22 percent, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were occupied by Israel 19 years later and remain under Israeli military rule. 

The League of Nations gave Britain a "mandate" over Palestine after the war, in an arrangement that did not take into account the wishes of the native Palestinian population. 

In the case of Palestine, the British Mandate incorporated the "Balfour Declaration" that pledged to establish "in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people", who made up less than 10 percent of the population at the time. 

During the mandate years between 1923-48, Britain facilitated the immigration of  European Jews to Palestine, increasing their population ten-fold, from 60,000 in the pre-Mandate era to 700,000 by 1948. 

They also trained Zionist armed groups, provided them with weapons and allowed them a degree of self-governance. 

Meanwhile, the native Palestinian population was violently suppressed following rebellions that called for independence and rejected European Jewish immigration.

In February 1947, Britain announced it would terminate the mandate and turn the question of Palestine over to the United Nations. 

The UN adopted a partition plan in November 1947, which divided Palestine into two parts: 55 percent to a Jewish state, and 45 to an Arab state, while keeping Jerusalem under international control.