In 1948 the illegitimate state of Israel was established. The Zionist state, that continues to seek to be for Jews and Jews only, is seen by many the world over to be a clearly racist and apartheid state. In large part, a reason why Israel was able to be established is because of the 1948 mass Palestinian refugee exodus.

This event is also known as the Nakba, meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, for it is indeed a catastrophe. Approximately up to a million Palestinians fled or were ejected from their homes, forcing them to leave Palestine to the Zionist invaders, and became refugees in nearby countries, creating the present Palestinian diaspora. Large numbers of Palestinians also crammed themselves into the West Bank (400,000) or Gaza Strip (60,000). By the end of the war, less than half of the entire Palestinian population remained in their original homes, due to Zionist expansion. The numbers of Palestinian refugees have now ballooned to over 4.6 million, in the present day.

There are a plethora of reasons of why so many Palestinians left their homes, but there is no denying that there was a forced expulsion by the Israeli government. While there was a gradual and general breakdown of law and order in Palestine, it must be noted that this was because of the creation of the Zionist state, that strived to be a Jewish-only state. The exodus was caused by the many and vast attacks by the Zionist military, which also, understandably, installed fear in many Palestinians, and convinced them to leave, rather than to stay and die by a Zionist attack. In the last stages of the expulsion, many Palestinians were expelled by the IDF, such as the 60,000 from Lydda and Ramla.

Thus, the Nakba was the result of an aggressive Israeli state that wanted to see as few Palestinians as possible, exemplified by the ideology of the Israeli prime minister of the time, Ben-Gurion.

However, the Zionists continue to deny the Nakba, as part of their strategy for legitimizing Zionism and the taking of Palestinian land. One such strategy of denying that the Nakba ever occurred, is that how could a people be expelled when they do not exist? According to the Zionist leader Israel Zangvil, the Jews are ‘a people without land returning to a land without people’. In Zionist ideology, the Palestinians do not exist, and neither does Palestine. Therefore the expulsion did not occur because the people do not exist, though a few battles will be admitted, because they put the Palestinians at fault for fighting the invading Zionists, falsifying history.

Another strategy of the Zionist rejection of the Nakba, one of the most calamitous refugee disasters ever, is that it was simply a ‘transfer policy’, as the revisionist Israeli historian Benny Morris has convinced many to believe. However, there was no transfer policy in existence with the other surrounding Arab states. This is clear because during the exodus the Arab governments had no idea at all on what to do with the new Palestinian refugees. Indeed the words ‘transfer policy’ deny the existence of the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus and expulsion, for it was merely a ‘transfer’, and is thus a very clever and dangerous use of language by the Zionists.

Zionism today continues to deny the existence of the Nakba by such methods. The denial of the Nakba is a very pertinent issue that must be raised, for the Nakba has resulted in over 4.6 million Palestinian refugees, one of the largest refugee populations in the world. The Nakba has caused Palestinians to not have a home – they have been homeless since 1948. In addition neither are they allowed to return, for Zionism only wants the land of Palestine, to be for Jews, proving it to be a racist, fascist, and apartheid state.

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