15 May marks 70 years since the beginning of the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), when more than 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their land by Zionist militias clearing the ground for the formation of the Israeli state.
Before 1948, Palestine was contested territory. After the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Western imperialist powers negotiated to carve up the Middle East. In Palestine, the British demonstrated ruthless duplicity, promising independence to the local Arab population while secretly dealing away the land with the French and Russians.
By 1922, the British had established a League of Nations mandate in Palestine. Local Palestinians had few democratic rights, and any opposition to British rule was put down violently. In the language of the mandate, Palestinians were “the other sections of the population”.
The British encouraged waves of Jewish migration and land purchasing to build up a new European-oriented population whose sympathies would lie with their benefactors. Underground Jewish paramilitary organisations were founded. One of these, the Haganah (Defence), was secretly armed, trained and deployed at strategic sites across the territory.
Read the article by Vashti Kenway in Red Flag.