History Illustrated is a series of perspectives that puts news events and current affairs into historical context using graphics generated with artificial intelligence.
People commemorate horrific events, in part to avoid repeating them. We commemorate the Holocaust. The genocides in Rwanda, in Srebrenica. And the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. But as people prepared to mark Nakba Day on May 15, Israel’s relentless war on Gaza indeed suggested a repeat, another Nakba.
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Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic, and refers to how Zionist militias, shortly after World War II, displaced about 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in order to establish the State of Israel.
In late 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
Arabs rejected the UN’s partition plan as a theft of Palestinian land by Zionists, in collusion with the United Kingdom – the region’s colonial power – and warned of the coming devastation. (It didn’t take long for the killing to start.)
On March 10, 1948, the Zionist Haganah paramilitary group adopted Plan Dalet, which laid out a strategy to ethnically cleanse Palestine.A month later, in the village of Deir Yassin, Zionist militias killed more than 100 men, women and children – one of several massacres that served to terrorise Palestinians.
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Decades of oppression and occupation would follow, until in late 2023, some members of the Israeli parliament, like Ariel Kallner of the Likud party, called for even more ethnic cleansing.
Today, Kallner seems to be getting his way. On May 5, Israel announced a new Gaza offensive that includes calling up tens of thousands of reservists, a plan that many Palestinians see as having the chilling overtones of a second Nakba. “[Palestinians in Gaza] will be moved for [their] own protection,” Netanyahu said. Despite Netanyahu’s assurances, it’s likely that few if any Palestinians will believe him.
Israel’s war on Gaza, a genocide, has so far killed more than 52,000 people. On Nakba Day, Palestinians will no doubt wonder why history is being allowed to repeat itself.
