The Nakba

The year 1948 is remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, the Catastrophe. In the war that accompanied the end of the British Mandate over Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel, more than seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs, around half of the Arab population of the land, were expelled from or fled their homes, and over four hundred Arab villages were depopulated and in many cases destroyed in the months that followed. Those uprooted became refugees in the West Bank and Gaza and in the surrounding Arab countries, where many and their descendants remain in camps to this day. Families left carrying what they could and, expecting to return within days or weeks once the fighting passed, many locked their houses and kept the keys; the great iron house-key became the enduring symbol of the Palestinian refugees and of the right of return that the new state did not grant. For Palestinians and across the Arab and wider Muslim world, the Nakba is mourned as a foundational catastrophe, the loss of the homeland and the scattering of a people, and it stands at the heart of one of the longest and most painful unresolved conflicts of the modern age. This scene depicts the human aftermath of that year, an emptied Palestinian hill village, its doors left open, a kept key, and a road of refugees walking out toward the tents of exile, framed soberly as the catastrophe it was for those who lived it.