How did the Palestinians come to be so dispersed ?
In the mid-19th century, Palestine was a predominantly Arabic-speaking country with a few ethnic minorities; about 85% of its residents were Muslim, 11% Christian, and 4% Jewish.
The demography of Palestine began to change rapidly during the British Mandate (1923-1948) as the British supported the Zionist movement’s aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine against the expressed will of the majority Palestinian population.
By 1948 Jews, mostly emigrants from Europe, grew to about ⅓ of the total population. Against the steadfast opposition of Palestinians, the United Nations General Assembly recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. Palestinians still made up the overwhelming majority of the population and owned well over 93% of the land.
The UN partition plan was never implemented. Instead, British authorities announced their intention to withdraw from Palestine, triggering a civil war.
Jewish Zionist militias were well-armed and trained, and launched a campaign of terror in the months leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948. At Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem, more than one hundred men, women, and children were slaughtered by Zionist militiamen.
750,000 Palestinian refugees from this terror campaign - ¾ of the Arab population - fled to surrounding Arab countries or to parts of Palestine that fell under the control of two Arab countries - Jordan in the case of the West Bank, and Egypt in the case of the Gaza Strip. Thousands more were internally displaced.
In 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (along with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights), again expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, some of them for a second time. Israel quickly annexed East Jerusalem, applying its own law there, but set up military governments in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Palestinians originally termed the destruction of their society and mass expulsions in 1948 “the Nakba,” or “Catastrophe.” Because Israel’s forced displacements of Palestinians have never ended, it is now common for Palestinians to refer to their experience as a “continuing Nakba.”