Dawud Assad still has nightmares of the day Jewish militias attacked his village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem 76 years ago.
Assad, then 16, peered out his front window to see his village ablaze. As his uncles shot back at the militias firing upon them, Assad escaped. But more than 100 Palestinians, including women, children and elderly people, were killed in what is now referred to as the Deir Yassin massacre.
Assad lost 27 members of his extended family that day, including his grandmother and his two-year-old brother, Omar.
“I don’t know how I escaped,” Assad said. “They called me the living martyr.”
That massacre, other attacks on Palestinian villages, and the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation spurred what is called the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe. It refers to the exodus of some 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from what is now Israel.
Nakba remembrances have taken on new significance this year, as more than twice that number have been displaced within Gaza since the start of Israel-Hamas war, which was triggered when militants from Gaza attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
Even before 1948, a series of events and declarations paved the way for the traumatic event that would shape what Palestinians see as a decades-long struggle for justice and their right to return, something Israel has denied them.
“This process of displacement has been going on for over a century now,” said Beshara Doumani, a professor of Palestinian studies at Brown University.
Decades before 1948, Jews escaping antisemitism and persecution in Europe sought to establish a Jewish state in a place they considered their ancestral homeland. In November 1947, after World War II and the Holocaust, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution to partition Mandatory Palestine, controlled by the British, into two states – one Arab and one Jewish.
The majority of Palestinians and the wider Arab world rejected the resolution.
After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, and the departure of British forces, armies of neighboring Arab nations invaded, spurring the war.
Assad, who is now 92 and lives in Monroe Township, New Jersey, initially fled with others to the village of Ein Karem after escaping Deir Yassin.
Leila Giries, 84, remembers when people from Deir Yassin arrived in Ein Karem, bringing news of their escape. Fearing for their own safety, Giries’ family fled for what they thought would be a brief respite from the violence.
“We left everything. We walked out with the clothes on our back,” said Giries. “Everybody said in a couple of weeks, we’d be back.”
Israel holds the Palestinians and Arab states responsible for the events of 1948 because they rejected the U.N. partition plan and declared war. It also notes that Palestinians who did not leave in 1948 are Israeli citizens.
Israel rejects the idea of a right of return because if it was fully implemented it would threaten its existence as a Jewish-majority state. And it notes that hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced out or fled Arab countries in the wake of Israel’s founding and were absorbed by the newly independent country.
Israeli leaders have said the Palestinian refugees should be absorbed by neighboring Arab states or in a future Palestinian state. The fate of the refugees was a major point of contention in peace talks going back to the 1990s.
“The overwhelming majority of Palestinians became displaced after the Nakba, even if they didn’t leave Palestine,” said Doumani.
More Palestinians fled in the years after 1948, including during the 1967 Middle East war, when Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza. Some fled for a second time.
Many of the now six million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in slum-like urban refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Others ended up outside the Middle East and built communities in places like Chile or the U.S.
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