Saturday, May 15, 2010

Naqba Photo Exhibit in Nablus


Nablus hosted a photo exhibit to com- memorate 62 years since Al-Naqba, or "The Catastro- phe". After a variety of partition plans, even proposals to transfer the Palestinian Arab population, on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved a partition plan - Resolution 181. Although Jewish people owned 6.5% of Palestinian land in private or collective property holdings, the Jewish state was awarded 56.5% of the territory of Palestine, and the Arab state was awarded 42.9% in the UN partition plan. Thus began the Arab-Israeli war, which brought independence for Israel and "catastrophe' for Palestinians. At the start of the 1948 war, 940,000 Palestinians lived in what was to become Israel. By the end of the war, 150,000 Palestinians remained in areas under Israeli control. Though israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion frequently said, "Israel did not expel a single Arab," it is clear that many were forced to leave by Israeli military units.


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