This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.During the 1947–1949 Palestine war, or the Nakba, around 400 Palestinian Arab towns and villages were forcibly depopulated, with a majority being destroyed and left uninhabitable.
Arabs remained in small numbers in some of the cities (Haifa, Jaffa and Acre); and Jerusalem was divided between Jordan and Israel.
An overwhelming number of the Arab residents who had lived in the cities that became a part of Israel and were renamed (Acre, Haifa, Safad, Tiberias, Ashkelon, Beersheba, Jaffa and Beisan) fled or were expelled.
[3] A number of the towns and villages were destroyed by Israeli forces in the aftermath of the 1948 war, but it was not until 1965 that more than 100 remaining locations – including many of the largest depopulated places – were demolished by the Israel Land Administration.
Rochelle A. Davis has described the authors as seeking "to pass on information about their villages and their values to coming generations".