'the catastrophe') is the ethnic cleansing[14] of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.

[17][18] During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine's predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people,[19] were expelled from their homes or made to flee through various violent means, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by its military.

Dozens of massacres targeted Palestinian Arabs and over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighborhoods were depopulated,[20] with many of these being either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names.

[28] By the time the British announced their official support for Zionism in the 1917 Balfour Declaration during World War I,[29] the population of Palestine was about 750,000, approximately 94% Arab and 6% Jewish.

"[33] Following World War II and the Holocaust, in February 1947, the British declared they would end the Mandate and submit the future of Palestine to the newly created United Nations for resolution.

[34] The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created, and in September, submitted a report to the UN General Assembly recommending partition.

[52] They also indicated an unwillingness to accept any form of territorial division,[53] arguing that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN Charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny.

[62] Israelis used psychological warfare tactics to frighten Palestinians into flight, including targeted violence, whispering campaigns, radio broadcasts, and loudspeaker vans.

[76] Israel began engaging in biological warfare in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain towns and villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May.

[96] Martial law assisted Israeli efforts to find and expel or kill "infiltrators" in order to prevent Palestinians from repopulating their villages.

[98] On 11 December 1948, the UN passed Resolution 194, resolving that Palestinians should be permitted to return to their homes and be compensated for lost or damaged property, and establishing the United Nations Conciliation Commission.

[108] The approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled from their homes were now living in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

[132] The Nakba encompasses the violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, along with the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.

[19] Almost half of this figure (over 300,000 Palestinians) had fled or had been expelled ahead of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948,[82] a fact which was named as a casus belli for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

[184] Since the late 1990s, the phrase "ongoing Nakba" (Arabic: النکبة المستمرة, romanized: al-nakba al-mustamirra) has emerged to describe the "continuous experience of violence and dispossession" experienced by the Palestinian people.

"[187] The term Nakba was first applied to the events of 1948 by Constantin Zureiq, a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, in his 1948 book Ma'na an-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster).

[188] Zureiq wrote that "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history.

"[189] Prior to 1948, the "Year of the Catastrophe" among Arabs referred to 1920, when European colonial powers partitioned the Ottoman Empire into a series of separate states along lines of their own choosing.

For example, for many years after 1948, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon avoided and even actively resisted using the term, because it lent permanency to a situation they viewed as temporary, and they often insisted on being called "returnees".

[22] Shmuel Trigano, writing in the Jewish Political Studies Review published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, outlines the evolution of the Nakba narrative through three stages.

He argues these evolving interpretations omit complex historical factors involving failed attempts to eliminate Israel, contested territorial claims, and Jewish refugee displacement from Arab nations.

[195] The Israeli national narrative rejects the Palestinian characterization of 1948 as the Nakba (catastrophe), instead viewing it as the War of Independence that established Israel's statehood and sovereignty.

[21] It perceives the 1948 war and its outcome as an equally formative and fundamental event – as an act of justice and redemption for the Jewish people after centuries of historical suffering, and the key step in the "negation of the Diaspora".

According to Neve Gordon, a school ceremony memoralizing the Nakba would, under the 2011 law, have to respond to charges that it incited racism, violence and terrorism, and denied Israel's democratic character, in doing so.

[203][better source needed] In 2023, after the United Nations instituted a commemoration day for the Nakba on 15 May, the Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan remonstrated that the event itself was antisemitic.

[206] The term 'Nakba denial' was used in 1998 by Steve Niva, editor of the Middle East Report, in describing how the rise of the early Internet led to competing online narratives of the events of 1948.

[207] In the 21st century the term came to be used by activists and scholars to describe narratives that minimized elements of the expulsion and its aftermath,[206] particularly in Israeli and Western historiography before the late 1980s,[208] when Israel's history began to be reviewed and rewritten by the New Historians.

[212] On 17 May 2024, the United Nations commemorated the Palestinian Nakba for a second year, calling on the international community to redouble its efforts to end the Israeli occupation.

[214] Elias Khoury writes that the works of Edward Said were important for taking a "radically new approach" to the Nakba than those of Zureiq and other early adopters of the term, whose usage had "the connotation of a natural catastrophe" and thus freed "Palestinian leadership and Arab governments from direct responsibility for the defeat.

In response, Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Finance Minister, ordered the treasury to withdraw government funding for Jaffa's Al Saraya Theater, where the film is scheduled for projection.