35 years to UN resolution 242

Abstract

The state of Israel was founded in 1948, following a war that the Israelis call the War of Independence, and the Palestinians – the Nakba (catastrophe). A haunted, persecuted people sought to find a shelter and a state for itself, and did so at a horrible price to another people. During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population of 1,380,000 at the time, were driven off their homeland by the Israeli army. Though Israel officially claimed that the majority of these refugees escaped and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after the 1948 war. Thus, the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants.