Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
20 December
START OF MASS ETHNIC CLEANSING IN PALESTINE
On this day in 1947, the Labour Zionist militia, the Haganah, and the Revisionist Irgun attacked Palestinian coastal villages north of Tel Aviv in the opening stage of the ethnic cleansing of coastal Palestine. This wave of Zionist ethnic cleansing was underway with many Palestinian villages emptied and destroyed before the first military forces of neighbouring Arab states made their entry into Palestine, into areas designated by the UN partition plan for a future Arab state.
بدء مسلسل التطهير العرقي في فلسطين
20 ديسمبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1947 ، هاجمت الميليشيا الصهيونية العمالية الهاغانا والاصلاحيون الإرغون القرى الساحلية الفلسطينية شمال تل أبيب في المرحلة الأولى من التطهير العرقي لفلسطين الساحلية. كانت هذه الموجة من التطهير العرقي الصهيوني جارية مع إفراغ العديد من القرى الفلسطينية وتدميرها قبل أن تدخل القوات العسكرية الأولى للدول العربية المجاورة لفلسطين ، إلى المناطق التي حددتها خطة الأمم المتحدة للتقسيم لدولة عربية مستقبلية.
On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. At the time, the Jews in Palestine constituted one third of the population and owned less than six percent of the total land area. Under the UN partition plan, they were allocated 55 percent of the land, encompassing many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities and the important coastline from Haifa to Jaffa. The Arab state would be deprived of key agricultural lands and seaports, which led the Palestinians to reject the proposal.
Shortly following the UN partition resolution, war broke out between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist armed groups, who had gained extensive training and arms from fighting alongside Britain in World War II.
Mass displacement of Palestinians from their lands started as soon as the UN partition plan was passed. In less than six months, from December 1947 to mid-May 1948, Zionist armed groups expelled about 440,000 Palestinians from 220 villages. Units of the Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi armies invaded on May 15, after the Zionist mass ethnic cleansing had been in full swing for almost six months.
Jewish militias - both the Haganah and the fascist-inspired Irgun carried out the ethnic cleansing by the judicious use of terror, widely publicised massacres, such as a successful attack "to kill maximum Arab males" in Balad al-Sheikh on December 31; seventy Palestinians died there. Sixty Palestinians were killed in the Sa’sa’ massacre on February 14. About 110 Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered in the notorious Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948.
The ethnic cleansing that was launched in December 1947 continued throughout 1948 and 1949 and was followed by another massive expulsion in 1967. It continues to this day.
4-minute video: how Israel planned and carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine