There is a particular kind of erasure that works through specificity — not the broad sweep of history but the deliberate unmaking of particular places. A well. A mosque. A name on a map replaced by a different name, or by nothing at all. The Nakba, the catastrophe that accompanied the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, was that kind of erasure, enacted village by village, family by family, across the length of Mandate Palestine.
By the time the fighting ended in 1949, somewhere between 750,000 and 900,000 Palestinians had been expelled or had fled in fear — a figure drawn from contemporary UN estimates, cross-referenced by demographic historian Benny Morris in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004). Walid Khalidi’s monumental All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in 1992, documents 418 villages that were wholly or largely depopulated. More recent surveys, including work by the Israeli organization Zochrot, place the total of destroyed or depopulated localities — including hamlets, Bedouin encampments, and mixed towns — at more than 530.
These were not empty spaces. They were places where people grew wheat and pressed olives, where children went to school, where families had lived for generations. What follows is an attempt to name some of them — and to say, as precisely as the record allows, what happened there.
Lifta: The Village at the Edge of Jerusalem
Lifta sat at the northwestern entrance to Jerusalem, its stone houses terraced into a hillside above a spring. In December 1947, within days of the UN partition vote, Irgun and Lehi gunmen attacked a coffeehouse in the village center, killing six men. Khalidi documents the attack as one of the earliest acts of deliberate violence against a Palestinian civilian community in the post-partition period. The killings prompted a wave of fear. By February 1948, Lifta’s roughly 2,550 residents had fled. Not one returned.
The stone houses still stand — Lifta is one of the few depopulated Palestinian villages whose structures were not bulldozed — and they are visible today from the highway entering Jerusalem. Israeli authorities have periodically proposed developing the site. Palestinian and Israeli heritage organizations have opposed demolition. The village exists in a kind of suspended state: present enough to see, absent enough to be forgotten.
Deir Yassin and the Logic of Terror
On April 9, 1948, fighters from the Irgun and Lehi attacked the village of Deir Yassin, on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. The village had signed a non-aggression pact with the Haganah. It did not matter. Over the course of the day, between 107 and 120 Palestinians were killed — men, women, and children. The precise number remains debated; the range comes from investigations by the Red Cross and from Morris’s research. Survivors described executions of prisoners and the mutilation of bodies. Haganah leadership publicly condemned the attack while privately acknowledging its psychological utility.
Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006), argues that Deir Yassin was not an aberration but a signal — an event whose broadcast through Palestinian communities was intended to accelerate flight. “The news of Deir Yassin,” Pappé writes, “had the desired effect.” Within days of the massacre, tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Jerusalem corridor fled their homes. The village’s ruins were later incorporated into the western Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Shaul. A psychiatric hospital, Kfar Shaul, was built on the site.
Plan Dalet and the Systematic Depopulation
The operations that emptied Deir Yassin, Lifta, and hundreds of other villages did not happen in an organizational vacuum. On March 10, 1948 — two months before Israeli independence was declared — the Haganah’s high command finalized Plan Dalet (Plan D), a strategic framework for securing the territory allocated to the Jewish state under the UN partition plan and, critically, much of the territory allocated to the proposed Arab state.
Plan Dalet authorized Haganah units to “destroy villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the rubble) and especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.” Villages whose inhabitants were deemed hostile were to be expelled; those deemed passive could, in theory, remain. In practice, the distinction was rarely honored. Khalidi reproduces the operative text of the plan in All That Remains. Pappé’s reading of Haganah operational archives leads him to conclude that the plan constituted a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.
The debate between Morris and Pappé — whether the depopulation was planned policy or the aggregate outcome of war decisions — has structured much of the historiography. Morris accepts the mass expulsion as documented fact while attributing it to the contingencies of conflict; Pappé argues the intent was present from the outset. The villages were emptied either way.
Tantura, Lydda, and the Spectrum of Violence
The village of Tantura, on the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa, was taken by the Alexandroni Brigade of the Haganah on the night of May 22–23, 1948. Israeli historian Teddy Katz, in a 1998 master’s thesis at the University of Haifa based on testimony from both Palestinian survivors and Israeli veterans, documented a massacre of between 40 and 200 Palestinian men after the village surrendered. The university eventually pressured Katz to retract his findings under threat of a defamation lawsuit brought by Alexandroni veterans; he later reasserted them. Investigative reporting by Haaretz journalist Alon Confino and, more recently, a 2022 documentary by Israeli filmmaker Alon Schwarz, Tantura, brought new veteran testimony corroborating the killings. Khalidi’s entry for Tantura in All That Remains records that the village’s roughly 1,500 residents were expelled.
Lydda — known in Hebrew as Lod — was a city of approximately 19,000 Palestinians when Israeli forces under the command of Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan entered it on July 11–12, 1948. After a brief armed resistance, Rabin issued a written expulsion order. Tens of thousands of Palestinians from Lydda and the neighboring city of Ramle were forced to march eastward in the July heat toward Jordanian lines. An unknown number died on the road. Rabin later described the expulsion in his memoirs; the passage was censored by Israeli military authorities before publication and first appeared in full in a 1979 New York Times account by journalist David Shipler. Rashid Khalidi discusses the Lydda expulsion in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020) as emblematic of the Nakba’s urban dimension.
Saffuriyya and What Was Built Over the Ruins
The village of Saffuriyya, in the Lower Galilee, had a population of roughly 4,300 in 1948. It was known for its olive groves, its Ottoman-era mosque, and its weekly market that drew traders from across the region. On July 16, 1948, Israeli aircraft bombed the village — one of the first uses of aerial bombardment against a Palestinian civilian locality — and Haganah infantry moved in the following day. The residents fled north toward Lebanon.
Khalidi’s entry in All That Remains records that most of Saffuriyya’s structures were demolished. An Israeli moshav, Tzipori, was established on the village lands in 1949. A national park bearing the same name now covers part of the site, centering Roman and Byzantine archaeological remains. The Palestinian village’s mosque and a handful of houses survive within the park’s perimeter. The poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose family was displaced from the village of al-Birwa in the same 1948 operations, wrote across the landscape of this kind of layered erasure for decades — the land present, the people absent, the names changed.
The Villages That Remain, in Name and in Memory
Khalidi’s All That Remains lists 418 villages with individual entries: population figures drawn from the 1945 British Mandatory statistics, descriptions of structures, notes on what was built afterward. Zochrot’s ongoing mapping project has extended and digitized that record. The Institute for Palestine Studies maintains the archive. UNRWA’s registration rolls for Palestinian refugees — now numbering more than five million registered descendants — constitute another kind of documentation: families who carry the name of a village as part of their identity, a location they have not seen and may never see.
What the village-by-village record makes plain is that the Nakba was not an abstraction or a political grievance invented after the fact. It was the demolition of Saffuriyya’s houses, the march out of Lydda in July heat, the bodies in Tantura, the coffeehouse in Lifta where six men were shot in December. The details do not simplify the history. They are the history.
Sources
- Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992
- Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2006
- Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Cambridge University Press, 2004
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Metropolitan Books, 2020
- Zochrot, iNakba mapping project, zochrot.org
- UNRWA, refugee registration data, unrwa.org
- David Shipler, “Rabin Admits Ordering Arabs Out in 1948,” The New York Times, October 23, 1979
- Alon Schwarz (dir.), Tantura, documentary film, 2022
- UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Progress Report, 1949 (refugee population estimates)
