On the anniversary of the Nakba, the people of Palestine suffer from injustice

الوكالة الكندية للأنباء

Colorized photos of the Nakba ("Catastrophe"), when between 750,000 and 1 million Palestinians were displaced from their land and homes in historical Palestine during Israel's creation in 1948.

As thousands of their fellow Palestinians were slaughtered by Israeli forces around them, Palestinian families fled in terror to neighbouring countries and to the West Bank and Gaza.

The Nakba’s roots lay in the rise of a political movement called Zionism in 19th century Europe, when some Jews, influenced by the racism, colonialism and nationalism then sweeping the continent, concluded that the remedy to centuries of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe was the creation of a nation state for Jewish people. Those traumatized by the oppression they endured in Europe and inspired by this idea began emigrating as colonists to "the Holy Land", eventually displacing indigenous Palestinians in the process.

In 1947, following the horrors of World War II and the Nazi genocide of European Jews, the newly-created United Nations approved a plan to partition Mandate Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. It allocated approximately 55% of the land to the proposed Jewish state, although Zionist Jews owned only about 7% of the private land in Palestine and made up only about 33% of the population, a large percentage of whom were recent immigrants from Europe.

Almost immediately after the partition plan was passed, violence broke out and large-scale expulsions of Palestinians began. When Zionist forces finished expanding, the new state of Israel comprised 78% of historic Palestine. In the 1967 War, Israel occupied a remaining 22% and began colonizing them shortly thereafter.

Today there are over 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced people, including Nakba survivors and their descendants. Israel still refuses to allow them to return to the land they were forced from, despite the internationally-recognized legal right of return.

But the Nakba didn't end in 1948. It has continued to this day, as the state of Israel continues to