Nakba and Palestinian Displacement

The civil war that followed the United Nations partition proposal in November 1947 escalated after the declaration of the State of Israel and the intervention of neighbouring Arab armies in May 1948. During the fighting, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from towns and villages in the territory that became Israel.

Homes, land and property were lost, many communities were depopulated or destroyed, and most refugees were prevented from returning. The displacement created enduring refugee communities in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, making the Nakba both a historical event and a continuing structure of memory and dispossession.

The final movement of Time of White Horses places the people of Hadiya within this catastrophe. This context supports fiction about village depopulation, flight, exile, refugee experience, lost property and the preservation of family and communal memory after 1948.