WEBVTT

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In early 1948, Palestinians owned almost nine times more land than Jews in
Palestine.

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Within two years, that Jewish minority, 6% of the population had taken 78% of
the country.

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This is the Palestinian Nakba, measured in land taken before the Nakba.

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Palestinians owned about 1300 zero square kilometers and Jews owned 1500km².

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In November 1947, the UN partition plan handed the future Jewish state 55% of
Palestine, even though Jews were only one third of the population and most were
recent European immigrants.

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Then came the war.

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Zionist forces carried out 31 military operations and at least 70 massacres.

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By the 1949 armistice, Israel had taken 78% of historic Palestine.

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More than 750,000 Palestinians had been pushed out, and 530 villages and towns
lay empty.

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This property, owned by Palestinians who were still alive, became property of a
new state in 1950.

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Israel passed the absentees property law.

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It defined any Palestinian who left their home after November 1947 as an
absentee.

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Even Palestinians who never left the country were called present absentees.

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Their property was transferred to the Jewish National Fund.

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By 1954, more than 10,000 Palestinian shops, 5000 buildings and nearly 60% of
the country's fertile land had been reallocated this way.

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Around 70% of the state's territory may have a Palestinian claimant.

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And it wasn't just land.

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On June 20th, 1948, Israel ordered every bank in the country to freeze the
accounts of Palestinian customers.

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More than $24 million was locked up overnight, worth more than $300 million
today.

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Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta found that about 80% of the land of
those destroyed villages is still uninhabited today, its open ground forest or
farmland.

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Palestinian historians draw the same conclusion.

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The Nakba wasn't a war for living space.

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It was a war to engineer a state with a Jewish majority.

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And in 2026, the same playbook is being used.

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In February 2026, Israel's cabinet approved a land registration mechanism for
the occupied West Bank.

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Any plot a Palestinian can't document on paper can now be claimed by the state.

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It is the same method that swallowed Palestinian property in 1948.

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A record 54 illegal Israeli settlements were approved in 2025 in Gaza, where
most refugees from 1948 ended up.

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86% of the farmland and 81% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed.

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Israel calls all of this state land for Palestinians almost eight decades after
the Nakba.

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The numbers don't add up.