Note from the producers:

This documentary is ten years in the making. We collected dozens of stories from fighters, refugees (many still living in camps) and survivors of the war. Their stories are powerful, heart-breaking and shocking.

On top of those interviews, we conducted a mountain of research (over 20,000 pages of history), painstakingly fact-checking every statement made in the documentary. Our team gathered photographs and film from archives across the globe. We retrieved copies of military orders from Israeli archives. We translated dozens of Arabic and Hebrew interviews as well as secondary documents. And we interviewed and consulted with some of the most respected historians in the field.

This has been a colossal amount of work. We sincerely hope you get something out of it.

Andy Trimlett & Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb

0:00 Introduction

12:14 Partition

19:37 Plan D

23:11 Dayr Yasin

31:32 Haifa

36:22 Jaffa

42:16 Declaration

47:44 Acre

51:14 Ramla & Lydda

58:39 Negba & Nazareth

1:01:43 Beersheba

1:04:30 Preventing Return

1:09:35 Design

1:14:23 Villages

1:16:35 Statehood

1:20:24 Returning

1:22:32 Conclusion

FILM REVIEW OF 1948: CREATION AND CATASTROPHE

Terri Ginsberg

Nakba means “catastrophe” in Arabic. Since 1948, it has come to denote the permanent expulsion and dispossession of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands, and the rape, pillage, and massacre of thousands more, by Zionist militias during the years leading up to the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in historic Palestine. The Nakba caused a large proportion of the Palestinian population to become refugees in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt and produced a significant Palestinian diaspora spanning Europe, the Americas, North Africa, and the Middle East. This ethnic cleansing of Palestine was denied until recently by the dominant forces within the international community, the neo-imperialist agenda of which was bolstered most notoriously by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s 1969 excoriation of the then-alliance between Egypt and the Soviet Union: the political front against the advance of communism and radical labor was for her—and in large part remains—the suppression of Palestinian liberation. Forty-two years later in 2011, Israel, politically much further to the right than it was during Meir’s time, passed a law that denies state funding to any public or government entity that memorializes the Nakba as an occasion for mourning.

Read More HERE:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/arabstudquar.40.1.0073?seq=1

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Through riveting and moving personal recollections of both Palestinians and Israelis, 1948: Creation and Catastrophe reveals the shocking events of the most pivotal year in the most controversial conflict in the world.

The documentary includes interviews with veterans, refugees, survivors and historians of the war collected in Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Those who lived through the war are the centerpiece of the story, but respected historians, including Charles D. Smith, Avi Shlaim, Nur Masalha, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Rashid Khalidi and Sharif Kanaaneh provide context for the events.

What People Are Saying:

"It is fair and even-handed in its telling of a wrenching, difficult history that features the perspectives of Israelis who saw the 1948 war as their War of Independence, and Palestinians who experienced it as their Nakba, or catastrophe."

-Sandy Tolan (Author, The Lemon Tree), Truthdig

“1948 makes the Nakba uncannily real for the doubting spectator.”

Terri Ginsberg (University of Cairo), Arab Studies Quarterly

Other Reviews:

• "This documentary is a must see."

• "I'm a university teacher and this documentary has been consistently part of my teaching materials."

• "The first in its class"

• "There are many good films about the Israel/Palestine situation, but 1948 is the best for fully understanding the context for what has been happening"

• "This movie was a transformative one for my understanding of what exactly happened in 1948