Nakba

The Zionist conquest of Palestine, which began haphazardly in the early 1880s and was intensified after the turn of the century, reaching its apogee with the British invasion and occupation of the country before the conclusion of World War I, was the inaugural moment of what would become known as the Nakba – the Catastrophe. Whereas the term “Nakba” was used by Syrian intellectual Constantine Zureik to describe what was befalling the Palestinians in August 1948 (when he wrote and published his classic book Ma’na al-Nakba), others used words like karitha (disaster), as Jordanian military officer and governor of East Jerusalem Abdullah al-Tall did in his 1959 book Karithat Filastin, or ma’saa (tragedy), as Palestinian anti-colonial nationalist intellectual Muhammad Izzat Darwaza did in his 1959 book Ma’sat Filastin.