A Land, A People, A Century of Loss

A Land, A People, A Century of Loss

The Palestinian Experience from Colonial Dispossession to International Law

01 June 2026

By: M. Tariq Bazger

Author and Journalist

I. The Land Before the Storm

For centuries before the modern colonial era, Palestine was a inhabited, cultivated, and culturally rich land. Its population predominantly Arab Muslim, alongside Christian Arabs and a small Jewish minority maintained a society with deep agricultural traditions, urban centres in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, and Nablus, and a vibrant civic life under the Ottoman Empire.

The 1878 Ottoman census recorded roughly 400,000 inhabitants in the region. By 1914, on the eve of World War I, that population had grown to approximately 700,000, of whom around 60,000 were Jewish a proportion that had grown through immigration but still constituted less than 10 percent of the total population. The land was not empty. It was home.

Palestinian society at this time was organised around extended family and clan networks (hamula), alongside a growing educated urban class that had absorbed Enlightenment ideas and was developing an emerging Arab national consciousness. Newspapers, cultural societies, and political clubs had taken root in the cities. Palestinians were, in short, a people with history, culture, and political awareness not a passive backdrop to events decided elsewhere.

The Balfour Declaration and Its Consequences

On 2 November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. It has since become one of the most consequential and contested documents of the twentieth century:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…”

The letter’s internal contradiction was glaring: a pledge to establish a national home for one people while simultaneously promising not to prejudice the rights of the existing majority. The 700,000 Palestinians who made up over 90 percent of the population were described as “existing non-Jewish communities” stripped of their name and national identity in their own land.

The declaration was issued by a colonial power over a territory it did not yet control on behalf of a people who did not live there, promising land that belonged to someone else. No Palestinian was consulted. No Palestinian consent was sought. The British Mandate that followed formalized British administrative control over Palestine from 1920 to 1948, operating under terms that built in the contradictions of the Balfour promise.

II. The Nakba Catastrophe of 1948

The Arabic word Nakba means catastrophe. For Palestinians, it designates the events of 1947 to 1949 a period in which the majority of the Palestinian population was expelled, fled under military assault, or was forced from their homes and towns, and in which over 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed, depopulated, or repopulated by Jewish settlers.

The Scale of Displacement

United Nations records and Israeli, British, and Arab archival sources including the work of Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim, who drew on newly declassified Israeli state archives from the 1980s onward document the following:

• Approximately 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians roughly half the total Arab population of Mandatory Palestine were displaced between November 1947 and the armistice agreements of 1949.
• Over 400 Palestinian villages were depopulated. A significant number were demolished. Israeli historian Benny Morris documented 369 villages in detail in his 1987 work The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.
• By 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine, significantly more than the 56 percent allocated to the proposed Jewish state under the 1947 UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181).
• Massacres were documented at Deir Yassin (9 April 1948), where over 100 villagers were killed; at Tantura (May 1948); at Dawayima (October 1948); and elsewhere. These were not isolated incidents but part of a broader pattern of military operations including Plan Dalet (Plan D) designed to secure Jewish territorial control.

Deir Yassin: A Village Remembered

The village of Deir Yassin, situated on a hilltop west of Jerusalem, had maintained a non-aggression agreement with the Haganah, the main Jewish paramilitary force. On 9 April 1948, forces from the Irgun and Lehi two Zionist paramilitary groups, attacked the village. The assault resulted in the deaths of between 100 and 120 Palestinian men, women, and children.

The massacre’s significance extended beyond Deir Yassin itself. News of the killings spread rapidly among the Palestinian population, accelerating the flight and panic that the ongoing military operations had already set in motion. Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun and later Prime Minister of Israel, acknowledged the role Deir Yassin played in precipitating mass Palestinian flight.

The Right of Return A Legal and Human Claim

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, passed on 11 December 1948, established the foundational international legal principle concerning Palestinian refugees. Paragraph 11 of the resolution resolved:

“…that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return…”

Israel was admitted to the United Nations in May 1949, in part on the understanding that it would comply with Resolution 194. It has never done so. Today, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) registers over 5.9 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, making Palestinians the largest and longest-standing refugee population in the world.

The keys. Across Palestinian communities worldwide in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and the diaspora elderly Palestinians hold the physical keys to homes they left in 1948, passing them to their children and grandchildren as symbols of a connection to land and a right to return that has never been extinguished in law or in memory.

III. Occupation, Expansion, and the Architecture of Control

The June 1967 War the Six Day War resulted in Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (from Jordan), the Gaza Strip (from Egypt), and the Golan Heights (from Syria). International law specifically UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed unanimously in November 1967 called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied in the conflict.

That withdrawal has not occurred. Instead, Israel has, over more than five decades, constructed a comprehensive system of control over the occupied Palestinian territories. Its central features include:

The Settlement Enterprise

Israeli settlements in the West Bank civilian communities built on land occupied in 1967 are illegal under international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. The International Court of Justice affirmed this in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Wall, and the UN Security Council reiterated it in Resolution 2334 (2016), which stated that Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 “have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation under international law.”

In 1967, fewer than 1,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank. By 2024, that number had grown to over 700,000, spread across more than 140 official settlements and dozens of outposts. Settlement expansion has accelerated in every decade since 1967, under governments of both the Israeli left and right.

The settlements are connected to Israel and to each other by a network of roads many restricted to Israeli citizens that fragment Palestinian territory into disconnected cantons. Settlement blocs around Jerusalem have effectively severed the northern West Bank from the southern West Bank, making a contiguous Palestinian state increasingly difficult to envision.

The Separation Wall

Beginning in 2002, Israel began constructing a barrier described by Israel as a security fence and by Palestinians and most of the international community as an Apartheid Wall or Separation Wall running through the West Bank. When completed, its total length will be approximately 700 kilometers, more than twice the length of the 1949 armistice line (the Green Line).

Critically, approximately 85 percent of the barrier’s route runs inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, encircling Palestinian communities, severing farmers from their agricultural land, and effectively annexing settlement blocs to Israel. The International Court of Justice, in its 2004 Advisory Opinion, ruled the sections of the barrier built inside the West Bank to be contrary to international law and called for their dismantlement.

The Wall has fundamentally reshaped Palestinian life. Communities that once accessed their farmland, relatives, hospitals, and schools by a short drive or walk now face hours of travel through military checkpoints or no access at all.

The Checkpoint Regime and Freedom of Movement

As of 2022, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented over 565 obstacles to movement in the West Bank, including permanent checkpoints, staffed checkpoints, gates, earth mounds, road barriers, and trenches. Movement between Palestinian cities requires navigating this network a daily reality that affects access to employment, education, healthcare, and family life.

A permit system governs Palestinian movement within and beyond the West Bank. Palestinians require Israeli-issued permits to enter Jerusalem, to travel to Israel for work or medical treatment, to cross between the West Bank and Gaza, and for many to access their own agricultural land in areas near settlements or the Wall. Permits are routinely denied, delayed, or revoked.

IV. Gaza -Siege, War, and Civilian Catastrophe

The Gaza Strip is a territory of approximately 365 square kilometers, home to roughly 2.3 million people as of 2023 one of the most densely populated places on earth. Over 70 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees or descendants of refugees from the 1948 war.

The Blockade

Following Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a comprehensive land, sea, and air blockade of the territory. Egypt has also periodically closed the Rafah crossing. The blockade which controls the movement of goods, fuel, and people into and out of Gaza has been condemned by the United Nations and human rights organisations as collective punishment, a violation of international humanitarian law.

The UN reported in 2012 that, at existing rates of development, Gaza would be “unliveable” by 2020. That assessment has since been updated repeatedly. Unemployment has persistently exceeded 40 percent, often reaching over 60 percent among young people. Electricity has been available for only a few hours per day for extended periods. Safe drinking water has been scarce: the UN estimated that 97 percent of Gaza’s groundwater was unfit for human consumption by 2018. Access to adequate food has been a recurring concern, with the World Food Program documenting chronic food insecurity across much of the population.

Recurring Military Campaigns

Gaza has been subject to successive Israeli military operations: Operation Cast Lead (2008–09), which killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians according to Palestinian and UN sources; Operation Pillar of Defence (2012); Operation Protective Edge (2014), which killed over 2,200 Palestinians, including approximately 1,500 civilians according to UN figures, and destroyed or damaged over 100,000 homes; and further operations in 2021 and 2022.

Each campaign has been followed by inadequate reconstruction, because the blockade restricts the entry of construction materials alongside other goods. The cumulative effect has been a territory in a permanent state of partial destruction, where recovery from one military operation is incomplete before the next begins.

The War of 2023–2024

On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led forces broke through the Gaza perimeter fence and conducted an assault on Israeli communities in the surrounding area, killing approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and taking approximately 250 people hostage. The attacks were among the most lethal against Israeli civilians in the country’s history, and their brutality including killings at a music festival and in family homes was widely condemned.

Israel’s military response Operation Swords of Iron was of an unprecedented scale and intensity. By mid-2024, Palestinian health authorities in Gaza reported over 37,000 people killed, with UN and independent humanitarian agencies estimating that the majority were civilians. Over a million people had been displaced multiple times. The UN World Food Program reported that famine conditions had taken hold in northern Gaza by early 2024.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Francesca Albanese, and multiple UN bodies described the conditions in Gaza as meeting the legal threshold for genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention a finding that South Africa formally brought before the International Court of Justice in December 2023. The ICJ, in a provisional measure ruling in January 2024, ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts that could fall within the Genocide Convention’s scope.

Hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and places of worship designated as protected sites under international humanitarian law were struck. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, reported the deaths of over 150 of its staff members the largest loss of UN personnel in a single conflict in the organisation’s history. Journalists covering Gaza over 100 killed by mid-2024 died in greater numbers than in any comparable period of modern reporting.

V. International Law and the Palestinian Question

The Palestinian experience cannot be assessed outside its international legal context a framework that, across multiple decades and institutions, has consistently reached conclusions that the dominant political order has failed to enforce.

Core Legal Principles

Self-determination: The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination to determine their own political future and governance has been affirmed repeatedly by the UN General Assembly and is considered a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens). General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974) explicitly reaffirmed the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including the right to self-determination.

Occupation law: The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, governs the conduct of occupying powers. Its protections include prohibitions on collective punishment (Article 33), transfer of the occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory (Article 49), and destruction of property not justified by military necessity (Article 53). International legal consensus holds that Israel remains an occupying power in the West Bank and notwithstanding the 2005 disengagement retains effective control over Gaza.

The ICJ Advisory Opinion (2004): The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory found the Wall, along with its associated regime, to be contrary to international law. The Court called on Israel to cease construction, dismantle sections built inside the West Bank, and make reparations for damage caused.

The ICJ Advisory Opinion (2024): In July 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion finding Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories unlawful. The Court found that Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was in violation of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force, that Israel’s settlement policy violated international law, and that third states were obligated not to render aid or assistance that maintained the unlawful situation.

The Gap Between Law and Reality

The record of international legal findings on Palestine is, in its consistency, remarkable. Decade after decade, the principal judicial and humanitarian institutions of the international order the ICJ, the UN Security Council (when not vetoed), the UN General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, and treaty bodies have reached broadly similar conclusions: the occupation is unlawful, the settlements violate international law, the blockade of Gaza constitutes collective punishment, and the Palestinian people possess rights that have not been honored.

What is equally remarkable and deeply troubling is the gap between these determinations and the political reality. The United States, as a permanent member of the Security Council, has vetoed more than 40 resolutions concerning Israel and Palestine since 1972, repeatedly blocking binding enforcement of the legal principles it formally endorses. The European Union has declared settlements illegal while continuing normal trade relations that, critics argue, provide material benefit to a system it condemns in law.

This gap between what the law says and what power permits is not incidental to the Palestinian condition. It is central to it. Palestinians have not simply been denied justice. They have been denied justice in full view of institutions specifically created to provide it.

VI. The Jewish Dimension – Diversity, Dissent, and Conscience

Any honest account of the Zionist project and Palestinian dispossession must grapple with a history that is frequently suppressed in public discourse: the deep and longstanding opposition to Zionism within Jewish communities themselves.

Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 after the original venue, Munich, was denied to him following protests from leading figures of the German Jewish community. The Munich Jewish establishment both Reform rabbis and Orthodox leaders objected to Zionism on grounds ranging from religious principle (the belief that a return to Zion was to be awaited messianically, not achieved by political means) to integrationist conviction (the belief that Jews’ future lay in full civic participation in the countries where they lived).

The Bund the General Jewish Labour Bund, founded in Vilnius also in 1897 represented a powerful alternative political tradition: secular, socialist, Yiddish-speaking, and anti-Zionist. The Bund argued that Jewish rights should be won through political struggle within existing societies, not through migration and colonial settlement. At its height in the early twentieth century, the Bund commanded a mass following in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and Russia.

Liberal and assimilated Jews in Western Europe and the United States were, for the most part, either hostile to or profoundly ambivalent about Zionism before the Second World War. The American Council for Judaism, founded in 1943, maintained an explicitly anti-Zionist position defining Judaism as a religious identity rather than a national one and its founders included prominent Reform rabbis.

The Holocaust changed this calculus irreversibly. The near-total destruction of European Jewry the murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators shattered the integrationist vision and gave Zionism a moral urgency it had previously lacked. The founding of Israel in 1948 coincided with a traumatized diaspora for whom the state represented physical safety in a world that had demonstrated it could not be trusted.

To acknowledge this history is not to diminish the Holocaust’s horror or the genuine security concerns of Israeli Jews. It is to insist that the founding of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinian people that accompanied it cannot be properly understood without holding all these threads simultaneously: the legitimate trauma that drove Jewish migration, the colonial context that shaped the project, and the Palestinian people who bore its cost.

Today, a significant and growing current of Jewish opinion particularly among younger American and European Jews is critical of Israeli policies in the occupied territories and of the occupation itself. Organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and B’Tselem (an Israeli human rights organisation) document abuses and call for accountability. These voices are part of a Jewish ethical tradition, not a departure from it.

VII. Palestinian Resistance -Character, Cost, and Continuity

Palestinian resistance to dispossession and occupation has taken many forms across more than a century: armed revolt, civil disobedience, legal advocacy, cultural production, political organising, and popular protest. To understand it requires situating it within the context of a people who have faced and continue to face a form of domination that has never been fully resolved.

The Great Revolt (1936–1939)

The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 was a mass Palestinian uprising against British colonial rule and Jewish immigration. It began with a general strike, the longest in the history of any anti-colonial movement and escalated into armed resistance. The British response was severe: collective punishments, house demolitions (a practice whose legacy continues in the occupied territories today), mass arrests, exile of Palestinian leadership, and military operations that killed thousands.

The revolt exhausted Palestinian society at a critical moment. The defeat of Palestinian leadership and the destruction of Palestinian military capacity in the late 1930s left the community poorly positioned to resist the events of 1948. Historians of the Nakba point to 1939 as the moment when the structural balance tipped decisively.

The First and Second Intifadas

The First Intifada (1987–1991) was a popular uprising against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, characterised by strikes, demonstrations, stone-throwing, and civil disobedience. It arose not from the commands of an external leadership but from the daily frustrations of occupation checkpoints, collective punishment, settlement expansion, land confiscation. The Israeli military response killed over 1,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands.

The Second Intifada (2000–2005) was precipitated in part by the failure of the Oslo peace process to deliver a viable Palestinian state and sparked by the visit of Ariel Sharon under heavy military escort to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem in September 2000. It was more violent on both sides, involving Palestinian suicide bombings that killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians and Israeli military operations that killed over 3,000 Palestinians.

Steadfastness – Sumud

Perhaps the most profound and least visible form of Palestinian resistance is summed steadfastness. It is the determination to remain: to stay on the land, to plant, to build, to raise children, to maintain cultural life in the face of a system designed to make Palestinian presence untenable. For the farmer who replants his olive trees after settlers uproot them, for the family that rebuilds its home after it is demolished, for the teacher who continues teaching in a school threatened with demolition orders summed is not passivity. It is the refusal to disappear.

Palestinian cultural life its literature, poetry, visual art, embroidery traditions, and music has constituted a form of resistance in itself. The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, recognised internationally as among the great writers of the twentieth century, gave voice to the Palestinian condition in ways that documentary accounts cannot.

“On this earth is what makes life worth living.” Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege (2002)

VIII. Where Things Stand -and What Is Required

The Palestinian condition in 2025 is one of the most comprehensively documented human rights situations in the world. The evidence accumulated across seventy-seven years of displacement, occupation, siege, and military assault is not in dispute among those who have examined it seriously. What remains in dispute is whether the international community possesses the political will to give that evidence consequence.

The two-state solution a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside Israel has been the formal policy of the United States, the European Union, the Arab League, and the United Nations for decades. It is also, as settlement expansion has continued unabated, increasingly difficult to envision as a physical reality. Over 700,000 settlers in the West Bank, East Jerusalem effectively annexed, and a Gaza under blockade and devastated by war do not constitute the territorial basis for a viable state.

What is required what international law has long required is not complicated in its statement, even if it is deeply challenging in its politics: a genuine end to occupation, an end to the settlement project and accountability for its illegality, an end to the blockade of Gaza, recognition of Palestinian refugee rights as established in Resolution 194, and a political settlement in which the Palestinian people exercise genuine self-determination.

These are not radical demands. They are what the international legal framework that states formally endorse already requires. The question of whether they will be achieved is, ultimately, a question about whether international law means anything, whether it is a genuine constraint on power or merely a language that power uses when convenient and discards when inconvenient.

Palestinians have waited for an answer to that question for over a century. Their patience, their sacrifices, and their continued existence as a people constitute one of the most enduring acts of collective steadfastness in modern history. The world owes them more than it has delivered. The world’s institutions were built, in part, in the wake of catastrophe to prevent the recurrence of precisely the kind of dispossession and violence that Palestinians continue to endure.

The test of those institutions is not what they say about Palestine. It is what they do.

 

Principal Sources and Further Reading

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge University Press, 1987; revised and expanded, 2004). The foundational scholarly account, drawing on newly declassified Israeli state archives.

Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006). A more politically explicit account from an Israeli historian using the same archival base.

Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W.W. Norton, 2000). A comprehensive diplomatic and military history.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020). A Palestinian historian’s account of the Palestinian experience from 1917 to the present.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Refugee statistics and documentation: www.unrwa.org

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory. Humanitarian data, movement restrictions, settlement documentation: www.ochaopt.org

International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004.

International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024.

UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967); Resolution 2334 (2016).

UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948); Resolution 3236 (1974).

B’Tselem -The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: www.btselem.org

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International annual reports on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2021–2024.

Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege, trans. Munir Akash and Daniel Moore (University of California Press, 2010).

 

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