This is a story about what happened here in 1948.

We are only 750 people.

And everybody knows each other.

It was a black spot in the history.

That history has been carefully concealed...

purposefully distorted, and in the West, largely forgotten.

They put our village as an example of what they can do.

The massacre in this village was one of many

in a series of catastrophic events...

that became known as the Nakba.

When hundreds of thousands of Palestinians

were violently displaced from their homeland...

in order to create the state of Israel.

“In May of 1948, a new Jewish state

Israel was born in a bath of blood.”

The borders of Palestine have been changed forcefully over time.

But historically, this region has been home to Palestinians for centuries

with hundreds of villages and thriving cities.

One of them being the central city of Jerusalem...

with holy sites important to Jewish

Christian and Muslim people.

By the late Ottoman Empire, Palestinians living here

were overwhelmingly Muslim

with minority Christian and Jewish native populations, too.

But regardless of religion

Palestinians were often referred to as Arabs.

People of the Arabic speaking world

despite their distinctive culture.

Palestinians have long distinguished themselves as Ahl Filastīn...

or the people of Palestine.

They developed a distinctive Arabic accent.

They developed regional food, regional dress, and family ties.

But by the time World War I began...

several key political forces

were competing for control of these lands.

First, there was a growing Arab political movement...

looking for independence from the Ottoman Empire

in hopes of a unified Arab state that would include Palestine.

Then there were Zionists

a political group that had one main goal:

The creation of a Jewish state.

Zionism was a response to an increasingly brutal climate

for Jewish people, particularly in Europe and Russia...

where there was a massive wave of antisemitism...

including large scale attacks in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

After briefly considering other areas for a new state

including Uganda and Argentina...

Zionist leaders decided on Palestine

because of its connection to early religious history.

But there was a third key group with political interests here.

The British.

Control of the region would allow them to expand

their spheres of influence and protect trade routes to India.

During World War I, since both the British

and the Arab independence movement wanted Palestine...

they decided to go after the Ottomans together

with an important pledge.

Through a series of letters in 1916

an Arab leader and a British official agreed

that if Arabs would help the British fight the Ottomans

and give the British economic and other foreign privileges in Arab lands...

in return, the British would recognize and support

an independent Arab state.

Soon the Arabs started doing their part

in revolting against the Ottomans

making it easier for the British to move in.

But the next year the British issued a new declaration

and betrayed the Arabs.

“In 1917, Lord Allenby conquered the Holy Land...

and the Jews were promised a national home in Palestine.”

Without consulting the native Palestinian population...

the British issued what's known as the Balfour Declaration:

Supporting the establishment in Palestine

of a national home for the Jewish people.

So instead of supporting the idea of Palestine

as part of a unified and independent Arab state...

the British pledged to help secure this land for Zionists.

It was a strategic move.

This declaration opened up a pathway for Britain

to gain power in Palestine.

Under the guise

that it was supporting the self-determination of another people...

of a people in Palestine...

who don't reside there yet.

As for Palestine's majority Arab population

the declaration referred to them as non-Jewish communities...

who would be given civil and religious rights...

but not political rights.

A few years later, after World War I ended

Britain gained control of Palestine through a mandate...

that also required them to put the Balfour plans

for Jewish settlement in motion.

And they did.

Between 1922 and 1931

the Jewish population more than doubled.

The migration helped the Zionist movement gain steam.

And a slogan took off.

“A land without people for, a people without land.”

And it sends a message to Western leaders...

that the people who had been living in Palestine for generations...

could just be easily moved elsewhere.

The idea was that those inhabitants weren't a people

with ties to that land.

Palestine was, of course, a land with a people.

In 1931, there were more than 850,000

Palestinian Arabs in the region, still the vast majority.

But with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in particular...

“Hate became a rallying call.”

Jewish flight from Europe became even more urgent.

And Palestine started to see

the biggest wave of Jewish emigration yet.

Violence broke out, rooted in tensions over land.

Jewish settlers purchased swaths of fertile land

and evicted tenant farmers

creating a crisis of hundreds of thousands

of landless, dispossessed Palestinian-Arabs.

Though Palestinians fiercely rebelled against

both British colonial forces and Jewish settlers

they were brutally crushed by the British.

They put in Palestine

more troops to repress that rebellion

than they had stationed in India at that time.

All of India.

These troops killed thousands of Palestinians

including many of their leaders

and the British began training and arming Zionist militias

to suppress the rebellion, too.

But the rebellion continued.

So in an attempt to prevent further Palestinian resistance...

the British began to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine.

This ended up angering Zionist extremists

leading to more violence.

So in 1947, after decades of trying to manipulate

both Palestinian Arabs and Zionists to keep their control over Palestine...

Britain gave up...

and handed the question of Palestine to someone else.

“To the United Nations

also came the problem of Palestine.”

“In recent years

this small country had been the scene of disorder and bloodshed.”

They figured, here is this new thing called the United Nations.

Here. In your lap.

Palestine. First gift.

So the United Nations has now to figure out

how do you disentangle this thing...

that the British who helped create.

A UN special committee proposed the land be divided into two states...

a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem

as a separate UN-controlled entity.

It was called the Partition Plan of 1947.

The plan shocked Palestinians.

We could not accept the partition plan

because at that time the population was almost 2 to 1.

But the plan proposed giving over half the land

and often the most fertile areas to the Jewish state.

From a purely pragmatic perspective...

the partition plan didn't make much sense for Palestinian Arabs.

That wasn't the only problem with the plan.

Within this proposed area of the Jewish state...

were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs...

including both Muslims and Christians who had lived there for generations.

On a moral level...

the idea of making hundreds of thousands

of Palestinian Arabs minorities in their own homeland...

seemed unjust and unfair.

In November 1947, the UN put the plan to a vote.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust

and after lobbying from US leaders and Zionists

the UN voted in favor of partition.

“And finally, a momentous decision to partition the Holy Land's

10,000 square miles.”

Britain announced their mandate over Palestine

would end on May 15th, 1948.

Even as Palestinians continued to reject

the UN's decision to partition the land.

After the partition took place, you know, in 1947...

you know, we really were scared

that something might happen to us.

By the end of 1947

Zionists had several well-developed paramilitary forces...

the largest one known as the Haganah.

And more extremist militias like Irgun.

On March 10th, a couple of months before the British mandate would end

the Haganah adopted what was called Plan Dalet.

Or Plan D.

On paper, the main goal was to gain control of the Jewish state

as laid out in the partition plan, while also defending

Jewish settlements outside of the borders.

In reality, that's where the majority of these operations took place...

outside of the UN's proposed Jewish state.

Some carried out by Haganah and others by more radical militias.

Many of these operations focused on isolating Jerusalem

and the roads to it.

A set of brutal instructions called for

the destruction of Arab villages by setting fire to

blowing up and planting mines.

Especially those population centers

which were difficult to control.

In case of resistance

it called for the population to be expelled

outside of the borders of the state...

villages emptied

and for the occupation and control of Arab villages

along main transportation arteries.

One of the most widely publicized village massacres

happened here in Deir Yassin.

We lkived in Deir Yassin

which is about 4 miles west of Jerusalem.

91 year old Dawud Assad

was there the day of the massacre and was 18 at the time.

On April 9th, 1948, extremist Zionist forces

executing Plan D closed in on Deir Yassin...

even though the village had made a local peace pact

with neighboring Jewish settlements.

Friday morning they attacked us.

Dawud escaped through a trench.

I went down, all the way down here like this.

So about 4 hours walking to Jerusalem.

To this day, the archive of the Israeli army refuses to release

many of the images and intelligence reports on Deir Yassin.

But one UN report detailed circumstances of great savagery...

including women and children stripped, lined up...

photographed and slaughtered.

Roughly 100 people, largely children and the elderly

were killed in the village.

As for Dawud, he later reunited with the group of Deir Yassin captives

in Jerusalem, including his sister and mother.

My mother says...

So everywhere there's a commotion, you know?

News of what happened in Deir Yassin

spread quickly with far reaching effects.

The Zionist militias used it as a propaganda tool

to tell people about it everywhere.

The idea was that if you don't leave...

we will do to you what happened in Deir Yassin.

Stories came out about women being raped

about babies being killed

and induced a great deal of fear among the Palestinian Arab population

many of them fleeing as a result.

“Jewish troops surrounded Arab forces from the city of Haifa.”

After taking Deir Yassin

Zionist paramilitary groups cleared major cities

including Haifa and Jaffa

and took hundreds of smaller villages and towns, too.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee

pouring into neighboring states as refugees.

Plan D became the blueprint for carrying out

the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine

to make room for a new state.

And on May 14th, the day before the British mandate ended...

Zionist declared the state as Israel.

But the creation of Israel didn't end the Nakba.