Perhaps no other single event has so significantly shaped the contemporary Palestinian reality as the forced exodus of 1948 when about half of Palestine's Arab population experienced the agony of sudden uprootedness. That unique event is indelibly marked on the Palestinian mind and psyche. Powerful and shattering as it was, and although it constitutes an important aspect of the Palestinian legacy, it is the one event in Palestinian history that has done essentially unrecorded from the standpoint of the victim. Political polemics concerning the circumstances, motivation, and underlying factors that brought about the exodus abound: all of them are intended to prove an essentially irrelevant datum: whether Zionist or Arab leaders were to blame in bringing about the exodus.
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Reja-e Busailah
Arab Studies Quarterly
Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 123-151
Published by: Pluto Journals
Page Count: 29
