مَاۤ اَصَابَ مِنۡ مُّصِيۡبَةٍ اِلَّا بِاِذۡنِ اللّٰهِ​ؕ وَمَنۡ يُّؤۡمِنۡۢ بِاللّٰهِ يَهۡدِ قَلۡبَهٗ​ؕ وَاللّٰهُ بِكُلِّ شَىۡءٍ عَلِيۡمٌ

No disaster occurs, except with the leave of Allah. And whoever believes in Allah, He guides his heart, for Allah knows all things.

The Levant, 1948-1952

The end of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 brought no happiness to any of its participants. Israel had failed in its war aims to annihilate the state of Palestine and subsume all of its territory. Kibbutzim had been swept from the map, their inhabitants murdered or driven to the huge refugee camp at Umm al-Rashrash, where hundreds died of deprivation and disease until eventually evacuated by foreign humanitarian missions. Egypt had failed to defend Palestine, and only succeeded in retaining Gaza and the Negev desert. Iraq pulled out of the war due to internal turmoil, and in the vacuum created by their evacuation Jordan's army had been humiliated and swept from the field, losing Jerusalem and the West Bank to the invaders. Lebanon had only committed a token force which was defeated in short order. Only Syria's success came as a surprise, coming away from the war with possession of the Hula Valley that had previously been successfully defended by the Israeli Defense Force.

The Palestinians had suffered the worst fate of them all. Israeli clearing operations had begun in Haifa and the brutality of them was immediately evident by the Suq Market Massacre of April 1st, 1948, when 157 Arab evacuees were killed by an Israeli stormtrooper attack. It was far from the last atrocity committed by the Israelis upon the Arab inhabitants of their territory, and the territory they conquered.

The policy of removing Arab inhabitants through force was general, and perpetuated everywhere by the IDF. While it had begun during the war, the immediate aftermath also saw huge campaigns of removal. IDF troops kicked down doors throughout Jerusalem, forcing the residents to flee at bayonet-point. Yet it was the depopulation of the West Bank that took the longest and was the most thorough. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs lived there, and only a concerted Israeli effort with the support of airplanes, tanks, and heavy machine guns could effect its accomplishment. Hundreds are said to have died in the West Bank "Cleansing" operation.

The largest gall came in December of 1948, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion confirmed that the Right to Return to the displaced population would "never be granted, in any form, for any reason." The outcry of the Palestinian exodus community led to large-scale protests in every country surrounding Israel. Demands to go back to war, to rip up the ceasefire and bomb Tel Aviv into nothingness were heard throughout Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. Yet nothing was done.

Only in 1952 did a concerted effort to measure the disposition of those displaced by what Constantin Zureiq termed لنكبة "an-Nakbah" ("the catastrophe"). The American University of Beirut calculated the following numbers:

With this massive displacement, the Palestinian community's longing for nationhood and self-sufficiency has only intensified. Agitation is rampant within these communities, who long for a chance to reclaim their homeland from the Israeli military.

Note: Thanks to u/senl for helping calculate these numbers!