During nearly eight decades between the early 1880s and 1949, the Palestinians were at the receiving end of a Jewish political movement of European provenance: Zionism.  Nineteen forty-eight, the Year of the Catastrophe or Nakba, as Palestinians call it, witnessed the long dreaded, inevitable climax of Zionist colonization since the 1880s in the twin phenomena of the establishment of Israel by force of arms in the greater part of Palestine, and the displacement of the Palestinian inhabitants from a score of towns, and from some four hundred villages whose ruined sites became part of the new Jewish state.
 

Chronology of events  before the Nakba  1876 - 1918  1918 - 1935  1936 - 1939  1939 - 1947

Chronology of   the Nakba  1947 1948 1949