1948 Palestinian exodus

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the Nakba (Arabic: النكبة‎, "al-Nakbah", literally "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"), occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war. The term "nakba" also refers to the period of war itself and events affecting Palestinians from December 1947 to January 1949.

The precise number of refugees is a matter of dispute but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (50 percent of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes.

The causes are also a subject of fundamental disagreement between Arabs and Israelis. Factors involved in the exodus include Jewish military advances, attacks against Arab villages and fears of another massacre by Zionist militias after the Deir Yassin massacre, which caused many to leave out of panic; Arab evacuation orders; expulsion orders by Israeli authorities; the voluntary self-removal of the wealthier classes, the collapse in Palestinian leadership, and an unwillingness to live under Jewish control.

Arab citizens of Israel

Arab citizens of Israel is the Israeli government's designation for non-Jewish Israeli citizens, the majority of whose cultural and linguistic heritage or ethnic identity is Arab. Many identify as Palestinian and commonly self-designate themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel. The traditional vernacular of most Arab citizens, irrespective of religion, is the Palestinian dialect of Arabic. Most Arab citizens of Israel are functionally bilingual, their second language being Modern Hebrew. By religious affiliation, most are Muslim, particularly of the Sunni branch of Islam. There is a significant Arab Christian minority from various denominations as well as Druze, among other religious communities. Israeli Mizrahi Jews are not usually considered to form part of this population.

According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the Arab population in 2013 was estimated at 1,658,000, representing 20.7% of the country's population. The majority of these identify themselves as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship. Many have family ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Negev Bedouins and Druze tend to identify more as Israelis than other Arab citizens of Israel.

1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle

The 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle was the expulsion of 50,000–70,000 Palestinian Arabs when Israeli troops captured the towns in July that year. The military action occurred within the context of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The two Arab towns, lying outside the area designated for a Jewish state in the UN Partition Plan of 1947, and inside the area set aside for an Arab state in Palestine, subsequently were transformed into predominantly Jewish areas in the new State of Israel, known as Lod and Ramla.

The exodus, constituting 'the biggest expulsion of the war', took place at the end of a truce period, when fighting resumed, prompting Israel to try to improve its control over the Jerusalem road and its coastal route which were under pressure from the Jordanian Arab Legion, Egyptian and Palestinian forces. From the Israeli perspective, the conquest of the towns averted an Arab threat to Tel Aviv, thwarted an Arab Legion advance by clogging the roads with refugees, forcing the Arab Legion to assume a logistical burden that would undermine its military capacities, and helped demoralize nearby Arab cities. On 10 July, Glubb Pasha ordered the defending Arab Legion troops to "make arrangements...for a phony war". The next day, Ramle surrendered immediately, but the conquest of Lydda took longer and led to an unknown number of deaths; Israeli historian Benny Morris suggests up to 450 Palestinians and 9–10 Israeli soldiers died.