Nakba Day

Nakba Day (Arabic: يوم النكبة Yawm an-Nakba, meaning "Day of the Catastrophe") is generally commemorated on 15 May, the day after the Gregorian calendar date for Israeli Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzmaut). For the Palestinians it is an annual day of commemoration of the displacement that preceded and followed the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.

Defining Nakba

During the 1948 Palestine War, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, and hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed.

These refugees and their descendants number several million people today, divided between Jordan (2 million), Lebanon (427,057), Syria (477,700), the West Bank (788,108) and the Gaza Strip (1.1 million), with at least another quarter of a million internally displaced Palestinians in Israel. The displacement, dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people is known to them as an-Nakba, meaning "catastrophe" or "disaster”.

Prior to its adoption by the Palestinian nationalist movement, the "Year of the Catastrophe" among Arabs referred to 1920, when European colonial powers partitioned the Ottoman Empire into a series of separate states along lines of their own choosing. The term was first used to reference the events of 1948 in the summer of that same year by the Syrian writer Constantine Zureiq in his work Ma^cnā an-Nakba ("The Meaning of the Nakba"; published in English in 1956).

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.

Day (automobile)

The Day Utility was an automobile manufactured in Detroit, Michigan by the Day Automobile Company from 1911-14. The Day used a four-cylinder, 30 horsepower (22 kW) engine and shaft drive. Removal of the rear seat and doors allowed the car to be converted from a five-seater touring car to a light truck in one minute. As a truck, the Day was able to carry up to 1,000 lb (450 kg) in a 36-inch (910 mm) by 96-inch (2,400 mm) cargo space. The rear seat could be lifted away by triggering two spring locks. The Day had an advertised price of $950US.

References

Day (Michelangelo)

Day is a marble sculpture by Michelangelo, datable to 1526–31. It is a pair with Night on the tomb of Giuliano de' Medici in the Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo in Florence.

External links

Day (surname)

Day is a surname. Notable people with the surname Day include:

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