ABSTRACT

The Nakba catastrophe of 1948 was a military defeat and loss of national home for the Palestinian people yet even more so it was the loss of individual homes for many families. Loss of homes was not restricted to Palestinian refugees ‘swept away’ from the land that became Israel but included many ‘internally displaced’ Palestinian families who were, following 1948, Israeli citizens (Cohen, 2002; Peteet, 2005). The Nakba is explored here not as military defeat or loss of sovereignty, though it was both, but rather as the loss of access to national housing.