JERUSALEM - The mass displacement Palestinians call their "Nakba," or Great Catastrophe, has its roots in Israel's creation in 1948 and the Arab-Israeli war that followed the declaration of the Jewish state.
In 1947, the United Nations tried to resolve 30 years of Arab-Jewish fighting by passing a resolution to partition the British mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab.
The plan was rejected by Arabs, who felt it was unfair to expect them to give up their territory for a state for Jewish immigrants, many of them refugees from the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.
Months of fierce fighting between Arab and Jewish militia groups followed the release of the UN plan, prompting Britain to decide to dissolve its mandate.
Shortly before the last British soldier left Palestine, Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared an independent Jewish state on May 14, 1948.
Hours later, the Armies of Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Jordan invaded the fledgling country.
It was the start of the first Arab-Israeli war, which raged until ceasefire agreements were signed in 1949.
Palestinians and Israelis disagree as to what caused the widespread movement of refugees during the war, in which Egypt captured what is today the Gaza Strip and Jordan took control of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. Israel occupied those areas in the 1967 Middle East war.
So emotive is the issue that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators trying to forge a peace treaty last year were unable to agree on an interpretation of the events of 1948.
During the 1948 war, the first of five between Israel and its Arab neighbours, around 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their towns and villages.
Their numbers have now swelled to four million people, many of whom still live in camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab states.
Each side accuses the other of committing atrocities against innocent civilians during the pre-state fighting and the war that followed.
One of the best known examples is the killing of scores of Palestinian men, women and children in the Deir Yassin village by a Jewish underground militia group in April 1948 followed by the killing of 200 Palestinians in the village of Tantura near Haifa, according to an Israeli researcher.
The massacre at Deir Yassin was followed days later by an Arab attack on a convoy of buses carrying Jewish doctors and nurses to a Jerusalem hospital.
Seventy-eight Jews were killed.
- REUTERS
Feature: Middle East
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UN: Information on the Question of Palestine
Israel's Permanent Mission to the UN
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Middle East Daily
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Arabic Media Internet Network
Jerusalem Post
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US Department of State - Middle East Peace Process
Great Catastrophe the roots of a 53-year Middle Eastern conflict
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