In 1948 more than 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes or fled in fear, and over 400 villages were emptied and later destroyed. 1948: Creation & Catastrophe tells the story of that year through the people who lived it: Palestinian refugees and survivors, alongside former Israeli fighters, many of them speaking on camera for the first and last time.
Moving from the UN partition plan and Plan D through Dayr Yasin, the fall of Haifa and Jaffa, the expulsions from Lydda and Ramla and the villages of the Galilee and the Negev, the film shows how the Nakba unfolded town by town. It ends with Israel’s decision to prevent the refugees from ever returning, a policy that still shapes Palestinian lives today.
The filmmakers spent ten years on interviews and archival research for the film, which makes it an essential introduction to the Nakba and to why the right of return remains at the heart of the Palestinian struggle.
