In terms of origin, etymology, and epistemology, nakba is an ordinary Arabic noun meaning “catastrophe” or “disaster,” from the root ن-ك-ب (n-k-b), “to be afflicted, to suffer a blow,” which was turned into a proper name for the 1948 events.
The Lebanese historian Constantin Zureiq is generally credited with first using it in this sense in his 1948 book Ma‘na al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster), after which the term was taken up by Palestinian writers and activists and later institutionalized in commemorations such as Nakba Day on 15 May.
Epistemologically, “Nakba” functions as a foundational narrative and analytic lens in Palestinian historiography and memory: it names a collective experience of loss and violence, structures claims to the right of return, and frames the conflict in terms of dispossession and settler colonialism, while also being contested, minimized, or legally constrained in Israeli state discourse (for example through the 2011 “Nakba Law”).
Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”) is the term used primarily by Palestinians to describe the mass displacement, dispossession, and destruction of Palestinian society that accompanied the establishment of the State of Israel in 1947–49. It refers above all to the expulsion or flight of roughly 700,000–750,000 Palestinians from their homes, the depopulation or destruction of more than 400 villages and urban neighborhoods, and the erasure of “Palestine” from the political map, events many historians analyze as a form of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism, while many Israeli officials and some historians instead frame the same period as a war of independence and deny this characterization. In contemporary Palestinian discourse, “the Nakba” also names an ongoing condition: exile, statelessness, refugeehood, land confiscation, and military occupation, sometimes referred to as the “ongoing Nakba.”