In the course of the 1948 war and immediate post-Nakba period the name 'Palestine' was wiped off the map.

The rupture of 1948 and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine are central to both the Palestinian society of today and Palestinian social history and collective identity.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Ilan pappé, commenting on the massacres carried out by Jewish forces during the Nakba, writes:

Palestinian sourees, combining Israeli military archives with oral histories, list thirty-one confirmed massacres - beginning with the massacre in Tirat Haifa om 11 December 1947 and ending with Khirbat Illin in the Hebron area on 19 January 1949 - and there may have been at least another six. We still do not have a systematic Nakba memorial archive that would allow one to trace the names of all those who died in the massacres. (Pappé 2006: 258)

The Nakba is the turning point in the modern history of Palestine - that year over 500 villages' and towns and a whole country and its people disappeared from international maps and dictionaries.

Zionist methods have not only dispossessed the Palestinians of their own land; they have also attempted to deprive Palestinians of their voice and their knowledge of their own history.