“Kadima!” — a Hebrew word meaning “advance quickly” — is one of the words that Um al-Walid Eid still remembers from the day she, her husband and their two small children, along with the approximately 2,600 other Palestinian inhabitants, were forcibly expelled from the village of Zarnuqa.

Beginning in late 1947 and throughout 1948, Zionist militias and later the Israeli army began the organized expulsion of Palestinians. Some 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from more than 450 from villages, towns and cities in Palestine; the violent dispossession has since been called the Nakba. This catastrophe is marked each year on 15 May — Nakba Day.