introduction9 (around 46,000) were displaced from their towns and villages to become internal refugees, meaning that they could not go back to their original villages and towns (Wakim 2001, 90–104 quoted in Sabbagh-Khoury 2011, 31). Now there is some disagreement on the particular statistics of the refugees and internally displaced, as well as on the number of villages demolished as a result of the Nakba.14 However, there is no disagreement among serious and honest scholars of the Zionist-Arab conflict that there was an organized and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing implemented against the indigenous Palestinian population. As prominent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi explains, the offensives by the Zionist forces “which entailed the destruction of the Palestinian-Arab community and the expulsion and pauperization of the bulk of the Palestine Arabs, were calculated to achieve the military fait accompli upon which the State of Israel was to be based” (Khalidi 1988, 8). Before this fragmentation and collapse of the indigenous population, the Palestinians who remained on their lands and were involuntarily granted Israeli citizenship were part of Palestinian society and its struggle against the British Mandate and the Zionist settler-colonial project. Having just endured a century of British imperialist rule and the violent shattering of their society, the remaining Palestinians were, through the bestowal of Israeli citizenship, thrown into a juridico-political order premised on controlling, excluding and removing them. Immediately after the 1948 ZionistArab war, a ‘Military Government’ or ‘Military Administration’ was formed on the basis of the Emergency Regulations set up during British rule. Used by the newly established state to control, isolate and dispel the remaining Arab population, the Military Administration enforced a rigid array of restrictions on the mobility of Palestinians living in the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Naqab, maintained careful surveillance, supervised the flow of Arab labour to Jewish cities, derailed attempts at organized political activity, and pre-empted efforts by internally displaced Palestinians to return to their homes and lands (Mattar 2005, 377). Yet none of these efforts compared to the devastation incurred by Palestinians in the form of land confiscation. Systematic state-led initiatives were implemented through an assortment of juridico-political and military measures that transferred large sections of Palestinian-owned land and resources to the 14 For instance, unlike Walid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé and Salman Abu Sitta estimate that 531 villages were destroyed while Israeli historian Benny Morris holds that 369 villages were demolished (see Khalidi 1992; Pappé 2006; Abu Sitta 2000; Morris 1988).