It is estimated that during the war of 1948 about 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were expelled from their lands, and hundreds of Palestinian cities and towns were destroyed or forcibly depopulated. Today, these refugees and their descendants make up the millions of people spread throughout Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with at least another four million internally displaced in Israel. This phenomenon of displacement, dispossession and dispersion of the Palestinian people is known as the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” or “disaster” in Arabic and coincides with the creation of the state of Israel.

At this conference, organized with the cooperation of the Diplomatic Mission of Palestine in Spain, Ziad Abu Amr will provide an analysis of the development of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the Nakba to today, placing a special emphasis on Palestine’s current situation. Presenting the event are Eduardo López Busquets, the General Director of Casa Árabe, and Mussa Amer Odeh, the Ambassador of Palestine in Spain.

Conference given by Ziad Abu-Amr, Vice-Prime Minister of the Palestinian national consensus government, who is also an independent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), having been elected for the first time in 1996 and re-elected in 2006 as the representative for the city of Gaza. For ten years, he was president of the PLC’s Foreign Affairs Commission and a member of the Human Rights Oversight Committee. Abu-Amr has been a member of the Palestinian National Authority Cabinet, once as the Minister of Culture (2003), and again as the Minister of Foreign Affairs (2007). Before moving into politics, Abu-Amr was a professor of Political Science at the University of Birzeit in Palestine. He has had many books and studies published, in both Arabic and English. Moreover, he earned his PhD in Comparative Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.