(h/t Sydney Nestel)

Photos from 1948 documenting the Israel War of Independence and Palestinian Nakba. They were published in Life Magazine with a distinctive and even neutral point of view. They were posted at The Palestine Project at Medium.

The photographs, which you can see here,  were primarily shot by war photographer John Philips, about whose own biography and complex background in the Middle East you can read here. He seems to have been embedded with British forces and with the Jordanian Arab Legion.

Most photos with which I’m familiar show victorious soldiers of the nascent Jewish state and Arab-Palestinian refugees. These photographs are more complex. Alongside pictures of Palestinian refugees from the village of Zenin and from Haifa are pictures of Jewish defeat. These include Jewish refugees from Europe surrounded by British troops, British soldiers on guard, Jewish POWs captured by the Jordanians, religious Jews of the Old Yishuv negotiating terms of surrender in the Old City of Jerusalem, occupying Jordanian soldiers, and residents expelled from the Jewish Quarter.