A New Perspective on the Palestinians' Cherished Catastrophe
The "Nakba" is the beating heart of the body of Palestinian victimization.
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This is a guest essay written by Paul Finlayson of Freedom to Offend.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
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“The Nakba” is the Arabic name for the displacement or voluntary departure of approximately 750,000 Arabs during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
The war started when forces from Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt invaded Israel immediately after Israel declared independence on May 14th, 1948.
The Nakba, or “the Catastrophe” in English, uses the definite article “the” in its description to heighten its sense of loss and humiliation; this 76-year-old Palestinian grievance is still as bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword.1
But is such singularity merited?
While the humiliation of the Nakba may be the still beating but wounded heart of the body of Palestinian grievances, it is a wound that never heals and demands constant attention.
A historical examination of other bloody or contentious borders that arose or were moved by war, the partitioning of land, or ethnic divisions leaves the Nakba looking comparatively less catastrophic than other “catastrophes.”
Indeed, in comparing it to other grand displacements, the Nakba distinguishes itself not by the number of people displaced, the unique relationship to the land, the violence, or the material loss of the dispossessed. It is unique as a catastrophe because its people decided, while cheered on by a grand cast of willing enablers, to make their loss an idol to be worshipped, a grievance that demanded their enduring obeisance.
Palestinians insisted they would be refugees until the land they sold to the Jews and the untitled British Palestinian partition lands were given back to them; they rejected five lands-for-peace offers because they preferred to pursue magical thinking, a dream sequence that ends with Israel packing up and leaving.
Polling last November showed 75 percent of Palestinians were only open to solving the conflict with Israel by implementing “The River to the Sea” solution, one in which their “Palestine” would encompass the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and Israel would be no more.
Just 17 percent of Palestinians were open to a two-state solution.
But it would have settled years ago if it were just about land and there was any openness to compromise. Heck, the resistance to compromise even predates the 1948 war. The 1937 Peel Commission offered over half of the British Palestinian Mandate to the indigenous Arab population. It was rejected.
The Palestinians might have settled years ago, and there would not be the absurdity of them deliberately breeding new generational grief. The Palestinian leadership, though, chose to cling to their humiliation, a humiliation that refuses to break into humility but rather metastasizes into Jew hatred.
If one person representing Palestinian culture sat down and prepared to listen to a counsellor, that person would be told that they cannot move forward while consumed with resentment; they would hear that victimization may initially taste sweet but quickly turns bitter. Their external locus of control assures only misery. It is just the neighboring Jews who have made the desert bloom.
Enablers ranging from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees to Hamas, and other extremists on both sides of the barricades, have used the Nakba to further their own financial and political ends while creating a convenient method for so many to vent their antisemitism and hide behind a patina of political objectivity.
But antisemitism did not start with the Nakba; it pre-dates Zionism by thousands of years.
History rhymes but seldom repeats. Of course, circumstances of displacement are not precisely the same, but why have incidents of more significant harm and displacement still seen refugees placed, allowing them to move forward in their lives?
The reason that the Nakba is so well-known is not an issue of the size of the Catastrophe; it is that Jews are involved, and the Palestinians are the losing football team that refuses to leave the pitch, staying on and becoming quite good at making a noisy spectacle of themselves.
But when calm, one might listen to quieter voices, learn the degree of injury from the Nakba, and compare it to other 20th-century displacements. Here, one notes the differing levels of displacement, death, and loss of property arising from the formation of countries or other conflicts of the last century.
The Nakba’s numbers do not sit at the top in the following chart of displacements in the 20th century:
The dispossessed of the Nakba indeed had historical ties to the land they left. But the case for Jewish ties to Israeli land is equally or more well-established, with archeology proving thousands of years of Jewish connection to their lands.
Zionists did not take any land that they were not granted by the British or that they did not buy directly from Arabs. Most Jewish land purchases were made through organizations and involved large tracts of land owned by absentee landowners. Much of the land was uncultivated and swampy, rocky, or sandy.
However, still, many Jewish organizations ended up paying exorbitant prices. For example, in 1948, rich black soil in Iowa sold for $110/acre, while Jews paid $1,000/acre for arid and semi-arid land in “Palestine.”
The bulk of the land that became the State of Israel was public land passed from the Ottoman Empire through the British Mandate to the newly founded Jewish state. About 30 percent of the land was privately owned by Jews and Arabs. Some of those Arabs remained and became citizens of Israel.
When one looks at land taken after 1948 by Israel, as they were responding to wars initiated against them, there is certainly no precedent for paying for conquered lands.
But Israel still cut new ground, voluntarily returning the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, an act unprecedented in history.
If one looks at many of the bloody borders that followed wars and country breakups and reformations, there is often much more than displacement; there is theft, and there is a significant loss of life.
None of them happened at any extraordinary level with the Nakba.
Arabs displaced via the Nakba did not suffer as much as those forced to move during the Indian partition or even the current conflict in Syria. In scale, both of these displacements dwarf the Nakba.
In the Indian partition, both Pakistani and Indian governments enacted laws to compensate property owners, but many refugees never received proper compensation. In the later 20th century, more laws were created to ensure compensation, but it was never assured in the chaos of changing borders, mass migration and the death of 1.2 million.
Considering the many fatalities and astronomical numbers above, it is difficult to frame the Nakba as truly catastrophic when compared to other permanent displacements larger and with more bloodshed and theft.
So why did the United Nations treat the original Palestinian refugees and their descendants differently?
If Israel is the problem, why wasn’t a Palestinian state declared when Egypt and Jordan were running the show in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively?
Why does the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees to resettle refugees exempt refugees from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence? Why are Palestinians not included in the 1951 UN refugee convention?
The world seems to have selective standards. And that selective morality seems only for Palestinians in conflict with Jews. In the 1991 Gulf War, 400,000 Palestinians were kicked out of Kuwait because they supported Saddam Hussein. There were no street protests; no Jewish hospitals, cafes, or bookstores being swarmed to cries of “Free Palestine!”
It is hard to look at long-running conditions in Gaza or the West Bank and say that Palestinian refugees have been coddled.
Willingly used might be a better description. Palestinian leaders themselves even prefer to keep their people in camps in Gaza and the West Bank rather than resettle them locally. Why?
To keep them miserable, bitter, and angry.
Today, scapegoating Israel distracts Middle Eastern governments from paying serious attention to their own country’s failings. So often, unhappy delusions are more saleable than admitting one’s failings.
There is no natural incentive for any country or organization being paid to help maintain the Palestinian people to do anything but agitate against Israel. Hamas or Hezbollah care not a whit for Palestinians; the Palestinians are useful PR tools for the parents of these terrorist organizations, like the Iranians and Qataris, or other Jew-haters who advocate for the right of return for the descendants of those displaced in 1948.
The so-called “right of return” is nothing more than a polite code for the demographic destruction of Israel; and of course, Israel will have none of it. Jewish politeness and deference went up in smoke in the crematoriums of Auschwitz.
The Palestinians are valuable props for the Hamas’ homicidal death cult and their masters in Qatar and Iran. Hamas loves a dead Israeli baby the most, but they will live happily with a dead Palestinian baby. How many Middle Eastern governments truly want the Palestinian situation resolved?
For them, it would be like stepping naked up out of a dirty pool; there would be too much on display. Governments prefer to stay in their cloudy pools, covering up their human rights abuses and failures while filing complaints against the one tiny democracy in the Middle East the size of New Jersey.
As some medieval European communities blamed the plague and poor rainfall on the Jews, so many bad actors push the myth that whatever the problem, Israel is at fault, all the while proclaiming that the Palestinian wound is the greatest injury on the world body. But it is not. It is just a small one that many do not want to heal.
And, of course, objections over “Palestine” also offer a convenient mask to hide antisemitism behind a mask of “anti-Zionism.”
“The Catastrophe” is not just about the land; it is that they have lost to those Jews. It is wounded pride. It is also the fact they can no longer subjugate those who, in past centuries, would be forced to follow two steps behind them while they rode high on their camels.
It is about the Islamists clinging desperately to the belief that they are innately superior to the Jews, and the assumption that the existence of Israel (a Jewish state) is simply a case of divine misalignment that God will correct. (They will offer to help.)
Or perhaps Palestinian forbearance is simply a form of denial.
Proverbs 5:4
One factual error-before the 1960s no Arabs identified themselves as, “Palestinians” they referred to themselves as, “Arabs”.
In what now seems odd- it was the Jews who identified as, “Palestinian”.
Thanks for this analysis. I'd like to add something to the mix that challenges the premise that the Nakba was a catastrophe of mass displacement. Constantin Zureiq, the person who coined the term, was referring to the shame and humiliation brought about by the failure of multiple Arab armies to defeat the lowly Jews.
In his own words: “Seven Arab countries declare war on Zionism in Palestine . . . Seven countries go to war to abolish the partition and to defeat Zionism, and quickly leave the battle after losing much of the land of Palestine – and even the part that was given to the Arabs in the Partition Plan . . . Our public diplomacy began to speak of our imaginary victories, to put the Arab public to sleep and talk of the ability to overcome and win easily – until the Nakba happened . . . Zionism is deeply implanted in Western life, while we are far from it . . . They live in the present and look to the future, while we are drugged-up dreaming of a magnificent past . . . We must admit our mistakes . . . and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot.”
But instead of waking up to Arab folly, the Nakba’s meaning was twisted and weaponized against the Jews, scapegoating them for the catastrophe that Arab’s brought upon themselves. There would have been no Arab refugee crisis had they not declared war on Israel. (And had they won, there would have been no Jews.)
Nakba became yet another in a long list of words that has been inverted and weaponized against the Jews. In 2023, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority President, signed a presidential decree stating that anyone denying the “Nakba” faced up to two years in jail. In Orwellian fashion, "Nakba” is now officially defined to mean “a crime against humanity” carried out by the “Zionist gangs.” This is pure gaslighting, and the endless rewriting of history and butchering of language is a main reason why there has not been peace since then.