The term “Palestinians” was invented by ideologues in KGB because originally Arafat went to Moscow and was carefully instructed there. Ultimately it was a war between USSR and USA. Just like it is now. And Putin is on the side of Evil -Iran, China, N. Korea, Venezuela, Syria playing same KGB game, the only one he knows. The only difference is American leadership back then being understanding towards Jewish causes (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy) and hostile now (Carter, Obama, Biden)! Actually even though Truman voted for Israel in 1948 but when Arabs invaded didn’t sell Jew even one bullet! America had unlimited stockpiles of outdated weapons and planes after WWII which Israel was begging for.
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.
The current usage of “Nakba” is in fact the third iteration. The first coinage was by the Arab Christian nationalist George Antoninus who used it in his book “The Arab Awakening” to refer to the creation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine that divided Syria - the Arabs in Palestine saw themselves as South Syrians and rejected any Palestinian identity.
Also, it is important to note that the 750,000 refugee number is on the high side and the number cannot be known with any accuracy. For instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica (not known for a pro-Zionism slant) puts it around 500,000.
When UNRWA (which had a slightly different name initially when its job specifically included resettlement and was meant to be a temporary agency) was established, many Arab governments used it as a convenient dumping ground for their own poor to gain access to free housing, medical care and education. There was no vetting worth the name in those chaotic early days and, in the early 50s it was blocked from auditing its rolls - so that even those who had died or relocated continued having funds sent to who knows what black hole of corruption. Things have never really improved.
Interesting. I did not know that. I'd like to learn more about this, possibly write something myself that might include all iterations. You seem to know a lot about this. Would you say that my comment was factually correct or do you have any constructive critique? Would love to read more if you have any good articles or books to recommend.
Yes, it is an excellent piece. But don't waste your time with the protesters. They would tear to pieces this article just as they have torn down the posters of the hostages stolen from Israel by Hamas.
Actually one doesn’t have to go further then just read Quran. It’s all there! Hatred towards Jews and all infidels! Now Muslim so called leaders are just playing on weaknesses of the Western world and overwhelming vulgar antisemitism but actually they want to concur the whole world and they are actually succeeding.
Anti Israel protestors want to be part of a group. That’s going to trump facts for most of them. Same as it did for supporters of the Soviet Union many of them “intellectuals.” Some wanted what Stalin did. Some were appalled and switched sides. But a majority clung to their preferred narrative.
It looks like a cult as much as it does an ideological movement. I don’t excuse people for ignorance. There’s such a thing as willful ignorance. And conformity. And this is largely where evil gets fuel.
The refugee list needs to include the roughly same number of Arab Jews who fled when multiple Arab countries invaded Israel. And Israel took on this 3/4 million. No one bothers to analyze why if Arab countries are so sympathetic to Palestinians they don’t absorb them. Palestinians are treated horribly in Lebanon. Also worthy of mentioning are the hundreds of thousand of Afghani refugees deported from Pakistan with many more hiding. No protests. Barely registers.
Excellent article. When compared to the severity of the conditions that millions of displaced refugees from the 2nd world war experienced in order to start a new life, the result of nakba was that refugees would be required to resettle probably not more than 100km from their original homes, in a region with the same language, customs, religion and environmental conditions. The real tragedy is their subsequent exploitation by their so called good neighbours in the same region.
I've long suspected the upset with 1948 was not that they lost land -- but lost it to the Jews.
If the school bully is punched out by the football hero, he might at least appreciate that it took the strongest other boy in school to take him out.
But if he's punched out by the school nerd, he's much more bitter. Not just for losing, but for losing it to the four-eyed twerp who, by all rights, he should be bullying.
All politics is local (as that Irish congressman Tip O’Neill famously said).
Imagine an ugly plot of land that was a garbage dump where nothing grew. For generations, no one was able to do anything with that land or chose not to do so. But then someone buys the plot, works hard over many years, and makes it into a spectacular garden full of crops and beautiful homes. It’s so beautiful that it makes all the other plots around it look even uglier.
The neighbors now have two possible responses: admiration for the new owners who beautified the land along with an invitation to teach them how to make their plots more beautiful and productive, or jealousy, envy, and anger which manifests itself in attempts to destroy the beautiful garden and blame the new owners for making the neighbors’ land and lives worse.
The Arabs could stop this conflict tomorrow if they wished. They could do it in multiple ways. They could have peace. They don’t want it. They are fine with dead Jews and dead Gazans, because the Jews are the objects of their hatred and the Gazans are expendable. In the last 1000 years, what has the Arab world contributed to civilization? What great works of art, literature or science? What social structures have they created that are the envy of the world? What great humanitarian acts have they shown us? The intellectual and scientific output of one large Western European country, or Israel, in 10 years is more than the entire Arab world over centuries. Anybody with the least bit of integrity and knowledge of history knows that the entire Arab story around the history of Israel is a bunch of lies and excuses. So why does the world cater to these sadists? Simple - oil money and Jew hatred. Fuck the Western phonies who tout anti-racism and diversity. They are racist poseurs and halfwits. The West could also apply enough pressure to stop this conflict permanently. But they coddle the “Palestinians”. No other country would put up with the crap that Israel is routinely subjected to- endless terror attacks and rockets. Israel could destroy Gaza in one night if they wanted. But they try to minimize collateral damage. And yet they continuously find themselves hamstrung by political manipulation from their duplicitous “allies” including the Obama- Biden Administration.
The world likes the Jews to suffer. The imbeciles in Europe massacred the Jews for centuries because they needed scapegoats for their own shitty societies and shitty governments. Murderers and hypocrites.Now they are being colonized by violent, uneducated Muslims who hate the West in their latest idiotic social engineering experiment. Enjoy. Whose fault will it be this time when it all goes to hell again in the very near future? When Iran sends a nuke to London or Paris, who will Europe blame? Morons.
Wow! Such a powerful piece. I agree100% with what you say. The whole of this history has been developed to fit an entirely different and false agenda. It’s disgusting!
“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?”
To be fair that was in 1967. Things were very different back then and Palestinian nationalists were openly focused on destroying Israel as their main goal. In 1988 the PLO recognized Israel and adopted the two-state solution as its official policy.
Of course as they say, talk is cheap. And the PLO nowadays is weak and irrelevant, and is only there in the West Bank because Israel props it up and fights Hamas. Hamas is theocratic and ISIS-like, and so far worse than the PLO ever was.
Thank you. Replying in relation to the previous dozen Comments. I agree it is a well written essay. I agree with most Commenters that - yes it is well written and accurate - but it is 'preaching to the converted'. My own views include: a) since Shemini Atzeret (Oct 7) we Jewish folks of all persuasions have a golden opportunity to enter "The BIG Lesson" b) for starters The BIG Lesson begins with "Now What"? c) The BIG Lesson for each of us is likely 100s of small and large lessons d) I think/image/hope/dream that there is a BIG turn around in attitudes of the vast majority of folks connected to the 3 historically linked 'religions' i.e. Judaism, Christianity, Islam. I won't detail my views about that here/publicly. e) for a huge majority of Jewish persons I think/imagine that most of us, and many of our Parents and Grandparents "threw the baby out with the bathwater" i.e. the precious baby was and is Torah/Tanach/Talmud etc. f) no matter how small a step one must step backwards and return or renew ones return to Torah in thoughts/speech/actions. Here is an 'online' Rabbi who I only came across 2 weeks ago. I've watched 4 of his recent video lessons - here is the first that I viewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3HduPDJAjo
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”.
The term “Palestinians” was invented by ideologues in KGB because originally Arafat went to Moscow and was carefully instructed there. Ultimately it was a war between USSR and USA. Just like it is now. And Putin is on the side of Evil -Iran, China, N. Korea, Venezuela, Syria playing same KGB game, the only one he knows. The only difference is American leadership back then being understanding towards Jewish causes (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy) and hostile now (Carter, Obama, Biden)! Actually even though Truman voted for Israel in 1948 but when Arabs invaded didn’t sell Jew even one bullet! America had unlimited stockpiles of outdated weapons and planes after WWII which Israel was begging for.
Even UNRWA still refers to them officially as “Arabs of Palestine” and not Palestinians.
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.
The current usage of “Nakba” is in fact the third iteration. The first coinage was by the Arab Christian nationalist George Antoninus who used it in his book “The Arab Awakening” to refer to the creation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine that divided Syria - the Arabs in Palestine saw themselves as South Syrians and rejected any Palestinian identity.
Also, it is important to note that the 750,000 refugee number is on the high side and the number cannot be known with any accuracy. For instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica (not known for a pro-Zionism slant) puts it around 500,000.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Nations-Relief-and-Works-Agency-for-Palestine-Refugees-in-the-Near-East
When UNRWA (which had a slightly different name initially when its job specifically included resettlement and was meant to be a temporary agency) was established, many Arab governments used it as a convenient dumping ground for their own poor to gain access to free housing, medical care and education. There was no vetting worth the name in those chaotic early days and, in the early 50s it was blocked from auditing its rolls - so that even those who had died or relocated continued having funds sent to who knows what black hole of corruption. Things have never really improved.
Interesting. I did not know that. I'd like to learn more about this, possibly write something myself that might include all iterations. You seem to know a lot about this. Would you say that my comment was factually correct or do you have any constructive critique? Would love to read more if you have any good articles or books to recommend.
Excellent piece! I’m tempted to print it out and distribute it to anti–Israel protestors.
Yes, it is an excellent piece. But don't waste your time with the protesters. They would tear to pieces this article just as they have torn down the posters of the hostages stolen from Israel by Hamas.
Love this article!!!....utterly brilliant!!.....thank you so much for writing the Truth.....
Actually one doesn’t have to go further then just read Quran. It’s all there! Hatred towards Jews and all infidels! Now Muslim so called leaders are just playing on weaknesses of the Western world and overwhelming vulgar antisemitism but actually they want to concur the whole world and they are actually succeeding.
Anti Israel protestors want to be part of a group. That’s going to trump facts for most of them. Same as it did for supporters of the Soviet Union many of them “intellectuals.” Some wanted what Stalin did. Some were appalled and switched sides. But a majority clung to their preferred narrative.
It looks like a cult as much as it does an ideological movement. I don’t excuse people for ignorance. There’s such a thing as willful ignorance. And conformity. And this is largely where evil gets fuel.
The refugee list needs to include the roughly same number of Arab Jews who fled when multiple Arab countries invaded Israel. And Israel took on this 3/4 million. No one bothers to analyze why if Arab countries are so sympathetic to Palestinians they don’t absorb them. Palestinians are treated horribly in Lebanon. Also worthy of mentioning are the hundreds of thousand of Afghani refugees deported from Pakistan with many more hiding. No protests. Barely registers.
Well compiled and argued article!
Excellent article. When compared to the severity of the conditions that millions of displaced refugees from the 2nd world war experienced in order to start a new life, the result of nakba was that refugees would be required to resettle probably not more than 100km from their original homes, in a region with the same language, customs, religion and environmental conditions. The real tragedy is their subsequent exploitation by their so called good neighbours in the same region.
I'm curious. Specifically what neighbors are you referring to?
The adjacent bordering territories of Lebanon, Syria. Jordan and Egypt.
I've long suspected the upset with 1948 was not that they lost land -- but lost it to the Jews.
If the school bully is punched out by the football hero, he might at least appreciate that it took the strongest other boy in school to take him out.
But if he's punched out by the school nerd, he's much more bitter. Not just for losing, but for losing it to the four-eyed twerp who, by all rights, he should be bullying.
Excellent essay. Thank you.
All politics is local (as that Irish congressman Tip O’Neill famously said).
Imagine an ugly plot of land that was a garbage dump where nothing grew. For generations, no one was able to do anything with that land or chose not to do so. But then someone buys the plot, works hard over many years, and makes it into a spectacular garden full of crops and beautiful homes. It’s so beautiful that it makes all the other plots around it look even uglier.
The neighbors now have two possible responses: admiration for the new owners who beautified the land along with an invitation to teach them how to make their plots more beautiful and productive, or jealousy, envy, and anger which manifests itself in attempts to destroy the beautiful garden and blame the new owners for making the neighbors’ land and lives worse.
We know what Arab leaders have chosen.
Thanks again for the keeper essay.
Brilliant and so important!
The Arabs could stop this conflict tomorrow if they wished. They could do it in multiple ways. They could have peace. They don’t want it. They are fine with dead Jews and dead Gazans, because the Jews are the objects of their hatred and the Gazans are expendable. In the last 1000 years, what has the Arab world contributed to civilization? What great works of art, literature or science? What social structures have they created that are the envy of the world? What great humanitarian acts have they shown us? The intellectual and scientific output of one large Western European country, or Israel, in 10 years is more than the entire Arab world over centuries. Anybody with the least bit of integrity and knowledge of history knows that the entire Arab story around the history of Israel is a bunch of lies and excuses. So why does the world cater to these sadists? Simple - oil money and Jew hatred. Fuck the Western phonies who tout anti-racism and diversity. They are racist poseurs and halfwits. The West could also apply enough pressure to stop this conflict permanently. But they coddle the “Palestinians”. No other country would put up with the crap that Israel is routinely subjected to- endless terror attacks and rockets. Israel could destroy Gaza in one night if they wanted. But they try to minimize collateral damage. And yet they continuously find themselves hamstrung by political manipulation from their duplicitous “allies” including the Obama- Biden Administration.
The world likes the Jews to suffer. The imbeciles in Europe massacred the Jews for centuries because they needed scapegoats for their own shitty societies and shitty governments. Murderers and hypocrites.Now they are being colonized by violent, uneducated Muslims who hate the West in their latest idiotic social engineering experiment. Enjoy. Whose fault will it be this time when it all goes to hell again in the very near future? When Iran sends a nuke to London or Paris, who will Europe blame? Morons.
Wow! Such a powerful piece. I agree100% with what you say. The whole of this history has been developed to fit an entirely different and false agenda. It’s disgusting!
“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?”
To be fair that was in 1967. Things were very different back then and Palestinian nationalists were openly focused on destroying Israel as their main goal. In 1988 the PLO recognized Israel and adopted the two-state solution as its official policy.
Of course as they say, talk is cheap. And the PLO nowadays is weak and irrelevant, and is only there in the West Bank because Israel props it up and fights Hamas. Hamas is theocratic and ISIS-like, and so far worse than the PLO ever was.
Thank you. Replying in relation to the previous dozen Comments. I agree it is a well written essay. I agree with most Commenters that - yes it is well written and accurate - but it is 'preaching to the converted'. My own views include: a) since Shemini Atzeret (Oct 7) we Jewish folks of all persuasions have a golden opportunity to enter "The BIG Lesson" b) for starters The BIG Lesson begins with "Now What"? c) The BIG Lesson for each of us is likely 100s of small and large lessons d) I think/image/hope/dream that there is a BIG turn around in attitudes of the vast majority of folks connected to the 3 historically linked 'religions' i.e. Judaism, Christianity, Islam. I won't detail my views about that here/publicly. e) for a huge majority of Jewish persons I think/imagine that most of us, and many of our Parents and Grandparents "threw the baby out with the bathwater" i.e. the precious baby was and is Torah/Tanach/Talmud etc. f) no matter how small a step one must step backwards and return or renew ones return to Torah in thoughts/speech/actions. Here is an 'online' Rabbi who I only came across 2 weeks ago. I've watched 4 of his recent video lessons - here is the first that I viewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3HduPDJAjo