"All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place."
George Orwell, 1984
AN ENTIRE MOVEMENT RESTING ON A FALSE PREMISE
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani recently shared a video highlighting a woman that he describes as a Nakba survivor, a relatively new term dated to the 2010s that borrows from Holocaust terminology (i.e. “Holocaust survivor”). It’s worth noting that the Nakba, or the Palestinian experience of flight, expulsion, and dispossession in 1948, had a 99.999% survival rate, even by the highest estimates. For what it’s worth, a whole 1% of Israeli Jews were murdered in 1948, meaning that, proportionately, more Jews were killed than Arabs during the 1948 War.
The Holocaust, on the other hand, had a 33% survival rate; in Eastern Europe, the Holocaust had a 5-10% survival rate.
Suffering is not a competition. But the parallel wording serves one purpose: to present the establishment of the State of Israel as a great sin, akin to the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.
It’s an entirely false premise that is at blatant odds with the historical record.
THE MEANING OF THE DISASTER
The first person to coin the term “Nakba” in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was Syrian historian and Arab nationalist Constantin Zureiq, who wrote in his 1956 book, The Meaning of the Disaster,
"Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism, stop impotent before it, and then turn on their heels."
Constantin Zureiq, The Meaning of the Disaster
More astoundingly, Zureiq’s concern regarding the displaced Palestinian Arabs was that they would be...
"...forced to return to their homes, there to live under the Zionist shadow."
Constantin Zureiq, The Meaning of the Disaster
Language changes over time, of course. But it’s telling that Zureiq described the Nakba not as a Zionist “crime against humanity,” but as a military defeat.
A FALSIFIED HISTORY OF 1948
Today the mainstream left-wing narrative pertaining to the 1948 War is that the Zionist movement, entirely unprovoked, brutally displaced the native Palestinian Arabs from their homes in order to establish a Jewish state. This is a stunning rewriting of history.
Palestinian Arabs were not the innocent victims of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. They were the losers of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Those are two different things entirely.
- 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or displaced from their homes in the context of a war. The civil war phase of the war began on November 30, 1947, the morning following the United Nations Partition Vote, when Palestinian Arab militias attacked Jewish civilian buses. Had there been no war, not a single person, Jewish or Arab, would have lost their home in 1948.
- The first 100,000 or so to leave did so before any recorded Zionist expulsions or military advances and largely belonged to the upper class, including the families of the Arab leadership waging the war.
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In the beginning months of the civil war, the Zionist position was entirely defensive, based on the Haganah’s policy of Havlagah, meaning “restraint.” Their focus was on protecting Jewish areas (e.g. kibbutzim, moshavim) from Arab attacks.
It was not until the Arab forces besieged 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, depriving them of food, water, and medication and destroying all aid convoys that attempted to break through the siege, that the Zionist militias took an offensive position.
- 850,000 Jews were simultaneously driven out or expelled from their homes in 1948, yet, for some reason, that flight and expulsion is not regarded as an “original sin” in the conflict the way that the Nakba is. This includes the entirety of the Jewish population in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria, which Jordan then renamed the West Bank. The Jews in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria constituted the most ancient communities in the land, and they actually fled in response to expulsion orders.
DAVID AND GOLIATH
The story of 1948 is now presented as a case of David and Goliath, in which the all-powerful, British, United Nations, and/or American-backed Zionists dispossessed the weaker, native Palestinian population. This is another astounding rewriting of history.
- About one out of every three Zionist (and later IDF) fighters in 1948 was a recent Holocaust survivor. They too were refugees and held zero power of any kind. They had lost everything in World War II. Meanwhile, the Jewish community in pre-state and early Israel had to absorb over a million Jewish refugees into a population of about 600,000, bringing the nascent state into near economic collapse.
- The surrounding Arab states, particularly Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan (Jordan), had fully-functioning, well-equipped armies in 1948. The Zionist paramilitaries and the IDF had no tanks, no aircraft, and no navy. The British military aided not the Zionist forces, but the Arab forces, in both official and non-official capacities. The Arab Legion, for example, was commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb.
THE ARMS EMBARGO
In late 1947, the United States and the United Nation instituted an arms embargo on the Middle East, hoping to contain the conflict.
The problem? The effects of the embargo were one-sided, and not in the way that you’d think.
Because the Arab states had pre-existing, fully-functioning, professionally-equipped militaries, as well as easier access to international markets, the embargo affected them very little, if at all.
Meanwhile, the Zionist forces had nothing but smuggled, often out-of-date weaponry that they’d acquired throughout the course of the British Mandate. This, coupled with the genocidal threats from Arab leaders, made the embargo a defacto death sentence for the Jewish state.
To win the war, the Zionist forces relied on international smuggling networks. For example, former Jewish American World War II pilots risked their American citizenship by illegally smuggling retired World War II aircraft across the Atlantic. That’s how the Israeli Air Force got started.
WHO IS THE AGGRESSOR?
In the revised story of Israel’s founding, the narrative is that the Zionist forces were the brutal aggressors against an innocent people. But while the State of Israel appealed to Arabs within its borders to stay and remain a part of the country in its Declaration of Independence, the Arab states had been openly threatening to annihilate the Jewish state even in the months leading up to the Partition Vote. Shortly after partition, the Arab leadership sent out a pamphlet to the British warning them not to intervene on behalf of the Jews and promising to carry out the Final Solution.
"We appeal, in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months, to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions."
Israeli Declaration of Independence
"The Arabs have taken the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out."
Arab Higher Committee of Palestine
"“I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars."
Secretary General of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, October 11, 1947
"If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea."
Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna, august 2, 1948
Beyond genocidal threats, it was the Arabs, both in Palestine and outside of it, that sparked the civil war phase of the War of Independence (November 30, 1947 to May 14, 1948) and the all-out war phase (May 14, 1948 to July 20, 1949) that proceeded it.
So why and how is Israel reframed as the aggressor in this new narrative?
DISPLACEMENT IS PAINFUL
My argument is never that Palestinians were not expelled in 1948, that Palestinians deserved to be displaced due to the actions of their leaders, or that Palestinians did not suffer during and as a result of these events. I repeat: that is not the argument.
Some, but not all, of the Palestinian refugees in 1948 left as a result of direct expulsions at the hands of the Zionist militias or, later, the IDF. Others fled in anticipation of the advancing Zionist forces. For example, the British carried out some of these evacuations. A minority seem to have left on orders of their own leaders. It’s worth considering that not a single Palestinian Arab was displaced from a non-hostile village (Abu Ghosh being one such notable place); in other words, Zionists did not attack Palestinian Arabs because of who they were, as happened to Jews during the Holocaust, but instead carried out attacks against villages that had declared war on the Jewish state.
Regardless of the reasons for displacement, displacement is always painful. Trauma from dispossession is real. In the case of Palestinian Arabs, their entire society collapsed due to the events of 1948. Those things can and should be recognized. But what’s unacceptable is to create an alternative history of the founding of the Jewish state to justify the demonization of its entire existence.
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