Perpetrator As Victim: No End To A Self-Inflicted "Tragedy"
What "Nakba" commemorations really disclose.
May 16, 2016
Daniel Mandel
Yesterday, May 15, Palestinians and their supporters, as they have done increasingly over recent years, marked the
nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) –– the day 68 years ago that Israel came into existence upon the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.
That juxtaposition of Israel and
nakba isn’t accidental. We’re meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the displacement of hundreds of thousand of Palestinian Arabs.
But the truth is different. A British document from the scene in early 1948, declassified in 2013,
tells the story: “the Arabs have suffered ... overwhelming defeats ... Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”
In other words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring states, were already at war and Arabs were fleeing even
before Israel came into sovereign existence on May 15, 1948.
Neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responded to Israel’s declaration of independence with full-scale hostilities. In fact, the headline for the
New York Times’ famous report on that day includes the words, ‘
Tel Aviv Is Bombed, Egypt Orders Invasion.’ And, indeed, the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.
Israel successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment –– the universally affirmed objective of the Arab belligerents –– and Palestinians came off worst of all from the whole venture. At war’s end, over 600,000 Palestinians were living as refugees under neighboring Arab regimes.
As Saudi columnist Abdulateef Al-Mulhim
observed on previous anniversary, “It was a defeat but the Arabs chose to call it a catastrophe.” In fact, the Syrian, Qustantin Zuraiq, in his 1948 pamphlet,
Ma’an al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Catastrophe), was first used the term
nakba in this context, and the catastrophe of his description was not an Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but their flight in anticipation of an Arab invasion and destruction of Israel.
Accordingly, the term
nakba, as used today, smacks of falsehood, inasmuch as it implies a tragedy inflicted by Israel. The "tragedy," of course, was self-inflicted.
As Israel’s UN ambassador Abba Eban was to
put it some years later, “Once you determine the responsibility for that war, you have determined the responsibility for the refugee problem. Nothing in the history of our generation is clearer or less controversial than the initiative of Arab governments for the conflict out of which the refugee tragedy emerged.”
However, the Palestinians do not mourn today the ill-conceived choice of going to war to abort Israel. They mourn only that they failed.
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Perpetrator As Victim: No End To A Self-Inflicted "Tragedy"