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The False Palestinian "Nakba" Narrative

(BESA Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Col. (res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen - The failed Palestinian Arab attempt to destroy the State of Israel at birth, and the attendant flight of some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs, has come to be known internationally as the "Nakba," the catastrophe, with its accompanying false implication of hapless victimhood. Ironically, this was the opposite of the original meaning of the term when it was first used by Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq in his 1948 pamphlet The Meaning of the Disaster (Ma'na al-Nakba). Zureiq wrote: "When the battle broke out, 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.... We must admit our mistakes...and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot." In his 1956 book Facts on the Question of Palestine, Hajj Amin Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to 1948, avoided the term "Nakba," which was widely associated at the time with a self-inflicted Palestinian Arab disaster - either through land sales to Zionists, failure to put up a fight, or the issuing of instructions to the people to leave. "Nakba" is not a fact. It is a manipulative term designed to service the Palestinian propaganda campaign against Israel by imposing a false sense of guilt or culpability for the creation of the refugee problem. The flight of the Palestinian Arabs was the direct result of a failed "war of extermination" (in the words of the Arab League's secretary-general). As Israeli Ambassador to the UN Abba Eban said on Nov. 17, 1958: "The Arab refugee problem was caused by a war of aggression, launched by the Arab States against Israel in 1947 and 1948. Let there be no mistake. If there had been no war against Israel...there would be no problem of Arab refugees today. Once you determine the responsibility for that war, you have determined the responsibility for the refugee problem." The writer served as a senior analyst in IDF Military Intelligence.
2019-04-16 00:00:00
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