Happy Nakba! Jaffa, 1948

Elder of Ziyon
16 May '10

The Palestinian Arab press is filled with articles about the "nakba" and all the horrible things that the Jews supposedly did to the Arabs in 1948.

Here's a typical piece, by Nabil Sha'ath:

For Palestinians, today marks the 62nd year since the Nakba – our national and personal catastrophe, involving the loss of our ancestral homeland and the dispersal of three-quarters of our people into exile.

To date, the Palestinian people await Israeli recognition of its responsibility in the catastrophe and agreement to resolve the conflict based on international law, including UN resolutions.

I experienced exile first-hand. On 13 May 1948 one day before Israel’s declaration of independence, my hometown of Jaffa was captured by Zionist forces. Seventy thousand Palestinian inhabitants of the city were forced to leave, most of them by sea to Gaza, Egypt, and Lebanon. We Jaffans were literally driven out to the sea. I was 10. We were never allowed to return.

What really happened in Jaffa in 1948?

The fighting in Jaffa did not start in May, 1948, as Sha'ath implies. In fact, the first people to become refugees in the War of Independence were not Arabs - but Jews from Jaffa, forced out of their homes in August 1947 as Arabs from Jaffa started a shooting and stabbing spree.

Another 5000 Jaffa Jews lost their homes when Arabs from Jaffa attacked them in the immediate aftermath of the UN Partition resolution.

The real reason that Arabs left Jaffa was because of a combination of factors.

As soon as the fighting erupted in December, many of Jaffa's richer Arabs fled to Lebanon and Syria. These were the same people who left during the 1936-9 riots, and they assumed that they would be able to return after things calmed down. Yet their departure left Jaffa without much of their practical leadership. This fact was not lost on the middle class of Jaffa, who felt abandoned.

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