Exposing the Nakba Myth

Palestine Betrayed, by Efraim Karsh, Yale University Press, 2010,
Reviewed by Asaf Romirowsky

Asaf Romirowsky
Institute for Global Jewish Affairs
Jewish Political Studies Review
Published November '10

Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University of London, and one of the preeminent historians of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This author has had the privilege to be one of his students and to be exposed to his research and teachings.

In this, his latest book, Karsh tackles one of the core narratives that continue to fuel the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the Nakba, the Arabic term for catastrophe. The Nakba represents much more than just the physical creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, which Palestinians decree as the cataclysmic disaster, but also the Palestinian process of refusing to accept the fact that a sovereign Jewish state could be allowed to come into being.

The greatest irony is that of all places, Arab Members of Knesset proposed establishing a "Nakba Day." Although the Knesset's Ministerial Committee on Legislative Affairs eventually banned this from coming to fruition, it does indicate the challenges of Israel in 2010, which is still debating Israel of 1948. To the Knesset's credit there was an understanding that marking the Nakba is harmful and propagates the notion that Israel's birth as illegitimate.

But what was this "Nakba" all about? On the one hand, it highlights the extent and openness of Israeli society that such ideas, even ludicrous ones, could be raised in its parliament. On the other, such a proposal would require Israeli society to forget what Zionism is all about.

By examining the historical record in detail, Karsh is able to test Abba Eban's observation that the Palestinians and the Arab world at large never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Karsh clearly shows how the Yishuv (the prestatehood community) under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion sought ways to come to terms with the Arabs, and how Arab rejectionism has favored the Nakba mentality over a cooperative relationship. Just three days after the second ceasefire during Israel's War of Independence, Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that Israel needed actively to seek peace with its Arab neighbors. He explained: "only through an alliance with the State of Israel and the Jewish People will the Arab world be able to free itself from its overt and covert subservience and reliance on oppressive and exploitative foreign forces, and only through collaboration with the neighboring [Arab] states will we be able to stabilize peace in our state and country."

Moreover, Karsh describes the reasons for the Arab states effectively sending the Arabs of Haifa into exile:

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The Nakba Obsession

Sol Stern
City Journal
Vol. 20 No. 3
Summer '10

A specter is haunting the prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations—the specter of the Nakba. The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “disaster”; but in its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism). The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians’ backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land’s native people. Every year, on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western racism and colonialism.

There is only one just compensation for the long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their allies: turning the clock back to 1948. This would entail ending the “Zionist hegemony” and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees—not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well—would be allowed to return to Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and all the villages that Palestinian Arabs once occupied.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it’s also, as it happens, a myth—a radical distortion of history.

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A good book, and a bad essay

Fresnozionism.org
17 May '10

I’ve just started reading the new book by Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed. I’ll write a review at some point, but there is a good one by Daniel Pipes here.

Karsh refutes the revisionist view of the history of the state of Israel that has become the standard version taught at American (and other) universities, according to which early Zionists advocated expulsion of Palestinian Arabs and then the Hagana, Etzel and Lehi carried it out. In fact — and Karsh carefully documents this — Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky and others did not call for or desire ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and most of the exodus of Arabs in 1947-49 was not directly caused by the actions of the Jews. The nakba (catastrophe), presented in Arab mythology as an unprovoked mass expulsion on racial grounds, Karsh argues, is exactly that — a myth.

Further, he argues that the disaster that overtook the Palestinian Arabs was entirely caused by the stubborn insistence of their leadership, particularly the antisemitic, Nazi-admiring Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to oppose any accommodation with the Jews in Palestine. The violence that characterized the pre-state period, he shows, was almost entirely provoked by these leaders, who cynically fostered hatred and suspicion of the Jews and disseminated antisemitic propaganda while profiting massively from the sale of land to those same Jews whose death or expulsion they called for daily.

In the years since 1948, the view of the ‘new historians’ has almost entirely replaced that found in contemporary accounts, and has done enormous damage to Zionism and Israel. Today most American university students accept as given that the state was founded in a racist, colonialist act of oppression in which most of the indigenous population was expelled and the remainder exploited. Their opinions on today’s events — and their decisions about whom to believe — are built on the foundation of this myth. An ironic thanks is due to Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, etc., the dishonest historians who, in part because they are Jews — Israeli Jews — did so much to arm Israel’s academic and media enemies.

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