The Nakba Hoax: Aggressor Posing as Victim

Shaul Rosenfeld
May 15, 2007
Ynet Opinion

How did the Zionists, who had the gall not to put their heads through the meat grinder, turn into an "occupying entity", who forcibly expelled the original inhabitants of the land?

“This will be a war of extermination, and a momentous massacre that will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and Crusades” boasted Arab League Secretary General Abed-el-Rahman Azzam on the eve of the Arab armies invasion of Israel, May 14th, 1948. Except the secretary wasn't so lucky and instead of seeing the entire Zionist entity butchered and robbed of all possessions, he and his flock earned themselves Nakba day, marked by the Palestinians lamenting their misfortune on May 15th, one day after Israel's Independence Day, the same day that Azzam's false prophecy slapped them in the face.

Over the years, Azzam's rantings turned into false propaganda, fuelled by the works of several Jewish historians and fertilized by vivid oriental imagination, and finally begot the proliferating Palestinian Arab narrative. At the core of the narrative lay the atrocities committed by the Zionist forces in 1948 and ever since. Sorely missing from the narrative is their own responsibility for their fate. They forget to mention their rejection of even modest and restricted Jewish settlement of the meager areas promised either by the Balfour Declaration or by the Peel Report in 1937. They never recognized the UN-endorsed 1947 partition. So they decided to wage war in order to terrify the "foreign entity".

When their dreams and plans of annihilating the Zionists failed miserably despite repeated attempts to butcher and massacre the Jewish population, when their own deeds failed to help their wishes materialize, they found themselves even not even remotely close to their aspirations (some even found themselves far away from their homes) and came up with the role-reversal plot: the aggressor who failed to implement his program, became a pure and innocent victim overnight. He never did anybody any harm. The Zionists who had the nerve to resist the meat grinder became the "evil occupier that drove them out of their homes". According to this logic, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs rally on May 15 to denounce the "atrocities perpetrated against them and their forefathers ", and even more than that - to promote the necessity of letting the refugees back and the restoration of their rights. (Funny, though, this Nakba day isn't even ten years old, as it was first invented and marked in 1998, at Arafat's behest, said Arafat being in fact an Egyptian).

The gatherings, processions and rallies attract many a good Jew, whose tormented soul bleeds due to the inability to contain the "shame". The Nakba day is an example of how Palestinians in Israel and abroad have become experts of mending the "Zionist evil", in real life as well as in history and school books.

But "there's the rub", because the cheapest price demanded by the Nakba implies in fact the destruction of the Jewish state. Even the minutest reparation of the evil from the perspective of one side cannot but severely hurt the interests of the other side. The Palestinians demand the implementation of UN 194 resolution to solve the Palestinian problem, and this is more than Israel can afford.

And if that didn't suffice, there is many a good Jew advocating the idea that two states for two peoples would bring the long desired reconciliation and peace in the Middle East. Except Israeli Arabs do not share in this idyllic vision. Several organizations, such as Adala (Arabic for "justice") - have drawn up documents that put forward an entirely different concept for their future:

- the annulment of theJewish right of return; the return of all the refugees to their homes and immediate granting of Israeli citizenship; citizenship rights for other Arab refugees; automatic Israeli citizenship for all offspring born to a citizen within or without Israel and for anyone marrying an Israeli citizen; changing the definition of Israel from the "Jewish state" to a "multi-cultural state" (multi-crappy-culti); the annulment of all laws contradictory to the Palestinian constitution (Israel isn't mentioned even once in this spuhlendid document, Jerusalem is their capital, and all legislation is to be based on Sharia). All of the above plus the restitution of all lands "stolen" from the Palestinians since 1967 represent just the tip of the iceberg. This is what the moderate Israeli Arabs demand, starting with Azmi Bishara and his supporters including several Jews.

Few Israeli Spring of the Nations believers, and even fewer Arabs, bother to stop for a second and enlighten us ignorants, i.e. those of us who do not share their views, that these demands are not meant only as a challenge, they are meant to put an end to the State of Israel. Those people are not bothered by the implications of such a program, but those of us who are not in favor of a Jewish Nakba, should apply the old Jewish principle "honor and suspect them, but above all - reject them".