The Nakba Myth

Introduction

After the new State of Israel signed armistice agreements in 1949, a new war against the Jewish state began. This was a war of propaganda that continues to this day. Its foundation was a single myth, what came to be known as the Nakba or ‘disaster’.

On 24 February 1949 the Israel–Egypt Armistice Agreement was signed in Rhodes, mediated by the United Nations. On 23 March 1949 came the armistice with Lebanon, 3 April with Jordan. Agreement with Syria was reached on 20 July 1949. No armistice agreement was ever reached with Iraq, which withdrew its forces in March 1949, or with Saudi Arabia.

Thus came the official cessation of hostilities of the first Arab-Israeli war which had begun in May 1948 when the British withdrew officially from the Palestine / Land of Israel Mandate territory. The parties agreed that the armistice agreements would serve only as interim agreements until replaced by permanent peace treaties. The 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and its Arab neighbors came to be known as The Green Line.

This triumph of survival against the odds for the Jewish Yishuv, now the new State of Israel, was of course a cataclysmic event for the Arab population, which had instigated the war, but were on the losing side. Their loss would increasingly be know as the Nakba, the disaster of defeat and dislocation suffered by the Arabs of Mandate Palestine / Land of Israel.

The term Nakba was first applied to the events of 1947-1948 by Constantin K. Zurayk, a Syrian intellectual and Arab nationalist, in his 1948 book Ma3nā an-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster).

To Zurayk the defeat of the Arabs was rooted in their hostility to progress and modernity:

The reason for the victory of the Zionists was that the roots of Zionism are grounded in modern Western life, while we for the most part are still distant from this life and hostile to it. They live in the present and for the future, while we continue to dream the dreams of the past and to stupefy ourselves with its fading glory

Thus to Zurayk, the Nakba was a failure of Arab civilization, not a particular victory of the Jewish people. This failure to engage with Israel as a Jewish national project, rather than as a symptom of Arab weakness, has become part of the mythology of Nakba. Thus Israelis are seen as nothing more than the agents of Arab humiliation, and their connection to the Land of Israel is ignored or dismissed in favor of an idea that they are likely to return to their diaspora countries if conditions became unfavourable for them. This refusal to engage with the reality of a Jewish Israeli national identity, has plagued Palestinians ever since. Paradoxically, Palestinians have developed their own national identity while denying the obvious development of an Israeli Jewish one.

Even more crippling to the failure to process the defeat has been the refusal to accept the course of events that culminated in that defeat. In fact the many choices of Arab leaders over decades to use violence and refuse negotiation with the Jews led to the situation where the Yishuv was forced to fight a ‘War of Annihilation' to massacre the Jews, as Azzam Pasha, head of the Arab League, famously stated. By seeing Jewish national aspirations only as a symptom of Arab weakness, the many squandered opportunities for peace through compromise are ignored and the dislocation of the Nakba itself seems inevitable. In reality, even early in 1947, the tragic outcome was anything but inevitable.

To understand this failure to engage with the reality of the situation after 1949, we will of course also have to address the most painful aspect of the Arab defeat, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and destruction of hundreds of their villages and towns. This will mean exploring the roots and leadership of this society and why it failed to enage with Jewish nationalist identity.

Origins

The Jewish Diaspora

By the end of the 1st Century BCE the Herodian Kingdom of Judea was no longer an independent Jewish state but a puppet of Rome. Yet it was wealthy, densely populated, famed for its high quality agricultural produce and the site of one of antiquity’s largest pilgrimage centres, Jerusalem. Few could have foreseen the cataclysmic events that would destroy this prosperous country during the following two centuries.

The defeat of the Jews was so complete at the hands of the Roman Empire that the Jews went from a client people of Rome to a despised, colonised and subjugated enemy population of the Roman and later Byzantine imperial state. The survivors attempted many times to reconstitute their national home, but only briefly regained autonomy during the beginning of the 7th Century during a war between the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires. Thus the final attempt to restore Jewish national rule in the Land of Israel ended in failure on the eve of the Arab Islamic invasion that would turn the Land of Israel into a backwater of an Islamic Empire. Thus began the next stage of Jewish decline in their homeland, one that saw the Jews become a small minority in a depopulated country so damaged, by the 1500s it could only sustain around 6% of its 1st C population. By this time of course most Jews lived in the diaspora, including the rapidly increasing Jewish communities of southern and eastern Europe.