The Nakba 2023

The Palestinians are now calling their displacement from Northern Gaza and its destruction “The Nakba 2023.” Nakba, which is Arabic for disaster, is their term for Israel’s 1948 War of Independence when thousands of Palestinians fled their homes. We have all witnessed how Palestinians brought The Nakba 2023 upon themselves following their vicious unprovoked massacre of Israelis on October 7. What is less well remembered is that the Palestinians provoked the Nakba of 1948 in the same way. This is important to understand, because the core of the Palestinian narrative is that they were innocent victims of Israeli aggression in 1948 and that this original sin on the part of Israel justifies every subsequent Palestinian atrocity.

The problem with this argument is that the premise is not only false but a reversal of the truth. Palestinian terror aimed at annihilating the Jews of Israel has been the cause of the conflict from the start not its result. Contrary to Palestinian propaganda, Palestinian terror is not a reaction to Israeli military action; rather Israel’s wars have, from the beginning, been in reaction to Palestinian terror and in defense of the Jews of Israel against the Palestinian’s genocidal schemes.

In 1929, nineteen years before Israel’s War of Independence, the Palestinians massacred the entire ancient Jewish community of Hebron. During the 1930’s, hundreds more Jews were murdered by the Palestinians led by their Grand Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini. In 1941, Husseini organized the massacre and expulsion of the entire ancient Jewish community of Iraq. Husseini spent the war years in Berlin as an advisor to Hitler on the Final Solution, which he advocated (some say initiated) and participated in. (For more on Husseini see The Nazi roots of Palestinian Nationalism.)

In 1948 the Palestinians dragged 12 Arab states into war with Israel, a war that Israel ultimately won. This victory enabled the survival of the Jewish state that the United Nations had voted to establish in part of the Land of Israel. The Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan because, then as now, they claim exclusive rights to the Land of Israel. Assuming that the Jews would do to them what they had planned to do to us, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in Israel for Judea, Samaria and Gaza which remained under Arab control.

Since Israel’s independence in 1948, the Palestinians have perpetrated hundreds more atrocities, killing thousands of Israeli civilians in the most depraved and brutal ways imaginable. They massacred school children in Maalot and Avvivim and Israeli athletes at the Munich Massacre in 1972. Palestinian terrorists took a baby girl from her mother and smashed her head against a rock in Nahariya, blew up a Lag B’Omer celebration in Tiberias, a Tel Aviv shopping mall, a Passover seder at a hotel in Netanya, buses, markets and a packed disco in Jaffa. Since 2001, Palestinians have launched thousands of rockets at Israeli cities.

Palestinian terrorist murdered Jews not only in Israel, but around the world. They blew up and killed hundreds of innocent people at a Jewish deli in Paris, a synagogue in Istanbul, a Jewish Center in Buenos Aires and in countless other atrocities.  Those familiar with the dark history of Palestinian nationalism are not surprised by the vicious anti-Semitic brutality we saw on October 7.

Each of Israel’s wars with the Palestinians and with the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah have been reactions to terrorist atrocities. In 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani following a decade of cross border terror attacks by the PLO from Lebanon. Continued Palestinian terror resulted in Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982, Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Operation Cast Lead in 2008, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Operation Guardian of the Walls 2021 and Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022.

This genocidal hatred on the part of the Palestinians is not a result of anything the Jews are doing, although they will always claim that it is.  Their fanatical hatred is driven by their own intolerance and by genocidal anti-Semitism fanned by their leaders from Haj Amin al Husseini through his nephew and successor Yasser Arafat to Arafat’s deputy and successor Mahmud Abbas and the psychopathic sadist Yahya Sinwar and the other heads of Hamas.

From the beginning of the conflict until today, the Palestinians have repeatedly brought disaster down upon themselves by denying historic Jewish rights in the Land of Israel, refusing to live in peace with us and violently attempting to reverse history and erase the State of Israel. The Palestinians have no one to blame but themselves for the Nakba of 1948, the Nakba of 2023, which has left Gaza in ruins, and their many other Nakbas in between.