Analysis: The true history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the ‘Nakba’

Contrary to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s fake narrative, the ‘Nakba’ is a catastrophe of the Arabs’ own making.

By Micha Danzig, The Algemeiner

To be clear, and contrary to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)’s fake “narrative” (where Palestinian Arabs are the innocent victims of the Jewish people regaining sovereignty in their religious, historical, and indigenous homeland), the actual history of the Arab-Israeli conflict — and the origin of the Palestinian Arabs’ annual “Nakba” commemoration — is as follows:

The Jews in both Ottoman- and British-controlled Palestine repeatedly reached out their hand in peace, over and over again. They made it very clear that the project to create a Jewish national homeland did not need to come at the expense of the local Arab populations, and that it could work in conjunction with uplifting and improving the lot for both peoples.

They took desert and swamp land that no one had lived on for centuries, let alone made productive, and made that land amazing. They planted trees all over a land where the forests had been decimated by at least 600 years of terrible neglect. They founded and created incredible cities, like Tel Aviv and Rishon LeZion.

They said yes to the partition plans in 1937 and 1947 — even though they felt that they were entitled to all of the remaining 22% of Mandatory Palestine for their national home (after the British had taken 78% of it and turned it into a new Arab state called Jordan, which had never before existed in history).

And they fought to defend that home and their sovereignty in 1948, after they were attacked in a self-described war of annihilation by the entire Arab League, which included seven combined Arab armies and paramilitary groups.

The Arabs living in Ottoman- and then British-controlled Palestine never had any nationalist aspirations for any state west of the Jordan River, or even a separate national identity before the 20th century. In fact, the entire idea of a separate Arab people known as “Palestinians” developed as a result of, and in response to, the Zionist movement for Jewish sovereignty.

As a whole, in response to all Jewish overtures for peace, and in response to the Jews’ express acceptance of two partition plans, the Arab reaction was not only utterly dismissive, but it was incredibly violent. With regularity, the Arabs in the region conducted pogroms and massacres of local Jewish populations based on both Arab and Islamist supremacist ideology, going back to 1834.

And beginning in 1920 — under the leadership of avowed Nazi collaborator and virulent antisemite Haj Amin al Husseini — the Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine massacred hundreds of Jews, and ethnically cleansed all of the Jews from Hebron in 1929. Unlike the Jewish Agency under Ben-Gurion, they did practically nothing from 1917 to 1948 to even form a quasi-government that would be ready for independence. And in 1937 and 1948, they refused the partition plans that would have created the first ever independent Arab state west of the Jordan River.

Creating Palestinian-Arab refugees

Then, their collective response to the partition plan of 1948 was to join in a self-described Arab League war of annihilation against the Jews, which ended up costing them that first-ever independent state — and creating the Palestinian-Arab refugee problem — all while leading to the death of thousands of Jews, including approximately 500 survivors of the Holocaust.

Yet, despite this history, every year in May, the Palestinian Arabs commemorate the Nakba — their “catastrophe.” However, it is a catastrophe entirely of their own making. It is a product and the natural result of a lot of really awful behavior and choices made by them and their leaders.

Just as the German people today recognize that the Germans losing World War II and failing in their effort to launch a Third Reich and murder all of the world’s Jews was far from a “catastrophe,” the Palestinian Arabs need to recognize the same about their 100-year campaign to destroy Jewish sovereignty and self-determination.

True peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict will never come until the Palestinian Arabs recognize this actual history, understand how much they embraced both Nazism and antisemitism, and how their embrace of fascism, despotism and often raw Jew-hatred has caused their “Nakba.”

Israeli-Arab conflictNakbaRashida Tlaib