Arab Nakba

One of the big successes of the Palestinianist propaganda machine is Nakba Day, which occurs every May. Nakba (“catastrophe”) is a deliberately provocative term and refers to the 600,000 refugees who were created as a consequence of the Arab rejection of the Jewish state and the ensuing assault on the newly-born State of Israel. Nakba Day is often marked by speeches and rallies by Arabs in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and in other places around the world, including London and New York.

The trouble with commemorating the Nakba is that it overlooks some inconvenient facts, which do not fit the overheated narrative of Palestinian-as-victim. During the Israeli War of Independence in 1947-48, Arab leaders deliberately spread false rumors that women were being raped in order to provoke Arab armies to fight on their behalf. The Arab armies encouraged the Palestinian to evacuate while they fought their war against the Israelis. The refugee crisis was not engineered by Israel, nor did Israel deliberately expel the Palestinians. According to the Institute for Palestine Studies, 68% of refugees "left without seeing an Israeli soldier".

UN Resolution 194, which was passed on December 11, 1948, recommended that refugees wishing to return home and live in peace with their neighbors should be allowed to do so. This resolution was never applied. Not because of Israeli opposition but due to the unanimous rejection of the Arab governments. If the Arabs had accepted the resolution it would have meant the implicit recognition of Israel and the laying down of arms and compensation for Jewish refugees.

Israel's neighbors refused to incorporate the displaced Palestinian Arabs, preferring to keep them in camps in the hope that the Zionist entity would soon be destroyed. In fact, Mahmoud Abbas has accused the Arab armies of forcing the Palestinians to emigrate and then putting them into ghettos. The United Nations aggravated the problem by creating a unique category for the Palestinian Arab refugees.

The UN recognized that many of the refugees who fled their villages had not lived in Israel/Palestine for very long. But nonetheless it decided to establish a unique criterion for the Arab refugees. This meant that any Arab who had lived in Israel for only two years before fleeing was classed as a refugee. Moreover, their descendants are also classed as refugees. As such, there was a sevenfold increase in the Palestinian population between 1967 and 2002. (Arafat said that the wombs of Palestinian women were the “secret weapon” of his cause.)

The UN has perpetuated the crisis by maintaining Palestinian refugee camps and handing out aid money. Strangely, since 1971 and for nearly ten years, the UN General Assembly annually condemned Israel for trying to rehabilitate the refugees.  This condemnation always had one requirement: “Send the refuges to the camps.”