The Nakba narrative, from the Arabic word “catastrophe,” is now associated with the so-called ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the state of Israel in 1948. However, when the term Nakba was first used, it had nothing to do with the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians. The phrase first surfaced in 1948, with the publication, “The Meaning of the Nakba” by Constantin Zureiq, the most important Arab nationalist intellectual at the time. He saw the defeat of the Arab armies, as a catastrophe for allowing an alien Jewish state within Arab lands; which is the view of Islamic fundamentalists like Hamas. After...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
