Haviv Rettig Gur
It’s no accident that the anti-Israel campaign is also a war on history. What’s fascinating is that it didn’t have to be. It is entirely possible – even actually easier and more effective – to simply demand Palestinian independence. But that’s not enough. That’s not, in fact, what the most powerful of Palestinian elites have been demanding for a century: That the Jews, first their identity and story and later their existence, be erased. To that great end, even Arab history can be rewritten. A “disaster” that once meant humiliating defeat for the Arab armies was transformed into a Nakba, the word no longer translated because it had become a totem, a conscious counterpoint to Shoah as a signifier of paradigmatic victimhood. This was done two generations after the event in a fully conscious attempt to compete with the Jewish story and so rob it of its power. And of course it landed on fertile ground among western elites grown weary of bland, static liberalism and eager for new intellectual horizons that might serve as the great crusading impulse of the age. It isn’t so much a fight for Palestinian independence - any version of independence that leaves Israel intact is considered a moral failure - as for the rewriting of history to satisfy the cravings of the new crusade.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain
At least get the history right. Until the 1990s, the word Nakba did not describe Israel's independence. It described the Arab military defeat to Israel in 1949, when the Arabs -- against UN resolution stipulation -- refused the two state plan and tried to nip a nascent Israel in its bud. To verify this claim, consider that the Arab defeat in 1967, which was styled in a similar fashion, was called Naksa, which means a setback, as compared to Nakba, a disaster. Syrian Prof at AUB Constantine Zureik was the one who coined the term Nakba in his book The Meaning of the Nakba in which he said that it meant the defeat of seven Arab armies to Israel in 1949. Go read some history, and save our time and yours.