Today, the estimates are even higher. The Nakba has been foregrounded by Palestinian nationalists and their supporters over the past couple of decades, a self-conscious attempt to both demonise Israel and to rival the Jewish State’s commemoration of the Holocaust. The disaster of 1948 is used primarily to suggest that Israel was founded in an act of violence against the Arabs of Palestine.
Yet, despite the frequent invocation of the Nakba, it is clearly not very well understood. The reason that there is an Israel and not a Palestine is not that Jews defeated the Palestinians. It is because the Jews defeated the British Empire in a war of national liberation, between 1946 and 1947. It was British imperialism that faced disaster in 1947, but it was the Arabs who paid for it in 1948, when Britain backed the Arabs, with arms and British officers.
Anti-Israel activists may today try to present Israel as a ‘settler-colonial state’. But its founding, forged in the heat of anti-colonial struggle, shows it was anything but.
James Heartfield is the author of Britain’s Empires.
(1) Voices of the Nakba, by Diana Allan, Pluto, 2021, pp6, 228, 240
(2) Call to Arms, by Sir Richard Nelson Gale, Hutchinson, 1968 pp164, 170
(3) Call to Arms, by Sir Richard Nelson Gale, Hutchinson, 1968 pp165, 170
(4) Call to Arms, by Sir Richard Nelson Gale, Hutchinson, 1968 p171
(5) Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, by Caroline Elkins, Penguin, 2022, p429
(6) Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, by Caroline Elkins, Penguin, 2022, p413
(7) Call to Arms, by Sir Richard Nelson Gale, Hutchinson, 1968, p168; Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, by Caroline Elkins, Penguin, 2022,, p425
(8) 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris, Yale University Press, 2009, p192
(9) A Soldier with the Arabs, by John Glubb, Hodder and Stoughton, 1957, pp91, 134
(10) 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, by Benny Morris, Yale University Press, 2009, p366
(11) The Meaning of the Disaster, by Constantine Zurayk, Princeton, 1956, p5
