On May 18, a photo of two Israeli soldiers circulated on social media. They were standing in front of a bullet-riddled house in what appeared to be Gaza. Its wall was spray-painted with the words "Nakba 2023."
This apparent mocking acknowledgment of the term's importance put those two soldiers in a peculiar kind of agreement with millions of Palestinians who mourn the event known as the Nakba — Arabic for "catastrophe" — not only as a historical moment that shattered their nation and drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, but also as a state of anguished existence that continues to define their lived experience.
The events most closely associated with the Nakba occurred in 1947 and 1948, amid the formulation of a plan to divide the territory known as Palestine between the then-indigenous Arab population (which encompassed both Muslims and Christians) and Jewish settlers who had been migrating to Palestine in increasing numbers since the late 19th century. Many Jewish settlers had emigrated from Europe to escape antisemitic pogroms and persecution, and many more were arriving in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in which roughly 6 million Jews had died. The partition plan was devised by the British government, which had administered Palestine since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and a special committee of the United Nations, a brand new global entity.
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Worldwide sympathy was on the side of the Jewish arrivals, understandably enough, but Palestinian Arabs questioned why they should have to surrender their land, as they saw it, to pay for Europe's sins. Nearly all of them opposed the partition plan, which gave 56% of the territory in Palestine to the significantly smaller Jewish population.
Zionist leaders, who had longed for a Jewish nation-state and were essentially promised one by the British in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, urged their followers to accept the U.N. proposal as a stepping stone toward even further expansion. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's revered founding father and first prime minister, described the plan as "the decisive stage in the beginning of full redemption and the most wonderful lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine," echoing the maximalist Zionist creed which held that Jews had a historic or divine right to the entire territory of Palestine from "the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea."
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's revered founding father and first prime minister, described the partition plan as "the most wonderful lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine."
As the U.N. prepared to vote on partition, fighting broke out between Jews and Arabs. In one violent tit-for-tat, members of Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary force, threw bombs at Arab workers standing in line at a Haifa oil refinery. The furious survivors went on a rampage, lynching several of their Jewish........