CAMERA Webinar on “False” Nakba Narratives

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) held a webinar on June 1 aimed at dispelling the “false” narratives of the Nakba.

Dr. Alex Safian, Associate Director and Research Director of CAMERA, argued during the webinar that “the Nakba narrative is an inversion of history portraying the victims of Arab aggression as the perpetrators and initiators of aggression, portraying self-defense of Arabs attack as a brutal assault on the Arabs.” The term “Nakba” is Arabic for catastrophe, which Safian acknowledged does accurately describe the situation for the Palestinians in the aftermath of the 1948 war, but contended that the Nakba has been “mostly self-inflicted, including their spurning of many opportunities for a Palestinian state.”

The Nakba narrative stems from Soviet propaganda in the 1950s in which they used writers with “Jewish-sounding names” to churn out pamphlets and articles accusing Israel of being “imperialist, colonialist Nazi-like,” all of which are terms similar to how the Soviets described their enemies. The Nakba narrative has since been furthered by the United Nation’s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution and then the U.N.-sponsored Durban conference in 2001 that delegitimized Israel, per Safian.

“Israel’s supposed original sin is the key to the anti-Israel movement and that makes debunking and exposing the false narrative absolutely crucial,” Safian contended.

He then delved into the history of Israel’s founding and the ensuing 1948 war, pointing out that in 1937 David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the main founder of the Jewish state, wrote in a letter to his son: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places. All our aspiration is built on the assumption proven throughout all our activity that there’s enough activity in the country for ourselves and for the Arabs.” This letter has been “widely mangled” to argue that Ben-Gurion had called for expelling Arabs from the land, Safian argued, pointing out that Israeli historian Efraim Karsh obtained the original letter from Ben-Gurion and found that Ben-Gurion did not call for expelling Arabs from the land as anti-Israel activists claim. Safian proceeded to cite a 1947 speech from Ben-Gurion where he declared: “In our state there will be non-Jews as well and all of them will be equal to citizens, equal in everything without exception the attitude of the Jewish state toward Arab citizens will be an important factor, though not the only one inbuilding good neighborly relations with the Arab states.” 

But Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and then-leader of the Palestinians, “chose to make common cause with the Nazis” during the Holocaust and called for the “elimination of the Jewish state,” Safian said, pointing out that al-Husseini Helped organize Bosnian Muslim SS units against Serbian Christian and Jews, gave pro-Nazi broadcasts to the world and helped impede efforts to rescue Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust. After World War II had ended, Yugoslavia attempted to prosecute al-Husseini for war crimes, prompting al-Husseini to flee to Egypt, where he received sanctuary, per Safian.

Ultimately, the Jews accepted the 1947 UN partition plan that would have created both an Arab and Jewish state, even though the Jews were “disappointed at how little land they would get.” The Arabs rejected the plan and launched a war against the newly established Jewish state instead, thinking they would ““easily slaughter” the Jews, but when the war turned against them Palestinians began to “panic” thus leading to Palestinian refugee crisis, Safian said.

He also argued that 10% of the Palestinian refugees came from Haifa, where they were not expelled; in fact, the Jews and a British general encouraged the Palestinians in Haifa to stay and offered a ceasefire, but the Palestinians refused because a ceasefire would have been seen as “collaboration and treachery.” Safian cited Israeli historian Benny Morris to substantiate his claims.

Safian was then asked by moderator Jonah Cohen, director of communications for CAMERA, to respond to various criticisms that Safian had received to his May 17 column “The Nakba Narrative Is Nonsense.” One such criticism is that Safian’s piece engaged in “Nakba denial,” a term Safian rejected. “I’m denying that Israel is responsible for that [Palestinian] catastrophe,” he said. Safian also dismissed analogies between the Holocaust and the Nakba. “Show me the death camps of the Palestinians. There were none,” he said. Another criticism was that his  “Nakba Narrative Is Nonsense” piece was “racist”; Safian retorted that the allegation of “racism” has been used as a cudgel to silence people. He argued that even some Palestinians reject specific Nakba narrative claims, as some Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin deny that a massacre took place there during the 1948 war. “That some Palestinians reject specific nakba claims, such as some who were in Deir Yassin during the 1948 war and say that a massacre never took place there. “Facts are stubborn things, as the saying goes, and it has nothing to do with race,” Safian said.

Cohen proceeded to ask Safian to respond to those who claimed that Israel ethnically cleansed 400-500 Arab villages to build the state; Safian replied that the claim largely comes from Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi’s book “All That Remains.” “Israeli geographers who have gone through it have said that there are vast mistakes and exaggerations,” Safian said. “Some of the villages which he claims were depopulated by Israel were villages that had not been inhabited for a hundred years at that point they were basically abandoned Palestinian villages. Many of the others there was no expulsion.” He again pointed to what occurred in Haifa to substantiate the claim of no expulsion, which he argued was the “largest single contribution to the Palestinian refugee problem.”

Safian also argued that a large amount of Palestinian refugees came from Jaffa; Safian said that the Israelis offered a ceasefire that had terms for a right of return for both Jewish and Arab refugees. The Arabs wanted to accept the deal, but al-Husseini ultimately nixed it, Safian contended. Many of the Arab refugees then fled to Lebanon. According to Safian, Palestinian historian Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was on a ship to Lebanon and was asked by sailor why he didn’t stay and fight; Abu-Lughod never had a good answer, claimed Safian.

In Safian’s view, the only major expulsion of Arabs by Israelis during the 1948 war was in the town of Lydda (today Lod) and the neighboring Ramle, “but that was a situation where the Israelis conquered this town, and the town agreed to surrender to give up their weapons and stop fighting.” In return, the Israelis would let the Arabs stay, and the Israelis largely withdrew but left a few soldiers behind. The reason the Israelis conquered Lydda-Ramle is because it was a “garrison town with Jordanian soldiers and militia members there between Tel Aviv and Jerualem,” Safian said. The Jordanians proceeded to conduct a reconnaissance, prompting the Israelis to shoot at them in order to drive them away. However, the townspeople of Lydda-Ramle took this as an attempt by the Jordanians to retake the town so they launched an “uprising” against the Israelis. “Under very difficult circumstances and outnumbered, the Israelis succeeded in retaking the town,” Safian said. The Israelis concluded that the townspeople had to leave––with the exception of the elderly, women, children and some Christians––because they felt the townspeople reneged on the agreement.

The expulsion of Arabs from Lydda-Ramle later became the results of a scandal in Israel when Yitzhak Rabin, who led the operations in Lydda-Ramle, included the expulsion in his autobiography but the Israeli military censored it and then the censored portion was leaked to The New York Times. Safian doesn’t understand why the military tried to censor it, arguing that “there’s nothing to be ashamed of” since “Arabs who left were relieved that the Jews didn’t do them what they had planned to do to the Jews.”

Those promulgating the Nakba narrative also argue that the Israelis massacred Palestinians in the fishing town of Tantura during the 1948 war, a claim that Safian believes is false. Safian pointed out that the first person to ever bring up Tantura was a graduate student named Teddy Katz, an Israeli Jew, at Haifa University; he claimed in his master’s thesis in the 1990s that he had interviewed elderly residents in Tantura who “said there was a terrible massacre, that the Jews took the town and then massacred the residents.” The student’s thesis advisor was historian Ilan Pape, who Safian described as “one of the worst of the radical revisionist historian who was denounced by even other revisionist historians for telling so many lies and defending the telling of those lies.” Eventually, a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Maariv got wind of Katz’s thesis and published a massive story on it. “The Israeli unit which had taken Tantura … they were very angry about being charged with committing crimes” because the “veterans knew this had not happened,” Safian said. Thus, the Israeli unit sued Katz for libel; during the trial, Katz’s interview recordings were unearthed and showed that the interviews did not in fact substantiate the claim that a massacre occurred, as the interviewees said that those that died had died fighting. Ultimately, Katz settled the case and issued an apology and a retraction.

A recent documentary has been released purportedly interviewing veterans who claim that a massacre did in fact occur at Tantura, but Safian questioned the credibility of the film. “I’m not sure those people were actually veterans from that fighting or if they’re in their right minds,” Safian said, pointing out that when Katz interviewed those that fought in the war the veterans were young enough then to remember it but now it’s too late.

Safian said that a lot of Nakba literature comes from Middle East Studies programs, which he called a “wasteland” because they tend to subscribe to the Edward Said school of thought “where facts don’t matter” and narratives do. He later lamented that “we’ve lost the choir, we’ve lost so many of our own Jewish students,” arguing that “many Jewish day schools” have failed to teach students how to respond to the Nakba narrative. Safian also pointed out that Israel lost 1% of its population during the 1948 war, the equivalent of more than 3.3 million dead in America. “It was a very brutal war fought in close quarters,” Safian said, adding that in some cases there was “hand-to-hand fighting.” He also pointed out that the Arab Legion “was commanded by a British general.” “The Jews had nothing to compare to that,” Safian said. “The fact that Israel was able to survive that war is miraculous.”

He concluded the webinar by calling on the Israeli government to do more to combat the Nakba narrative, as there used to be a Hasbara (explanation) Department that has since been abolished. “The Israeli government wanted to make peace with the Palestinians, but the Palestinians never stopped their anti-Israel propaganda,” Safian said.