Who Changed the Term “Nakba” into a Symbol of Arab Victimization?
A propaganda tool that Arafat quickly seized upon.
April 19, 2019
Who Changed the Term “Nakba” into a Symbol of Arab Victimization?
A propaganda tool that Arafat quickly seized upon.
In contemporary Palestinian discourse, not to mention that of the Palestinians’ Western supporters, the creation of the state of Israel is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe—sometimes explicitly compared with the Holocaust. The very term has come to form a central element in a narrative of passive Palestinian suffering at Jewish hands. But when the Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq first used the term with regard to the events of 1948, he meant something quite different, and those responsible for changing its meaning were none other than Israelis. Raphael Bouchnik-Chen explains:
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