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The Palestinians' Real "Nakba"
(Boston Globe) Jeff Jacoby - Seventy years ago, on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel proclaimed its independence. The next day, a story in the New York Times - "Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands" - reported that Jewish communities throughout the Arab world were under siege. Hundreds of thousands of Jews became refugees as once-vibrant Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa were decimated. In 1945, there were nearly 1 million Jews living in Arab lands. Today, there are almost none. The "Jewish nakba" of the 1940s is now largely forgotten. Yet in terms of the number of people affected, property lost, and history erased, the catastrophe that befell the Jews of the Arab world dwarfed what happened to the Palestinians. The waves of expulsion and expropriation that ensued were orchestrated by Arab governments, which passed harsh new laws stripping Jews of their property. Most made their way to Israel with little more than the clothes on their backs. Unlike Palestinian refugees, the Jews expelled from Arab countries were not encouraged to keep believing that they would return and reclaim their lost homes. They were not kept in refugee camps for decades, or denied the right to become citizens of countries that took them in. The Palestinian refugees' worst catastrophe wasn't displacement. It was being fed a lie - that the clock will be turned back, and the last 70 years undone. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the 1948 refugees are not refugees. No one is going back to the 1940s. Once Palestinians stop believing otherwise, the "nakba" will be at an end.