Become a Member
The Jewish Chronicle

The Nakba narrative now dominates

May 1, 2008 23:00

By

Alex Brummer,

Alex Brummer

2 min read

The Palestinian ‘disaster’ framed much of the UK media’s coverage of Israel’s 60th

Anyone tuning into Jeremy Bowen’s documentary Birth of Israel, reviewed below, would instantly recognise the progress the revisionists and the Palestinians have made in framing the history of the Jewish state. No longer is it sufficient to record how Ben-Gurion and his generals repelled five Arab armies in the aftermath of the United Nations vote in favour of the Jewish state.

Instead, journalists marking Israel’s 60th birthday feel the need to frame the narrative in terms of what the Arabs call the Nakba, or the catastrophe. Anyone tuning into Bowen, for instance, might easily assume that Israel owes its existence to a series of massacres perpetrated by the Irgun, the Stern Gang and Haganah, aimed at dispossessing the Palestinian Arabs, rather than an existential war.

Among those buying into the revisionist history is Johann Hari in the Independent. Quoting Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, he notes that when the state was born in 1948, “Plan Dalit” came into operation. The goal was intimidation of the of the Arab population aimed at forcibly evicting a people. As a result, he asserts, 800,000 Arabs “were ethnically cleansed”.