Palestine and the truth about the Nakba

The Nakba – Arabic for ‘the catastrophe’ and commemorated today – marks a profound moment of trauma in the Palestinian Arab consciousness. In 1948, following the Arab world’s rejection of the United Nations’ partition plan and their subsequent military assault on the fledgling State of Israel, around 700,000 Palestinians were displaced. While Israel accepted the partition and declared independence, the Arab states and local militias initiated a war they would lose. Yet the memory of the Nakba, though born from an aggressive campaign that ended in defeat, has been carefully curated into a narrative of pure victimhood, a perennial wound severed from the choices and actions that preceded it.

This phenomenon is not unique to the Palestinian case. Across history, defeated peoples have frequently transformed military or political collapse into mythic narratives of victimhood, often eliding their own agency or culpability. In recent decades, scholars of memory and historiography have increasingly examined how such ‘defeat mythologies’ function – not to recount events faithfully, but to console, unify, and morally rehabilitate.