Globalize the Nakba

The word Nakba means different things depending on where you stand to look at it. From the angle of colonialism you will see European Jews arrived in the land of Palestine and drove out 800,000 of its Arab inhabitants. Stand at the angle of territorial dispute and you will see two peoples went to war over a piece of ground, and the losing side, 800,000 of them, was displaced.

Both of these framings are available in the Western discourse on any given day, but stand at the angle of what the thing actually was and you will see the Nakba was a theological assault that failed. It was the attempt to extinguish a non-Muslim sovereignty newly declared on land that Islam regards as its own, an attempt prosecuted by five Arab armies that invaded the day after the state was born, lost the war they had started, and produced, in their losing, the refugees they have wept over ever since.

From high enough up, you see only the misery. You see a displaced people, hundreds of thousands of them, scattered across the Arab world. You see that some of them, eighty years later, still live in camps and even in tents, in Lebanon, where they are denied citizenship and barred by law from dozens of professions; in Jordan; in Syria. You see crowded alleys, statelessness, a grievance handed down like an heirloom from grandfather to grandson.

But to understand the misery, start from the 1880s onward, Jews returned to the land in waves, and for roughly forty years they were tolerated. They bought land and worked it. They drained the malarial swamps of the Jezreel and the Hula. They planted the orchards. They founded Tel Aviv in 1909 on the empty dunes north of Jaffa and watched it grow into a city. They built schools, hospitals, newspapers, a university, the institutions of a society.

The Arabs of the land had no problem with any of that. Arab migrants poured in from Egypt, Syria, the Hauran, and beyond, drawn by the wages and the work that Jewish development was generating, and it was acceptable to them, even attractive, for one reason: all of it was being built inside the house of Islam. The Jews were prospering under the sovereignty of the caliphate.