The Meaning of the Nakba
Anti-Zionist protesters have a lot to complain about. In the seven months since the October 7 massacre, over 35,000 Gazans have been killed, compared to less than 2,000 Israelis. Population centers in Gaza have been decimated, while Israel has been able to fend off most of the missiles fired into the Jewish state. Around two million Gazans have been displaced, compared to perhaps 250,000 Israelis. These numbers are impossible to ignore, but they do not tell the whole story. For critics of Zionism, the current Israel-Gaza war is just the latest chapter in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the state of Israel. This struggle, which they call the Nakba ( "the Catastrophe"), began in the late 19th century, when Zionists staked a claim to the land in Palestine as their national home, and crystallised during the first Arab-Israel war (1947-1949), when Israel ascended to statehood and over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees, mostly in Gaza and the West Bank....