But if Israelis really believe this to be the case, why are veteran politicians such as Katz, Dayan and Hanegbi using the Palestinian terminology of Nakba themselves - and threatening that Israel will carry out for a second or third time what officials insist never happened in the first place?
Operation BroomIsrael's narrative is so dominant that until recently most Israeli Jews believed that their state's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, urged the Palestinian population fleeing the large port city of Haifa in 1948 to return. Palestinians supposedly preferred to wait out the fighting until the Zionist forces were defeated.
According to this account, Ben-Gurion sent Golda Meir, later prime minister herself, on a mission to reassure fleeing Palestinians. In her autobiography, Meir recounts: "I sat on the beach there [in Haifa] and begged them to return home" I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn't work."
But a letter written in early June 1948 by Ben-Gurion came to light seven years ago that undermines Israel's propaganda. In it, he responded angrily to reports that the British consul was "working to return the Arabs to Haifa". Ben-Gurion demanded that Haifa's Jewish leaders actively stymie these British efforts.
In fact, an Israeli scholar who was handed an archive file in error disclosed nearly a decade ago that the story of Arab leaders insisting Palestinians flee their homeland in 1948 was a nonsense. It was concocted by Israeli officials as a way to end US pressure on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return.
Beginning in the 1980s, a new generation of Israeli historians started trawling through Israel's archives as sections of it were briefly opened. They unearthed documentary evidence of an entirely different set of events that accorded with the Palestinian narrative.
Military operations had suggestive titles like "Operation Broom" and commanders received orders to "clean" areas. Many hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed as soon as their populations had been driven out by Zionist soldiers, with the clear intent never to let them return.
Reign of terror
And despite Israel's best efforts to keep it under wraps, archival evidence has kept emerging of Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians, making explicit why the vast majority of Palestinians fled in 1948.
In one of the worst, around 170 unarmed men, women and children were executed by the Israeli army near Hebron, and hundreds more wounded, even as they offered no resistance.
A letter from the time by Shabtai Kaplan, a soldier and journalist who witnessed the Dawayimah massacre, was found in 2016. He observed that the killings were part of "a system of expulsion and destruction". The rationale, he wrote, was: "The fewer Arabs who remain, the better."
Another long-denied massacre of Palestinians - at Tantura, on the coast south of Haifa - was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year after a new Israeli film included testimonies from former soldiers in which they admitted committing the massacre.
Katz, Dayan and Hanegbi understand what the word Nakba means for Palestinians and are aware too that the Palestinian narrative of the events of 1948 has been confirmed by the archives.
Nakba - for them, as for Palestinians - means a reign of military terror to drive out the Palestinian population in areas Israel wishes to further colonise with Jews, or "Judaise" as official Israeli terminology puts it. It means yet another wave of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, both those under occupation and the minority living with highly degraded citizenship inside Israel.
In threatening a second Nakba, Katz and Dayan are simply confirming that Israeli leaders, despite their protestations, have always known what the Nakba was and have always approved of the goal of ethnic cleansing Palestinians.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
