The irony is that, while Israel denounces Palestinians and their supporters as liars for speaking of the Nakba, its own officials publicly cite the Nakba as a real event that can be repeated if Palestinians do not submit completely.
Genocidal rhetoricThat should not surprise us. After all, the goal of expulsion did not end with the events of 1948 - the reason Palestinians speak of an "ongoing Nakba".
Israeli officials regularly employ genocidal-type rhetoric. As head of Israel's military, Moshe Yaalon compared the threat posed by Palestinians to "cancer" that had "to be severed and fought to the bitter end".
Ayelet Shaked, currently Israel's interior minister, has characterised all Palestinians as "enemy combatants" - a term suggesting they are legitimate military targets. She has referred to any Palestinians that fight Israel's decades of belligerent occupation as "snakes" and indicated that their entire families can be eliminated, including their mothers, otherwise "more little snakes will be raised there".
Leading rabbis in Israel are even more explicit. Two wrote a notorious handbook, The King's Torah, arguing that it is permitted to kill Palestinians, even babies, pre-emptively because "it is clear that they will grow to harm us". Neither faced prosecution.
'Finish the job'
These types of menacing comments are not just directed at Palestinians in the occupied territories. Notably, the recent Nakba threats were chiefly aimed at Israel's 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, who, Israel falsely maintains, enjoy equal status with Israel's Jewish citizens.
Palestinian citizens are the descendants of the small numbers of Palestinians who managed to avoid expulsion in 1948 - due largely to oversights and international pressure.
Exemplifying Israelis' cognitive dissonance on this issue, historian Benny Morris has cited the existence of a Palestinian minority in Israel as proof that the Nakba is a lie and that Israel never intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
He has done so even as he lamented the fact that Ben-Gurion "got cold feet during the [1948] war" and "faltered" in failing to expel every last Palestinian.
In this, he shares the sentiments of far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich, another former government minister. Last year, Smotrich addressed legislators representing the Palestinian minority, saying: "It's a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and didn't throw you out in 1948."
On another occasion, Smotrich made a barely veiled threat of expulsion: "Arabs are citizens of Israel - for now, at least."
Caught in a trap
Such threats are far from idle. In its first decades, Israel continued to secretly expel vulnerable communities of Palestinian citizens, such as the Bedouin in the Naqab, and plotted to expel more.
Israel's security forces carried out an early massacre of Palestinian citizens, almost certainly to incentivise them to leave. Israel has also conducted at least one secret military exercise to prepare for a scenario in which there is a mass expulsion of Israel's Palestinian minority.
Israel's most senior politicians have proposed opaque plans to strip much of the Palestinian minority of its Israeli citizenship and their right to live in the state of Israel.
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