For Palestinians, the Nakba is every day, not just once a year

I don’t intend to address all the fallacies within Ehab Naser’s article, but I will say this. Naser’s description of Palestinian life uses worst case examples of life during conflict in Gaza and then conflates it with Palestinians living everywhere. People unable to look through windows or climb on a roof do not exist in Ramallah.

As it happens I was in Ramallah last week. A bustling, lively city with many large houses and flashy cars. I did not see any sign of occupation there at all whilst I was there, and the only weapons I saw were in the hands of the Palestinian police.

I spent the rest of my time in the West Bank, visiting the new Palestinian city Rawabi, eating lunch in Berzeit and walking through an exhibition in Banksy’s ‘Walled Off’ hotel in Bethlehem. I had the same problem viewing the exhibition in the hotel as I did reading Nasser’s comment piece. Neither are trying to tell the truth.

The ‘Nakba’ was the result of a civil conflict between the Jews who wanted to create the state the UN had promised them in 1947, and an Arab front that wanted to stop them. The local Arab communities received the help of irregular Arab forces that entered the Mandate areas as early as January 1948 and then by May from the forces of several armies of regional Arab states. The Arabs failed in their attempts to destroy the Jewish enclave and Israel survived its war of independence.

The Nakba is the price the Arab communities paid for this loss. I agree with Ehab that the price was heavy, but it was one that did not have to be paid. The Jewish side did not ask for the Arabs to oppose partition. The Jews did not want Arab irregular forces to enter the fight and they certainly had no desire to fight the forces of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq.

The Jewish community lost 1% of its total population in this battle. The alternative, defeat, would have led to a far greater loss.

What Ehab experiences everyday is not a ‘nakba’, but rather the result of his own Arab community still unable to come to terms with the presence of a Jewish state. More importantly, and it is why I have such trouble with his article and the Banksy exhibition, there still does not appear to be any acceptance at all, of the responsibility his own community must also take in having helped to create the environment in which he lives. In the stories they tell, everything is Israel’s fault. For as long as this remains the case, there will be no progress.

When I first went to Israel before the first Intifada, people moved about freely. Then the stabbings started. During the Oslo peace process, as I tried to work with Palestinians on building joint ventures, the buses started exploding. The cooperation between my own business and the PA stopped, when the violent second Intifada started. Then the wall went up as a way of protecting Israeli communities from terrorists infiltrating from PA areas.

Finally, there was the election, that saw Hamas receive the largest number of votes. Israelis didn’t vote for Hamas, Palestinians did. The result of voting for terrorists is the situation we see in Gaza today.

At every turn, Palestinians have been let down by their own leadership, their own extremists and the way they vote when given the chance. Israel cannot, nor should it be expected to take responsibility for these contributing factors.

If a Palestinian leader was to stand up tomorrow and recognise Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, if Palestinians were able to unite and reject the extremism of groups like Hamas and if they really sought to co-exist with Israel, peace would quickly follow.

It doesn’t mean Israel doesn’t make mistakes. Nor does it mean the Palestinians are not suffering. It only points out that the beating heart of the conflict is in Palestinian attitudes towards Israel and not the other way around.

At one-point Ehab rejects the term ‘conflict’ as a description because Israel has the power and the Palestinians do not. He is mistaken. Almost all the power in this conflict is with the Palestinians. They just need to do what they have not been able to do for a hundred years. Accept the right of the Jewish state to exist. Once they do this, peace will quickly follow and Ehab’s ‘Nakba’ will come to an end. That step isn’t ours to take.

DC”

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