Ethan Bronner, the Times writer who reviewed Jimmy Carter’s book and dismissed it as "strange" and "little," has a piece in tomorrow’s times about Israeli Arabs’ mixed feelings as the 60th birthday of the state approaches.
Better off and better integrated than ever in their history, freer
than the vast majority of other Arabs, Israel’s 1.3 million Arab
citizens are still far less well off than Israeli Jews and feel
increasingly unwanted. On Thursday, which is Independence Day, thousands will gather in their
former villages to protest what they have come to call the “nakba,” or
catastrophe, meaning Israel’s birth.
That seems to me a strange and little definition. As I understand it, Nakba refers to the expulsion and massacre of Arabs, not just the political definition of the territory they were living in, which after all had been Turkish, then U.N./British in the previous 30 years.
Bronner’s also a little wiggly about the expulsion:
After the United Nations General Assembly
voted in late 1947 for two states in Palestine, one Arab and one
Jewish, local Arab militias and their regional supporters went on the
offensive against Jewish settlements, in anger over the United Nations’
support for a Jewish state. Zionist forces counterattacked.
The new historians suggest that Zionists did plenty of attacking on their own. This account is, plainly, one-sided.
