“Every moment I connect my life now to those years after the Nakba,” says 85-year-old Fatima Ibrahim Khalfallah. “This Nakba is more terrifying, more deadly, more destructive. . . The same hunger, thirst, and fear — but multiplied many times over.”

Salman Abu Sitta was uprooted from his family lands near Beersheba during the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the trauma has informed his entire life as a refugee and scholar. “I looked back at the smoldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with the still-unharvested wheat. What had we done to them? Who were these Jews anyway?”

A judge in Beersheba yesterday acquitted two Israeli security officers of the lynching of Haftom Zarhum in 2015 because Palestinian attacks had “created an atmosphere of fear and panic.” So revenge against Palestinians is a justifiable motive for attacking an innocent person.