A MORE INFORMED PUBLIC
This morning NPR landed in my news feed with this astonishing bit of journalism:
FEBRUARY 26, 2024
Somehow, written by two knowledgeable journalists working in the region and offering 1,400 words on the matter in digital format, in a piece falling into a feature section titled Middle East crisis — explained, for a media outlet "founded on the mission to create a more informed public", this article misses virtually all relevant information on the very topic it purports to cover. Not sure how that's even possible. And yet here we are.
Surely, to my mind at least, the most critical context here is the long history of chaos Palestinians have continually brought to all their neighbouring nations. In asking why Egypt is hesitant to open its borders, it’s astonishing any response could avoid mention of at least the recent history everyone in positions of power have living memory of, like the Lebanese and Jordanian civil wars. Or, I’m not sure of any argument for aggressively, very aggressively, ignoring all that. Both are huge and hugely relevant. But if you don’t like either of those, you feel Black September is too distant in time and space and no body remembers the Holiday Inn Beirut, then just consider the last two decades in Egypt and their last border crisis with Gaza. What, that too is irrelevant to the Egyptian border and Egyptian relations with Palestinians and Hamas? Well, let's at least have a look.
JORDAN
After failing to kill off the world’s only and fledgling Jewish state in 1948, the Arab world tried to strangle Israel once again by halting maritime shipping in 1956. Once he nationalized the Suez Canal, the Egyptian president, Nasser, went on to block passage for Israeli ships into the Straits of Tīrān (at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba). Nasser combined that with pushing out UN peacekeepers and launching commando raids (of the Egypt-based Palestinian fedayeen insurgency) into Israel. Since that time, Israel assured the world that further attempts to shut off the Suez or the Gulf of Aqaba would be interpreted as, well, exactly what they were: deliberate acts of war. So, in 1967, when Egypt signed a defensive pact with Jordan and then prevented Israeli ships from passing into the Gulf of Aqaba, and paired that with rolling the nation’s tanks and troops across the Sinai desert to its border with Israel, the situation was abundantly clear. And when Iraqi and Egyptian armies were seen amassing troops and armour in Jordan at this same time, the situation was clearer still: it was transparent that Arab forces intended to repeat the mistakes of 1948.
Fully appreciating that their continued existence was on the line, Israel struck Egypt’s air force assets in the Sinai and then initiated a ground offensive into the Sinai Peninsula and Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. Not wanting to fight a war on all fronts, Israeli officials promised to abstain from attacking Jordan if they in turn promised to stay out of the war. Jordan’s King Hussein responded by telling the Israelis that “the die was cast” and accompanied his message with 6,000 artillery rounds into Jerusalem — from Jordan and the West Bank, which the kingdom had occupied since the war in ‘48 — striking military installations but also almost a thousand other buildings including government infrastructure, residences, a senior’s home, a hospital, and a zoo.
Despite the collective Arab armies being twice the size of Israel’s, Israel maintained total air superiority. As a result, in just days Israel controlled the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip but also all of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — which, of course, is twice the size of Israel and borders those two waterways continually being weaponized by Egypt. And again, despite their aims and instigation, the losing side, just one more time, demanded a ceasefire to cut their dramatic losses, which were roughly 20:1. Favouring peace with its neighbours over land acquisition, Israel slowly withdrew its troops from and relinquished those areas that had been made into a staging ground for invasion.
From there, Palestinians crossed the border into Jordan to, as ever, regroup and continue their attacks against Israel. This recent influx of Palestinians included Yasser Arafat and his PLO, who set up training camps and military bases for his 40,000-strong army of revolutionary guerrillas and other friendly militant groups and their supporters. As their strength and support grew, they built a state-within-a-state headquartered in the capital Amman, where their militias controlled the streets, running amok with impunity. The Palestinians even declared the Al-Wehdat and Al-Hussein refugee camps to be “liberated territory”, set up checkpoints (considered a crime against humanity when Israel does it), and extorted “taxes” from the locals. Oh, and, like any good neighbour and ally would, they also began agitating for the overthrow of the monarch.
King Hussein was in a perilous position: if he didn’t strike back he risked being overthrown; and yet being seen as too heavy-handed, which would have been a difficult line to avoid crossing, risked inflaming the many Palestinians in his own country and abroad as well as all of the wider Arab world. Hussein appealed to the Egyptian president to help influence the fedayeen to cool their attempted revolution. As the fedayeen launched rocket attacks on Israel, trying to spark a regional war on Jordanian soil, it started to look like the Jordanian military was beginning to fracture over the issue. Many foreign diplomats believed King Hussein would fall.
In the summer of 1970, Egypt and Jordan accepted a peace initiative, following Resolution 242 of the UN Security Council, giving recognition to the state of Israel. The Palestinians rejected the plan. At the same time, the Palestinians attacked Jordan’s intelligence headquarters, the General Intelligence Directorate. King Hussein visited the site of the attack and there his motorcade came under sustained fire. Bedouin members of the Jordanian army retaliated against the assassination attempt by shelling the “liberated” Palestinian refugee camps, resulting in a three-day battle that killed and wounded 1,000. Again, Hussein was torn. Some in his counsel insisted the only option was to finish the job while others argued the guaranteed casualties would be beyond acceptable. He halted the fighting, reached a ceasefire agreement with Yasser Arafat and his PLO, but did not expel the Palestinians from Jordan.
Other revolutionary forces did not observe the truce. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, for example, breached the peace agreement and took 125 women and children (68 foreign nationals) hostage at two hotels, the Intercontinental and Philadelphia, in Amman. They threatened to kill everyone and blow up both buildings if their demands were not met, which included replacing Jordanian military leaders with ones friendly to the Palestinians. King Hussein capitulated. Dr George Habash, the American-trained physician and leader of the Marxist-Leninist militant group, sitting in a gilded chair in a salon of the Intercontinental Hotel, told reporters “Believe me — and I am not joking — we were determined to blow up the hotels with the hostages in them if we had been smashed in our camps.” A month later another peace deal was reached between Hussein and Arafat, recognizing the legitimacy of the fedayeen in Jordan. But the revolutionaries once again rejected any truce and only made their calls for overthrowing the monarchy more vehement.
In September, King Hussein’s motorcade came under fire once again and Palestinian militants hijacked four civilian passenger jets, while attempting a fifth. Three of those jets were put down in a remote desert airstrip in Jordan; an airstrip the Marxist-Leninist terrorists, just as you would expect, renamed “Revolution Airport”. In the most dramatic manner possible and in front of the international press, the hijackers exploded the captured jets and declared the city of Irbid, in northwest Jordan, liberated from the kingdom.
Interestingly, decades later we learned that, along with backing Iraq and Syria, the Soviets were supporting the Palestinians at this time and their attempted overthrow of the monarchy. We also learned Jordan, twice seeking Israeli extermination, was now quietly requesting Israel to strike Syrian forces should they press into Jordan to support the Palestinians; you know, so they didn’t have to, because how would that look? Also of note, by the end of September, all the hostages were released along with six captured hijackers, who received no punishment.
As a result of so much chaos across the country and sustained attempts on his own life, King Hussein eventually declared martial law and sent his army to expel Palestinian fighters from the kingdom. That initiated ten days of assaults on Palestinian-controlled parts of Jordan, including the cities of Irbid, Jerash, Al-Salt, and Zarqa, with more shelling of the Palestinian refugee camps. Journalists trapped in their hotels during the fighting in Amman documented the catastrophe. One journalist from Agence France-Presse offered that "No neighbourhood has been spared. All the houses show traces of the fighting, some have been gutted by a shell, others hit by volleys of heavy weapons fire."
At the time, Arafat claimed these events, later known as Black September, killed 25,000 Palestinians. (Most now accept the number was closer to 3,000.) The PLO leader only continued to get support. He followed his initiation of the Jordanian Civil War and massacre of many thousands of people under his guidance by forming the Black September Organization to carry out reprisal attacks. And that they did. In November of 1971, for example, the BSO assassinated the Jordanian Prime Minister, Wasfi Tal, while he attended an Arab League summit in Cairo. And, of course, these were the folks who terrorized the Munich Olympics in 1972, kidnapping, castrating, and killing Israelis and others.
You: Why won't authorities in Cairo permit many thousands of Palestinian refugees to set up camp in Egypt?
Me: Hmmm. I just don't know. It's an impenetrable enigma.
LEBANON
Shortly after the conflict and lingering hostilities in Jordan, the Palestinian fedayeen relocated to Lebanon and repeated the kinds of activities they became notorious for in Jordan. Thousands of militant Palestinians were welcomed in and supported by the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already there (who came to Lebanon after Palestine favoured a war of genocide over a declaration independence and statehood.) This influx and the mentality of those arriving contributed significantly to the sense of a Palestinian state-within-a-state in Lebanon, just as previously seen in Jordan. This surge of people also helped shift the country toward becoming a Muslim majority nation and further contributed to kicking off the 15-year-long Lebanese Civil War.
The pan-Arabists, Muslims, and Leftists, most of whom aligned themselves with the Soviets, increasingly opposed Lebanon’s Christian-dominated and Western-aligned government. A nation whose political system had been that of consensus between diverse sects, was soon to be challenged. Though the Lebanese National Movement, for example, was originally headed by the Druze leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, Kamal Jumblatt, who sought a more secular and democratic Lebanon, the popular organization would eventually be taken over by the PLO and Islamists wishing to see the nation run by radical clerics. And the PLO, still headed by Arafat and continuing to be funded by oil wealth from Iraq, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, quickly took control of West Beirut as well as the major cities of Sidon and Tyre to the south, and along with them much of the south of the country. Eventually, in April of 1975, fighting broke out between insurgents from the Palestine Liberation Organization and Lebanese Christians throughout Beirut. Much of downtown Beirut was quickly destroyed and the city was partitioned by The Green Line, demarcating East from West Beirut and the city into Christian and Muslim halves.
The conflict exploded as militias sprung up everywhere, the nation’s military split into factions, the government divided, and retaliatory massacres occurred throughout the country. The conflict grew and grew, eventually involving Iran, Syria, Israel and others (including North Korea, the US, Britain, France, Italy, and UN peacekeepers). Syria soon invaded the east of the country, conducting operations against Leftists and Palestinians. Israel, technically on the same side as Syria for a change, was supplying Christian militias, largely in the northwest. Palestinian forces continued holding the south. At the end of the year an Arab League summit pushed a ceasefire deal and the introduction of peacekeeping troops. But in the spring of ‘77, with the assassination of Jumblatt, more retaliatory massacres ensued. 1978 saw the Hundred Days’ War, which led to a deployment of more UN troops. But the hostilities could not be contained. Continued PLO attacks into Israel saw tensions rise and eventually led to Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. Though troops withdrew by the end of ‘78, the fighting never really stopped.
When Palestinians attempted to assassinate an Israeli ambassador in London, in June of 1982, any hopes for a ceasefire were dashed once more. With such an overt act, Israel retaliated with attacks on PLO and PFLP targets in West Beirut. Of course, the PLO responded in kind. Those attacks resulted in Israel marching its military all the way to Beirut. And that’s when the Islamic Republic of Iran established a base in Lebanon from which its Revolutionary Guard Corps could operate a proxy army. Hezbollah was born. New and bold suicide bombings struck the US Embassy in West Beirut, an embassy annex in East Beirut, and also a barracks of US and French forces, killing almost 400. When fighting began between Syrian forces and Israel, the US, fearing a full-on regional conflagration, pressed all sides to agree on a ceasefire. A truce was eventually negotiated with the help of a multinational force, largely made up of Muslims, aiding the withdrawal of Israeli and PLO fighters. However, despite eradicating the PLO from Lebanon and Israel’s partial withdrawal in 1985, the Israeli invasion managed to worsen the conflict with Lebanese militias. Israeli presence helped consolidate what had been disorganized local Shia movements, including Hezbollah, who emerged as the dominant force in South Lebanon by the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990.
Ousted from Lebanon, Arafat and the PLO retreated to Tunisia. They also ran operations out of Algeria and Cyprus. From these overseas outposts they continued their attacks on Israel, including planning an October 7th-style assault thwarted by Israeli intelligence…
You: But why won't Egypt take in many thousands of radicals and militants and the hundreds of thousands who support them?
Me: Gee, it's just a confounding conundrum. I can't make sense of it.
EGYPT
If all of that seems like ancient history, we can just talk about the 21st century. When Hamas came to power in Gaza, Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, called the event a “coup against Palestinian legitimacy.” Months later Egypt, like Israel, closed its border with Gaza when fighting between Hamas and Fatah broke out. When violence got worse (and there was a sharp increase in rocket attacks into Israel) the movement of goods through Gaza’s borders was further restricted.
On January 22nd, Hamas demonstrators, mostly female, broke through the Rafah border crossing and fled into Egypt. That caused a flood. Gazans eventually cut through and blew up their southern border wall with Egypt, pouring into the Sinai by car, donkey cart, and on foot. When they came, they arrived by the hundreds of thousands. (According to the UN, maybe as many as 700,000 or half the population of Gaza.) As they did so, they hospitalized dozens of members of Egyptian security forces along with causing a goods shortage and price jump throughout the region. All kinds of chaos. And when a temporary fence was constructed, that one was also bulldozed by the Gazans.
In no time — in fact, in the same amount of time as the sudden influx of Palestinians to Lebanon resulted in civil war there — Egypt experienced the overthrow of their government and the ouster of Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood (whose military wing is Hamas and who had been prohibited from running a political party under Mubarak) immediately formed, get this, the Freedom and Justice Party. Zoinks! They placed Mohamed Morsi as the party’s first president. In the following election, in 2012, Morsi, who labelled himself an Islamist and condemned his opponent for being moderate and secular, was elected president of Egypt.
In what many called an Islamist coup and a plan to return Egypt to totalitarianism, Morsi immediately issued a declaration granting himself unrestricted powers, the ability to legislate without judicial oversight, instated an Islamist-dominated parliament, reworked the constitution to enshrine Islamic law, and asked for the regulation of the head of the military. You know, as you would. Mohamed ElBaradei, Egyptian diplomat and legal scholar, looked at all of this and suggested Morsi had “usurped all state powers and appointed himself Egypt’s new pharaoh.”
Morsi’s first official visit was to the northwest of the country where he delivered a speech on national unity at the el-Tenaim mosque. The televised event opened with a prayer including the lines “Deal with the Jews and their supporters, oh Allah, disperse them, rend them asunder. Oh Allah, demonstrate Your might and greatness upon them. Show us Your omnipotence, oh Lord.” What could be more unifying? Still, Egyptians saw what was happening. And within weeks protesters were in Tahrir Square calling for Morsi's removal.
In the summer of 2013, religious leaders and the Egyptian military responded to these popular protests by ousting Morsi in their own coup. Morsi was held by the military and charged with, among other things, conspiring with foreign militant groups, including Hamas, and spreading violence and chaos throughout the country. Later Morsi and two Al-Jazeera journalists were given life sentences for passing state secrets to Qatar (who we all know backs Hamas and is home to the Hamas leadership.) Following the Islamist insurgency and eventual ouster, Egypt once again closed its border with Gaza. And the border stayed shut for the next five years. Egypt also built up the border wall and uncovered and destroyed, or sometimes just flooded with sewage, hundreds (by some accounts, well over a thousand) Gazan smuggling tunnels breaching the Egyptian border.
You: But why does Egypt not want to take in a million Gazans?
Me: We will never know. The answer is lost to history.
SO WHAT DO THEY SAY?
Knowing all of the above, how could anyone wonder why those same countries might be hesitant to allow a sudden flush of a million desperate Palestinians — fleeing a war they overwhelmingly voted for, initiated, and continue to support and participate in? And how are the details of three militant Islamist revolutions in three neighbouring nations in just one lifetime, all sparked (or very significantly fomented) by Palestinian militants and the population that fills their ranks and gladly provides them cover and legitimacy, not even worth mentioning? This is modern journalism.
Those are just some of the significant details (direct and obvious historical connections) the NPR article conceals. But the article does make some offerings. The primary reason for Egypt failing to fling open its border or Gazans wishing to leave, they say, is the Nakba. Though the authors consider it a key factor, they offer the following and little else on the matter: “The possibility of another Nakba, or catastrophe, as Palestinians refer to their displacement more than 70 years ago, makes many today determined to stay put in Gaza.” But what — dear journalists, providers of context, explainers of world events — actually is the Nakba, how does it sit culturally and in historical context, and how is the event being used today?
Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that I think the authors laughably misinterpret the reality of the Nakba. As is self-reported across the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Nakba is not about some folks somewhere losing their homes generations ago. Though this is very much the common framing in the West, particularly so and with such volume in recent months, framing the Nakba as a provincial real estate dispute or legal issue is absurd. The Nakba is far more about, for virtually everyone concerned, that the Levant and the broader Arab homeland became defiled by the world's only Jewish state. This has been and will remain an existential crisis so long as there is a Jewish homeland, as continually expressed by everyone taking up arms against Israel (but denied by seemingly everyone presently calling for an Israeli ceasefire.) The Palestinians, as such, but also believers across the world, are seen as having cultural and spiritual obligations to, at the very least, cede no more land to the dastardly Jews. More than that, they and everyone else are also expected to do their bit to reclaim the areas lost and to do so at any and all costs of blood, treasure, and time. And that is a message drummed home daily by clerics and media outlets and schools all over the region and throughout the globe, from Canada to the UK to Australia and everywhere in between.
You don't have to subscribe to any foreign newspapers or social media channels to validate my assessment. You can simply notice that, just as in the NPR article, almost every offering mentioning the Nakba fails to make any ethical or legal argument or take a stance against ethnic cleansing generally — just as you would if you were actually concerned about such things. That's because they cannot. They can't, of course, because Jewish populations all across the Arab and Muslim worlds, often established in ancient times, were systematically expunged in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Israel’s declaration of independence, and the Arab world’s first real attempt and failure at wiping Israel off the map. You see, while the anti-Semites of Europe did not achieve their aim, their Arab counterparts very much succeeded in “solving the Jewish problem” across virtually all of the more than 13 million square kilometres of the Arab homeland — except for the tiny speck of land that became Israel, comprised by the brutal Negev and Judean deserts inland and some malaria infested swamps along the coast. (And that, of course, is to say nothing at all of the countless extirpations of endemic belief systems, cultures, and languages that had to occur to get us the modern “Arab homeland”, so called.) As you'll find, articles mentioning the Nakba don’t tend to even acknowledge this recent, well-documented, continent-wide ethnic cleansing of Jews that is sustained still today. They prefer a narrative that paints, by omission, the Nakba as a kind of natural disaster: something that befell the innocent Palestinians who, actually, the tale goes, had no part in any of it.
Amazingly, public officials, preachers, teachers, journalists, commentators, and activists alike are able to partition their minds in this wildly fanciful manner. They simultaneously redact this history, that everyone knows and can see with their own eyes, as they argue that the failure of Israel to allow all Arabs (and generations of their kin) to return to any property they once occupied (and thereby immediately transforming a democratic Israel into a Muslim majority nation dominated by the same people, families, and affinity groups who’ve been calling for and attempting their extermination for a century; the same people who gifted Lebanon a civil war from which it has never recovered) is an incomprehensible and unique crime against humanity. And in its precise and prudent omissions, I consider the NPR piece to be among such deliberate and galling erasures of history. I mean, you really couldn’t engineer a more perfect piece of propaganda, making so very simple so much difficult mental gymnastics and brash censorship of readily available and undisputed fact.
And we can all see how effective this relentless propaganda is. Yes, all of what I just wrote is denied in whole or in part by just about everyone I read and talk to. And that is so while we can all watch these sermons from every corner of the globe being beamed into our homes. Just last Friday, for example, an esteemed religious scholar in Sydney streamed his sermon live on Facebook. First praising Hamas, of course, he then called on his flock to recognize that “the Righteous Caliphs … did not conquer the world by peaceful means, negotiations, concessions, or understandings, rather they conquered it by Jihad for the sake of Allah.” He insisted, “Don’t even dream that [Palestine] can be regained through negotiations.” He asked “When has our nation [Islam] ever reached such power by any means other than Jihad?”
If I shared this with anyone I know personally or with any journalist I read, they would respond by telling me that no one actually believes this stuff and that the man is a radical, just like there are radicals in every community. They would say this was a one-off and, obviously, indefensible. I would respond by saying that this wasn't just disseminated on Facebook, without trouble, but forms a set of ideas that are far closer to popular opinion than a radical fringe. I would argue that you don't get millions slinging the most scandalous slogans in the streets (inorganic imports, all) without such cultural and institutional normalization and, thus, sanction. Or, better, I would ask them to tell me what kind of statements would be objectionable to them and then what level of agreement (5%, 25%, 85%?) among a population would be deemed problematic, needing to be acknowledged and addressed. And then I would pull up any of a hundred terrifying polls from fifty countries, highlighting responses in their own and peer nations.
Or to better make my point I might just offer the same screed from a very different character and on the other side of the planet and see what they say. I might offer them a Canadian psychologist, chaplain of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and imam, Ayam Taher. The man presents as close to your brother or uncle as a person could. Charming, put together, happy to help, a real member of the community. Just like the fellow above, only preaching out of a mosque in Hamilton Ontario, Taher also streams his offerings live on social media for the world to see. There Taher recommends parents everywhere screen for their children an interview from Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin. In that video, Yassin prescribes and predicts the total destruction of Israel by 2027, “inshallah.” Taher doesn't suggest this video as a warning of waywardness; instead, he recounts the details of video as he assures his listeners Yassin “has inspired millions”, just as they should be inspired. Taher notes how “calm and confident” Yassin was “to speak his mind and inspire the generations to come.” Suddenly conscious that it’s not just the people in the room watching, Taher ends with “I know I am getting myself in trouble now for speaking on social media. Who cares, because if we do not get ourselves into trouble, we will not be getting victory.”
"What's that," I would ask, "another one-off? Is Taher also a radical extremist?" I would insist that this, in fact, is the essence of the Nakba. And I would wonder aloud if anyone could imagine learning a fourth-grade teacher in thier neighbourhood (and seemingly every neighbourhood) was reciting and offering to parents interviews with bin-Laden and also pressing those out weekly on TikTok and Snapchat. And I would ask if they could imagine said teacher doing so in the weeks and months following 9/11. I'd love to know from them how the above offerings are any different. Yes, “take up arms” and “exterminate the Jews” are absolutely slogans being preached in every city around, and continuously so. And, horrifically, that is true while NPR and others gladly generate and amplify the Goebbelsian propaganda that says all of this is just about a peace-loving people, victims, the oppressed, never seeking anything more than to return home. Unsurprisingly, and only more horrifically, this manipulation belongs among their admonishments that any call for a "global intifada" or "by any means necessary" are rightfully read as pleas for dialogue and negotiations, or at most protest, but most certainly not violence or murder — which they transparently are. Black? White! Oranges? Apples! And they argue, until they no longer can, that explicit calls for murder and genocide from a raging mob are good and fine, protected speech at any school, obviously, so long as the intended genocide is not actually carried out at Cambridge Common, which would be bad... I mean, what would the donors and investors think?
You: I was wrongly evicted and now no one will rent to me!
(You forget to mention that what precipitated the eviction was that you and some friends set fire to the building after a disagreement with your roommate. And you also neglect to mention that, post-fire and after your eviction, you convinced all of your kin and community to evict any tenants or roommates they have who look or sound like your former roommate. You fail to note that they followed through and on their own volition commit, weekly, to killing, or just praying that God will kill, your former roommate and any and all of their friends. And you skip over the bit where you and your pals also committed a dozen more arsons and evictions in response, including some at neighbouring apartment buildings...)
NPR: "Freedom-loving humanitarian peace activist in need of home after eviction by greedy, racist roommate."
But please prove me wrong. Go find the popular social media streams by prominent officials explaining that the equivalent of the Nakba was carried out in nation after nation all across North Africa and the Middle East. Go find the loud and abundant Palestinian and Arab voices demanding Jewish rights to or compensation for land and property that had been in the family for centuries in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Find the public protests arguing that Palestinians and their allies long ago chose to extinguish any earthly moral or legal claim to any right of return when they favoured instead a genocidal pact sustained generation after generation by appeals to scripture and divine authority. Find the religious leaders meaningfully pushing back against the weekly celebrations of murder and the calls for the erasure of the Jewish homeland in neighbourhoods across the West. I’ll be waiting. And in the meantime, I will continue to claim that all the above forms the actual meaning and usage of the Nakba and the critical context for the refusal of so many neighbouring nations to accept Palestinian refugees at present. Perhaps worst of all, I will continue to claim that words have meanings.
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