The Soviet Roots of the Palestinian Nakba Narrative

Part Four of a

Six-Part series

A On May 15, as has been done for decades, Palestinian Arabs, their supporters and Israel detractors observed the “Nakba” or the catastrophe of Israel’s birth in 1948. In order to understand the veracity of that narrative and how it’s been conflated in modern dialogue and reporting, it’s important to understand what lies behind that.

A Cold War creation

The invention of modern Palestinian Arab identity in 1964 did not happen in a vacuum. Nor was it merely the product of the coalescing of an ethnic Arab identity of its own accord. Rather, the invention of modern P...