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Comment by pgeorgi | Hacker News Reader

The Nakba, you mean when all neighboring Arab countries said "hey Palestinians, step out of the way, we'll kill the Jews real quick and then you can have all the land"?

And then lost the war they've started?

Yes, that's a catastrophe for Arabs, just like losing WW2 was a catastrophe for certain Germans. And also for those in Germany who were exiled from their (sometimes extensive) land, no matter what they thought of the war and its outcome.

Eastern Prussian didn't then go and tried to kill the Western German president when the FRG took them in, though. Besides some whining by a few select bunch, that chapter is closed.

Not so for the Arabs for whom the "Nakba" was and is that the military campaign failed and not that Palestinians now live in misery.

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Not at all.

"During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted and about 400 Arab-majority towns and villages were depopulated;[3] with many of these being either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jewish residents and given new Hebrew names. Approximately 750,000[4] Palestinian Arabs (about half of Palestine's Arab population) fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba#:~:text=During%20the%2....

This did happen and I don't think there's a lot of prevarication to be done about how bad it was, but if we're talking about it as a way of imputing original sin to the citizens of Israel, it's worth keeping in mind that most of them are descendants of Arab Jewish people who were counter-Nakba'd --- chased from their homes across the Middle East and North Africa by pogroms.

I get why you'd respond to the previous comment, though, which reads as if it's an attempt to deny the events of the Palestinian Nakba. You're right to do that. All I'm here to say is that the 20th century history of that region is complicated and no simple narrative will get anybody to where we are today.

In many ways I agree with you. I'm not promoting any original sin.I'm simply responding the narrative that "Hamas started all this on October 7th, so as conclusion, all of what Israel is doing is justified."

Sure. It's easy to accept both arguments though: Hamas must be destroyed, but no matter how diabolical Hamas' tactics are, you still can't fight them primarily through an air war that kills tens of thousands of innocent Gazans.

Either way, my only stake in this little subthread is to stick up for the complexity of the history of the region, which both sides of the argument have a tendency to flatten to the point of unrecognizability.

You can’t really describe the events like this and leave out the massacres and the number of refugees storming into neighboring countries as a result. This kind of narrative would have Britain start World War 2 as we can easily omit all the Nazi atrocities and powergrabs in Czechia and Poland, just like we can omit the atrocities and land grabs committed by Zionists prior to the Arab invasion.

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