> The Nakba was an outcome of Arabs deciding to attack Israel in 1948, they wanted to wipe it off the map, and they lost. They rejected the partition plan.
The "partition plan" was a plan to give part of Palestine to Israel. It's pretty natural that one side refused and the other accepted- the action is the same but the outcome is the opposite for the two parties. Trying to spin it like "they both got the same generous offer" is propaganda.
But even more important is that the partition plan assigned to a "Jewish state" a territory whose population was 45% Palestinian. This means that either
a) they thought it was possible to create a Jewish democratic state with a 45% of the population non-Jewish, or
b) the plan was to enforce apartheid from the beginning, or
c) the plan was ethnic cleansing from the beginning.
And- lo and behold- ethnic cleansing is exactly what happened one minute after the creation of Israel. How convenient that it was the Palestinian's fault.
The problem trying to tie everything back to the Nakba is that the same thing happened in reverse in all the other MENA countries: they ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations in response, which emigrated wholesale to Israel.
I'm not supporting Israel's actions. I think Israel is justified in killing every Hamas member it can get a bead on, but not in inflicting mass civilian casualties on a population that is supermajority too young even to have voted for Hamas in the first place, at least not without extraordinarily clear military proportionality claims (arguably present early on, now clearly absent).
But this "Nakba" stuff appears invariably to be coded appeals to a "one-state solution". Israel is a nuclear-armed state with one of the world's best trained military and a strong economy that, contrary to activist opinion, stands on its own two feet. There is only one outcome in a "one-state solution" and it's not the one you (or I) want.
It's worth pushing back on existential arguments against Israel as it's currently construed. "Mass murder of Israeli civilians is unprovoked because Nakba" is one of those. The correct response is "no, things are much more complicated than that."
