The Patriot Post® · Monday Opinion

Best of Right Opinion

• Rebecca Hagelin: Mother’s Day and Boy Scouts
• Jeff Jacoby: The Palestinians’ Real ‘Nakba’
• Tony Perkins: Senate Considers August Staycation
• Todd Starnes: Don’t Mention Jesus or Bible, University Tells Graduation Speaker
• Gary Bauer: Vintage Trump

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Jeff Jacoby: “Seventy years ago [today], on May 14, 1948, the state of Israel proclaimed its independence. … For the Palestinians, May 14, 1948, is remembered as the ‘Nakba’ (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) — the flight of 700,000 Arab refugees from Israel during the war that followed the creation of the Jewish state. The fighting was launched by the Arab League, whose armies invaded Israel within hours of its birth. … Yet in terms of the number of people affected, property lost, and history erased, the catastrophe that befell the Jews of the Arab world dwarfed what happened to the Palestinians. Jews had been living in the Arab lands since time immemorial; in countries like Egypt, Iraq, and Libya, Jewish communities flourished centuries before the advent of Islam. Jewish life was integral to Middle East society, which drew nourishment from some of the world’s most ancient cultural roots. But with the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, antisemitic fury erupted across the region and those roots were ripped out. … The Palestinian refugees’ worst catastrophe wasn’t displacement, a fate they have shared with much of mankind. It was being fed a lie — that the clock will be turned back, and the last 70 years undone. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the 1948 refugees, whether they live in Lebanon or Jordan, in America or the West Bank, are not refugees. They are at home. That is how they should think of themselves. That is how they should insist that the world think of them. No one is going back to the 1940s. Once Palestinians stop believing otherwise, the ‘nakba’ will be at an end.”