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Jumping off point

The opening of this article takes extreme liberties with objectivity.

"...was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948"

This is an article about the framing of the creation of the Jewish state as a catastrophe by the Islamic world, and should start as such. 86.175.105.129 (talk) 21:20, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

If you disagree with the sources that state this write an article, get it peer-reviewed and submit it to a reliable source journal. And try to avoid substituting 'Islamic' for 'Palestinian'. That only flaunts the POV leg under the skirt of your opinion.Nishidani (talk) 22:06, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
(edit conflict) "…the framing of the…"? So the suffering of millions of Palestinians is just framing is it? This comment is shameful. Onceinawhile (talk) 22:08, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Merger discussion

I don't see why we need two articles on the exact same topic. Currently, the Nakba article is very short. 1948 as a commemorative day can be a section in the wider Nakba article, which I would say is the detailed 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight. Makeandtoss (talk) 10:56, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

It was proposed last year to rename 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight (then called Palestinian Exodus) to Nakba. Discussion here..as the closer said "This is listed as an RM but is equally a proposed merge". A pretty limited discussion admittedly but I do wonder if Nakba is solely restricted to 48 events. Selfstudier (talk) 14:28, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
My recollection was that there was a clear consensus that "Nakba" is more than just the expulsion and flight. It was (is) all elements of the catastrophe. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:24, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
Expulsion and flight are the main aspects, of which we can delve further into with the loss of properties, houses, etc. Plus it’s a merge so anything else missing can be later added. Makeandtoss (talk) 08:32, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
I was of this opinion about 12 months ago, but when you see the volumes of literature about the Nakba as a concept that expand well beyond simple expulsion, the division of the topics begins to make a certain amount of sense. The "Nakba" might have originally just been the expulsion event, but it seems like it has since become a cultural totem with much wider significance and bearing. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:47, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
Well it's a merger, so the expulsion content - a major if not main theme - is incorporated into the Nakba article. For an analogy, the Holocaust for example, where there's no separate article on the main theme; that of extermination. Everything is discussed within that article. Makeandtoss (talk) 17:24, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
My concern is that the expulsion article is 7,200 words while the Nakba is 1,600 words, so the former will overwhelm the latter.
At 116,311 bytes, WP:SIZESPLIT suggests the expulsion article is already too long.
Onceinawhile (talk) 18:04, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
That measures readable prose size, not size on the back end, so it's only 45k, but that's a healthy size, and the point stands that the material on the expulsions would simple drown out all of the other material on this page. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:39, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
Remain as it is now. Nakba: Broad term representing the Palestinian exodus during and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, symbolizing displacement and suffering caused by the creation of Israel.
1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight: Specific events of forced expulsion and flight during the war, involving military operations, attacks on villages, and fear, leading to the displacement of Palestinians. Sarah SchneiderCH (talk) 01:00, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Important to note there is a separate Nakba Day article.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Makeandtoss (talk • contribs) 10:54, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

And Ongoing Nakba too. Selfstudier (talk) 11:08, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 (talk) 16:42, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

(
)
  • ... that the Nakba has been described as an ongoing catastrophe? Source: See quotations in footnotes 4-7 of the current version[1] of the article.

Created by Onceinawhile (talk). Self-nominated at 23:17, 4 April 2021 (UTC).

:* Absolutely not. A blatant POV fork that just barely escaped speedy deletion with the closer recommending a redirect or merge with the article it was forked from. Kenosha Forever (talk) 23:27, 4 April 2021 (UTC) blocked by Bradv as a sock of NoCal100

  • ALT1 ... that the Nakba – the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian people – has been described as an ongoing catastrophe?
  • ALT2 Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish described the Nakba as "an extended present that promises to continue in the future."?
  • ALT3 the Nakba greatly influenced the Palestinian culture and is a foundational symbol of Palestinian identity?
  • ALT4 the Palestinian Nakba resulted in the loss of their homeland, the fragmentation and marginalization of their national community, and their transformation into a stateless people?
Hi @Kokopelli7309: thanks for your comment. Some more detailed alternatives for consideration - what do you think? Nakba Day is in about three weeks (15 May) - I am hoping that this DYK could be up on that day. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:36, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

New reviewer needed. Onceinawhile (talk) 19:52, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

  • Came to review, but am concerned that the issue raised by the sock puppet is actually valid. I don't see a clear dividing line between this article and the much larger article 1948 Palestinian exodus, which used to have Nakba as an alternate title. Can you explain the difference? --GRuban (talk) 13:10, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
Hi GRuban, yes sure. This article was created after a discussion which concluded the two topics were different. On the back of that, work was done to gather the best sources for an article on the Nakba, with a clear scope defined by those sources.
The scholarly definitions of the Nakba from those sources are quoted in the footnotes of the article, but I will try to answer your question in layman's terms. The simplest way to perceive the Nakba is in its literal translation. The Nakba is the Palestinian Catastrophe. That catastrophe was much more than the fact that many people had to leave. It is that the country ceased to exist, that its history was erased, its society fractured, its people denationalized and displaced (much of the displacement was internal, which was not part of the exodus). The Nakba encompasses the impact on all Palestinian lives, not just those who had to leave; and it is commonly said to be ongoing given the continuing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians still under Israeli control.
Onceinawhile (talk) 13:35, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
  • OK, I can accept that. So then it should be much larger than the 1948 Palestinian exodus rather than the other way around? So it's nowhere near complete? I guess completeness isn't part of the DYK requirements. Reviewing:
General: Article is new enough and long enough

Policy compliance:

  • Adequate sourcing: No - yAlmost; need a cite for second paragraph under "Dispossession and erasure"
  • Neutral: No - yNo; we do need to cover the Israeli point of view on the Nakba, all we've got is an "Israeli law" paragraph about how one politician tried to outlaw commemoration, which isn't really comprehensive.
  • Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing: Yes
Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation

QPQ: No - yn
Overall: So, multiple issues. The cite is no big deal, there are loads to choose from, that should be easy. The neutrality needs a fair bit of content, I'm afraid, and given the high quality of sources used in the rest of the article needs to have high quality sourcing there as well. And I think you need a quid pro quo review, unless this is one of your first few DYKs? If you fix all that, please ping. For the hooks, I prefer ALT1, followed by 0 and 2. ALT3 seems to minimize it (alongside a cartoon? and a key that we don't even have an article on?), while ALT4 is just wrong, as you describe it, the Nakba didn't result in the loss, fragmentation, transformation, the Nakba is the loss, fragmentation and transformation. Right? That is part of the confusion there. GRuban (talk) 14:25, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @GRuban: for reviewing this. I have done the QPQ and added the citation. I am fine with ALT1.
On the neutrality question, would you be able to give me some more guidance? Part of the challenge is that, as you say, the article is not currently a complete summary of all aspects of the Nakba, so nor can I currently give a complete summary of all perspectives on the same. At this point all perspectives will be incomplete, but I do agree that we must still maintain neutrality which I perceive as being done if we hit the right "relative weighting" for the various perspectives.
In writing the article, I have tried to stay away from any of the really contentious ground - the article doesn't say which side caused the displacement, it doesn't argue why the towns were demolished and their names changed, it doesn't seek to explain why those who crossed the borders were denationalized, and it's doesn't seek to discuss the legality of laws enacted to take possession of the land. It just says that these things happened (factual statements, to which there are no "two sides") and that taken together they are considered a catastrophe for Palestinians (again a factual statement, which the Israeli mainstream agrees with). If you asked an Israeli on the street for their view of the Nakba, you would get answers very similar to these: "Israelis: What do you think of Palestinian property confiscated in 1948 war?" A mix of "sure it's a shame", "that's war", whataboutism, "it was their fault" etc etc. There is no coherent "Israeli view" on the Palestinian tragedy.
If there are specific sentences or paragraphs which you consider would benefit from alternative viewpoints, I would find that much easier to implement. Onceinawhile (talk) 22:44, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
For the QPQ, I know when I reviewed DYKs, I got in trouble once or twice for just saying "ok" or "not ok" without going point by point, as in the template I used here. But maybe that has changed: I've reviewed maybe a dozen DYKs, but I'm not a DYK-review-reviewer. For neutrality, please take a look at the section 1948 Palestinian exodus#Role in the Palestinian and Israeli narratives. This whole Nakba article is quite similar to the Palestinian narrative section of that article. To balance, we want something like the Israeli narrative section; though, I admit, that one is not very well sourced. You've picked a hard article to write, which you can tell by how long it took to get a DYK reviewer! Honestly, if you just present a section reading a mix of "sure it's a shame", "that's war", whataboutism, "it was their fault" etc etc, with good sourcing for each (not just Youtube man-on-the-street interviews, you've got scholarly sources for the rest of the article, you want to match that), that would probably satisfy. --GRuban (talk) 23:13, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
Hi GRuban, thanks for this. On QPQ's I have reviewed about 50 or so in my time and have usually done it in prose form. On the 1948 Palestinian exodus#Role in the Palestinian and Israeli narratives I have read that a few times and find the whole thing to be poor quality. The Palestinian narratives and Israeli narratives sections are covering entirely different sub-topics and fail to present a coherent picture of the various perspectives. That whole article needs some real work. I can't use the Israeli narrative section here because it is all about the cause of the exodus, and I really don't want to get into that in either direction (we have a whole article dedicated to it at Causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus).
I will see what I can do on the proposal in your last sentence, and will ping you when done. Onceinawhile (talk) 23:24, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
Hi GRuban I have spent the last 10 days on and off looking for good quality sourcing for criticism of the Nakba. All I have been able to find is non-RS extremist blogs, and a few months ago some news about the Israeli ambassador to the UK calling it a lie[2] (when you listen to her words, she doesn’t present any substance behind the claim[3]).
I can’t find any reliable sources or any other form of mainstream criticism.
Onceinawhile (talk) 22:51, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
I'm not asking for criticism of the Nakba, just for the Israeli view. If that view is supportive or mixed or neutral that is perfectly fine too, just some good scholarly sources on what that or those views is or are. I can't believe there are no Israeli views on such an important thing; say what you like about Israelis, but no one has ever called them restrained in their opinions! --GRuban (talk) 23:05, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
Well it's today, isn't it? I think this idea of criticism is a wrong way of looking at it. The truth of it, as far as truth can be found, is that Israeli independence and the initial Palestinian Nakba are two narratives about the same events and never the twain shall meet. It is not specifically about the rights and wrongs of what happened then and since, it is that it is difficult if not impossible for a participant to hold the idea of both in their heads at the same time, they are contradictory. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/jewish-israelis-should-stop-being-afraid-of-the-nakba-1.9761766 is a good as anything I have read up to now.Selfstudier (talk) 23:18, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
I was trying to post mine and kept getting edit conflict, anyway, same conclusion, it's not that it is criticism.Selfstudier (talk) 23:25, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
Thanks @GRuban and Selfstudier: I think I have found a good source which covers this elegantly:
Motti Golani; Adel Manna (2011). Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba 1948. Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation. p. 14. ISBN 9789089790811. The Palestinians regard the Nakba and its repercussions as a formative trauma defining their identity and their national, moral, and political aspirations. As a result of the 1948 war, the Palestinian people, which to a large degree lost their country to the establishment of a Jewish state for the survivors of the Holocaust, developed a victimized national identity. From their perspective, the Palestinians have been forced to pay for the Jewish Holocaust with their bodies, their property, and their freedom instead of those who were truly responsible. Jewish Israelis, in contrast, see the war and its outcome not merely as an act of historical justice that changed the historical course of the Jewish people, which until that point had been filled with suffering and hardship, but also as a birth – the birth of Israel as an independent Jewish state after two thousand years of exile. As such, it must be pure and untainted, because if a person, a nation, or a state is born in sin, its entire essence is tainted. In this sense, discourse on the war is not at all historical but rather current and extremely sensitive. Its power and intensity is directly influenced by present day events. In the Israeli and the Palestinian cases, therefore, the 1948 war plays a pivotal role in two simple, clear, unequivocal, and harmonious narratives, with both peoples continuing to see the war as a formative event in their respective histories.
Onceinawhile (talk) 11:25, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
Yes, in essence, I think that covers it.Selfstudier (talk) 11:28, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
I have implemented it here: [4]. Onceinawhile (talk) 11:44, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
Good enough for DYK. Thank you! I struck the "no"s in my form and replaced with "y"s but it still marks them with crosses; hopefully the closing editor will understand.--GRuban (talk) 13:17, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 1 September 2023 uplease update broken links!!!

Please update Citation [24] with a working link, here's the NON-ARCHIVE UNITED NATIONS DOCUMENT PAGE

HERE IS THE WAYBACK MACHINE ARCHIVES UNITED NATIONS LINK TO THE DOCUMENT IN QUESTION

There's an important bit in the page with a broken link, citation [24] IbnTawfik (talk) 17:11, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

 Done Wracking talk! 23:33, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
Thank you!! IbnTawfik (talk) 02:39, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

"80% of the land in the programmed Jewish state was already owned by Palestinians"

This claim seem dubius, given that the vast majority of the land of the proposed Jewish state was an empty desert. Even according to the map, there were no Arab settlements there. Did the Arabs own the empty desert? TFighterPilot (talk) 15:41, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I think this statement was added by @Nishidani: - I do not have access to the underlying source (Ahmad H. Sa'di, Reflections on Representations, History, and Moral Accountability). Onceinawhile (talk) 15:59, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
Can't remember. But what Sa'di wrote is the traditional figure (where 'owned by Palestinians' probably refers to 'land accessible to, and with user rights exercised by, Palestinians. There's always this ugly matter of the difference between Western concepts of proprietorship, and the concept of land rights in non-Western societies, as anyone raised in Australia must be acutely aware of.)
perhaps the figures could be put into a chart, by converting the data given in a more accessible source.
I'm thinking of Saree Makdisi 's Palestine Inside Out:An Everyday Occupation, W. W. Norton 2010 ISBN 978-0-393-33844-7 p.228
There the figure of 80% is applied to the percentage of Jewish National Fund lands formerly owned by Palestinians.
Another route to establishing the exact dimensions of one of the great land swindles in history (an entire territory snapped up without paying a cent. Henry VIII did better in swiping all Catholic estates and monastery land -the 'commons' of the overwhelming mass of the peasantry, and handing it over to his barons) is to examine land registered under Jewish title on the eve of 1948, and subtract that percentage, just under 6% from memory, from the total land area under British administration. That gives a higher figure, but all sorts of technical details (i.e. public lands recognized as such by mandatory authorities) explain much of the difference between 80% and 94%. There are excelLent charts at The Palestine Remembered website.
I'm afraid I have a heavy demand on my reading offline at the moment, preparing a new article, and can't tweak this myself.Nishidani (talk) 16:55, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
According to this chart, 84% of the southern territory was "public and other". Am I missing something? For now, I'll remove this claim from the article. EDIT: Or not, because I don't have the needed permissions. Can you do it? TFighterPilot (talk) 15:01, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
1.'Ownership' is distinct from usufruct rights or access. Americans, for instance, have rights of access to many public parks and federal lands. Norwegians have a right to roam in most wilderness found in the country. Access can not be considered ownership, which was a defined legal category in Ottoman law, which was observed by the British Mandate. As such, Sa'di's source has not provided any evidence for the claim. It equivocates state and vacant land, as well as generally, any accessible land (as in not land owned privately by Jews), with Palestinian land, while exclusively referring to Jewish private and trust land as Jewish land. That is deliberately deceptive.
Sa'di's attribution of vacant land attributed to Arabs, which was actually under trust for the Government of Palestine, amounts to 1,203,322 dunnums of non-cultivable vacant land. If we subtract that (3,143,695-1,203,322) we get 1,940,373 dunnums, or 29.5% of the land. There was also government title over a large proportion of cultivable land but I suppose the false statistic can be damned without more complex considerations.
Usufruct rights are not the equivalent of site-specific occupation or use, let alone legal ownership. Mandatory Palestine all the way back to Ancient Israel was not Australia (ethnoterritorial claims in Australia are also not regarded as ownership by courts, it is a special type of title, so it is not a get-out-reality-free-card). Both the various caliphate and Ottoman property systems included the concept of ownership as well as public and vacant lands which was common for states throughout history as this tended to result in a closer correlation with empirical observation with respect to land use. Ottoman law itself was Islamic religious law influenced by European (e.g., Austrian, Swiss, and French) law. Even the indigenous legal systems of early Jewish kingdoms recognized ownership.
That would be like me saying Pakistan, for a hypothetical example, was 85% owned by Hindus and Sikhs, and 15% by Muslims, before the partition but I include all public and vacant land (deserts, forests, shrubland, etc) as "Hindu/Sikh"
Department of Statistics (1945). "Village Statistics, April, 1945," Government of Palestine, scan of the original document at the National Library of Israel.
2. If we look at specific survey statistics (Village statistics, April, 1945), April, 1945, 7,766,535 dunnams out of 26,333,201 were Arab owned or 29.5%. Most of this was outside of the territory for the proposed Jewish state.
See: Department of Statistics (1945). "Village Statistics, April, 1945," Government of Palestine, scan of the original document at the National Library of Israel, available at https://nli.org.il/en/books/NNL_ALEPH990022497560205171/NLI……, retrieved 16/09/2023.
3. "Another route is to establishing the exact dimensions [...] is to examine land registered under Jewish title on the eve of 1948, and subtract that percentage, just under 6% from memory, from the total land area under British administration."
As explained above, that is an equally deceptive approach as it rests on the following assumptions:
(a) a particular ethnic, racial or religious group owns all land in a region that is not privately owned;
(b) that legal ownership only matters for Jews, despite the existence of the concept of ownership for all population groups;
(c) that the ability to access land constitutes land-ownership (Sa'di choosing to attribute 1,203,322 acres of non-cultivable vacant land to Arabs on the basis of the ability to 'access' it is comically deceptive)
(d) that Jews were not 'Palestinians' then (the identity emerged recently and at times Jews did identify with it, it was after all a term used prior to Arab colonization of the region). PresidentCoriolanus (talk) 08:10, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
Of the approximately 110,000 Bedouin who lived in the area before the war about 11,000 remained. Most had relocated from the northwestern to the northeastern Negev. It wasnt empty. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/droi/dv/138_abrahamfundstudy_/138_abrahamfundstudy_en.pdf
Despite this, the region remained exclusively Arab until 1946; in response to the British Morrison–Grady Plan which would have allotted the area to an Arab state, the Jewish Agency enacted the 11 points in the Negev plan to begin Jewish settlement in the area. A year later, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine allotted a larger part of the area to the Jewish State which became Israel.
Negev IbnTawfik (talk) 02:51, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
Most of the Negev was, nonetheless, unowned and vacant land.
See: Department of Statistics (1945). "Village Statistics, April, 1945," Government of Palestine, scan of the original document at the National Library of Israel, available at https://nli.org.il/en/books/NNL_ALEPH990022497560205171/NLI……, retrieved 16/09/2023.
10,572,110 dunums was non-cultivable public land, along with 1,815 dunums of urban public land. 1,426 dunums was Arab urban land and 1,984,849 dunums was Arab cultivated land. 65,151 dunums was jewish cultivated land and 80 dunums was Jewish urban land. PresidentCoriolanus (talk) 08:19, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Ilan Pappe on Wikipedia's coverage of Nakba, 2006

I was reading Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and he discusses Wikipedia's coverage of it in the introduction. From page 4:

Wikipedia also includes the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. But one cannot tell whether the editors regard the Nakba as a case of ethnic cleansing that leaves no room for ambivalence, as in the examples ofNazi Germany or the former Yugoslavia, or whether they consider this a more doubtful case, perhaps similar to that of the Jewish settlers whom Israel removed from the Gaza Strip.

And this was written in 2006! Levivich (talk) 17:00, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

It's likely that different editors have varying perspectives on this topic, which is understandable. He may not understand Wikipedia very well based on this comment, but this type of 'loop' is interesting! Marokwitz (talk) 20:41, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

palestinian trauma narrative

Im sorry, but that line even if sourced it is nonsense. It is not simply a Palestinian narrative, per sources it is the consensus view on the central facts of what happened. See for example note 44 here. nableezy - 09:19, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Also, to suggest trauma is a 'narrative' is to strongly imply that it isn't real. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:17, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
Ok, I removed these words. Marokwitz (talk) 10:45, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Fringe

@Marokwitz: Not only have you added an entire section dedicated to the works of a scholar who is largely unknown and unreported on in reliable sources, you have proceeded to add that fringe view to the lede, and reverted attempts for its summarization and combination in a wider section. This cannot be considered constructive to the article. Makeandtoss (talk) 16:19, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your note. I don't agree that this is a fringe view, and I added it in a highly summarized manner (different from the original which was correctly criticized of being too long); however, I have no problem with removing this citation from the lead if you think that would be better. I'll do it. Marokwitz (talk) 16:43, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
All you have currently produced from this guy is a single paper, and that's from the Jewish Political Studies Review, published by an advocacy group, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:44, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
He is a recognized authority, with most of his publications in French. Asserting that he is not a prominent academic, while at the same time coincidentally erasing the list of books and the organizations he founded from his Wikipedia page, smacks of WP:Systemic bias. The publication 'Jewish Political Studies Review' holds academic rigor, standing no less reliable than the Arab world and Palestine-focused journals cited elsewhere on his page, and infinitely more reliable than an op-ed in WP:COUNTERPUNCH, and certainly a reliable source for opposing views of the subject, which is the topic of this section.
On that topic, citing an article from Counterpunch as a source for fairly describing the Israeli point of view, and using the clearly biased language 'Israeli officials have repeatedly stigmatized the term,' in wiki-voice is an affront to the neutrality of Wikipedia. Marokwitz (talk) 06:16, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
A single-sourced section is not particularly compelling regardless. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:22, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
I will remind you of WP:UNDUE: "Neutrality requires that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in those sources." The Jewish Political Studies Review is a publication by a neoconservative Israeli think tank, and is not a reliable source, and this is also evidenced by the lack of any other reliable sources reporting on them. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate if this is due. Makeandtoss (talk) 09:33, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Sela and Kadish have posited a comparable notion regarding the evolution of the national memory of the Nakba over time, albeit with nuanced differences in their analyses. However, their paragraph has been transitioned by another editor to the Historiography section. I believe they should be together. Being published by a think tank does not make a source unreliable, particularly for the topic of reporting contrary viewpoints, particularly when the writer is a respected academic, and surely when used with attribution. Marokwitz (talk) 09:59, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Respected academics publish with academic publishers. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:45, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
'Institute for Palestine Studies' and 'Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs' fall under the same category, and you know it. Marokwitz (talk) 11:37, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Well I'm afraid that's where you are wrong. Aside from being decades older and infinitely more learned, the Journal of Palestine Studies, an actually notable journal, is published by Taylor & Francis, an actual academic publisher, unlike the Jewish Political Studies Review. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:55, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Not at all in the same category, not even close. Selfstudier (talk) 11:57, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
I concur with Iskandar, a think tank is by definition a political advocacy organization. Comparable notion doesn't matter, what matters is what independent reliable sources think of the work by the author. A quick google search reveals no one had anything to say, leading us to the conclusion that it is indeed undue. Makeandtoss (talk) 10:49, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Then we should equally remove all materials sourced to 'Institute for Palestine Studies' and their publications. Marokwitz (talk) 11:38, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
False equivalency. Institute for Palestine Studies is an independent research institution and not a political advocacy think tank group; it has a scholarly journal which is peer-reviewed and published through University of California Press; and Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi's works are widely cited in independent secondary reliable sources. All of this Trigano's work lacks. Makeandtoss (talk) 11:50, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, it says Taylor and Francis on the page. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:57, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
It was UCP and changed over not that long ago, iirc. Selfstudier (talk) 11:59, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Yes, just spotted that part in the lead blurb. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:00, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Codswallop, IPS is RS, no question. Selfstudier (talk) 12:00, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out. Still stands that there is an independent publisher and so it is a false equivalency. Makeandtoss (talk) 12:00, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
They are both academic journals published by organizations representing particular point of view. Both claim to be independent research institutions. According to WP:RSthey are considered reliable to show the views of the groups represented by those journals. There is no problem whatever relying on Jewish Political Studies Review to represent the opposing viewpoint in this article. Marokwitz (talk) 12:17, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
JCPA can be used with attribution but it is a crappy source and if that is all there is, that's why. Selfstudier (talk) 12:28, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
It can be used with attribution indeed as I had left it in a short simple paragraph, but it was reverted to the version where it enjoys a massive dedicated section titled "Opposition by scholars", and now occupies even a greater position on the lede. Makeandtoss (talk) 13:06, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
It is not currently in the lead. It was not reverted to the original version but to a shortened version, but I am very open to discuss the due length, or to try to shorten it myself. We can also discuss whether this represents an 'Israeli' narrative and in such case merge it with the previous section. Marokwitz (talk) 13:51, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for being cooperative. Due guideline refers to the body. Lede is only a summary of body. The issue here is about the length of the section on Trigano. A short paragraph suffices. Makeandtoss (talk) 14:15, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
Ok, I took a stab at shortening this section, and solving the single-source section concern. Marokwitz (talk) 17:24, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Today doesn't mean 2003

In the last sentance of the "displacement" section, word "today" is used, referering to a source from 2003. Someone please change this to read "In 2003" instead of "today". Can't do it myself because I'm not extended confirmed. Globokivisoki (talk) 11:54, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Done. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:18, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Benny Morris in lead

Benny Morris has since rejected the notion of ethnic cleansing. Is it appropriate to include his name in the lead? Moreover, the article does not mention him, which seems inconsistent with WP:LEDE? See: [5] Marokwitz (talk) 20:38, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

I note this was already corrected - discussion closed as done. Marokwitz (talk) 10:41, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Lead should include opposing viewpoints

Per WP:LEAD the lead should summarize the body of the article with appropriate weight, including all prominent controversies; Opposing viewpoints are currently lacking. Marokwitz (talk) 19:07, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

 Done Marokwitz (talk) 10:42, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

National narratives

The article's scope is focused on the expulsion and fleeing of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, which are historical facts. The Israeli national narrative cannot be given this much weight while the Palestinian one isn't even mentioned. Both national narratives need to be expanded on in the body, and then briefly summarized in lede. Makeandtoss (talk) 12:18, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree. I beg to know how there is somehow more written for the perspective of the entity that invaded Palestine... rather than of the Palestinians themselves. I believe this article has bias. NOKO444 (talk) 21:07, 29 October 2023 (UTC)


  • To the first paragraph this should be added: "The decision of the General Assembly of the United Nations regarding the

> division of the Land of Israel into two states, Jewish and Arab, which was > accepted by the Jewish community with joy, met with strong opposition from the > Arab leadership in the country, led by the leader of the Supreme Arab > Committee, Mufti Amin al-Husseini, who rejected the plan outright. And the day > after the vote he started a general strike, which was accompanied by acts > of terror against Jews in the cities and on the roads - these acts led to the > beginning of the War of Independence [Nakba]." (format using {{textdiff}}):

  • To avoid fact gap between the English and the Hebrew and Arab Wikipedia articles, which could prevent miscommunication and hatred between the sides:
  • שמואל לדרמן, לפרק את הנכבה: האם הפלסטינים אכן נלחמו בתוכנית החלוקה?, באתר הפורום לחשיבה אזורית, ‏26.1.2021 (format using the "cite" button):

46.120.120.178 (talk) 15:03, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Nope, that is propaganda, the Jewish leaders accepted partition with the view of it being a stepping stone to further expansion over all of Palestine, and the violence in the last years of the Mandate was certainly not simply "acts of terror against Jews in the cities and on the roads", nor did that lead to the beginning of the war. nableezy - 15:09, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
I gave a source and reasoning for the claim which I made. What source says it was "a stepping stone to further expansion"? 46.120.120.178 (talk) 19:21, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Morris, Benny (2011). Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998. Vintage. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-78805-4. Retrieved October 30, 2023. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion pressed for a solution based on partition. Said Weizmann: "The Jews would be fools not to accept it, even if [the land they were allocated] were the size of a table cloth." Both saw partition as a stepping stone to further expansion and the eventual takeover of the whole of Palestine. "No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel," Ben-Gurion was quoted as saying.118 He wrote to his son Amos: "[A] Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning.… Our possession is important not only for itself … through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a [small] state … will serve as a very potent lever in our historical efforts to redeem the whole country." nableezy - 19:25, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Ben-Gurion used the word "purchasing the land". It doesn't implies to conquer land by violence.
The quote by Said Weizmann doesn't imply any kind of violence to conquer more land. 46.120.120.178 (talk) 20:46, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
You asked me what the quote for "stepping stone to further expansion" was, there it is. And a couple of pages later:

Yet transfer, however problematic or cruel, offered a way out of the demographic dilemma, and it was sporadically given an airing. Israel Zangwill had declared in April 1905: "[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population." And fourteen years later he wrote: "We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction.… And therefore we must gently persuade them to ‘trek.’ After all, they have all Arabia with its million square miles.… There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometers. 'To fold their tents and silently steal away' is their proverbial habit: Let them exemplify it now."

nableezy - 21:04, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Refer to the addition I have purposed, what would you change in it, to make it neutral and to bring less hate to the situation? 2.55.173.200 (talk) 21:44, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
The source you cited, https://www.regthink.org/deconstruction-the-nakba/, says pretty much the opposite of what you wrote. It says the Palestinians did not fight against the partition plan, and calls that a "myth." Despite the importance of this discussion, to a large extent it resulted in the marginalization of the question of the Palestinians' choice to forcefully oppose the partition plan, which allowed Israel to preserve the mythology that the Palestinians as a collective chose to go to war against the partition plan, and therefore the responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem (and in fact, since the events of 1947-1948 They are a defining event in the history of the Jewish-Arab conflict - also for the entire conflict) is first and foremost the Palestinians themselves. ... In fact, it is known in research that despite the call of Palestinian leaders, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, for the Palestinians to fight against the partition plan, only a tiny minority of them chose to do so ... The whole paper is about dismantling this myth. It makes no mention of "terror against Jews." Again, it pretty much says the opposite: ...the myth that the Palestinians as a collective started a war against the Jewish settlement in 1947-1948 is one of the persistent and least challenged myths. Unless maybe Google translate is way off here. (All these quotes via GT.) Levivich (talk) 19:43, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
There was no claim that Palestinians as a collective chose to go to war. Even a few [in the article you quoted 4000 until May] can start a war if the tension is high enough.
Jamal al-Husayni was quoted after the UN partition "The dividing line will be nothing but a line of fire and blood"
Day after the UN partition plan, Fajja bus attack took place. 46.120.120.178 (talk) 20:59, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Thats ignoring the days before the vote, such as the blowing up Arab residences by the Haganah in August of 47. Youre not going to be able to say "this right here, this is when the war started and this was the violence that instigated it". nableezy - 21:04, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Faija was retaliation for the Shubaki family assassination on 19 November. Selfstudier (talk) 18:50, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

References

Ethnic cleansing

Am I missing something or is the ethnic cleansing characterisation by some scholars left out? Makeandtoss (talk) 10:46, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

It probably has something to do with the slightly artificial distinction between this article and the 1948 Palestinian exodus, where those characterizations are mentioned. These subjects are arguably synonymous, as the Palestinian nation is its people, and Nakba is the 1948 expulsion event - and everything else is just epiphenomenal to this, but two pages it currently is. Iskandar323 (talk) 11:36, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
Viz the Nakba, there are more than a few commentators that (now) view the Nakba as a continuing event so there is some justification for two articles. Selfstudier (talk) 12:07, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
So? They interrlap, and there is no reason why not to mention the ethnic cleansing characterization here as well. Makeandtoss (talk) 12:09, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
No, there is no reason why a mention should not be made here under the current setup, in which more or less any 1948 information is fair game. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:15, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
@Selfstudier: You may or may not have seen the new "ongoing Nakba" article that I have created that focuses on that emerging framework of conceptual understanding. I began that with half a mind to zoom in on examples of the "ongoing" forms of catastrophe, but very few sources bridge all the way from that specific term to specific examples. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:19, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
Nice. Arafat referred to the need to close the chapter of Nakba in 1998, implying it was ongoing (the ref is in the Nakba article). Maybe where Ashrawi picked up on it. Selfstudier (talk) 12:33, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
I also like Iskandar's new article. It makes this "Nakba" article the parent of two "child" articles - the "1948 exodus" and the "ongoing Nakba".
I also agree with Makeandtoss that mentioning the common "ethnic cleaning" assessment in this article would be appropriate. It is clearly relevant to both 1948 and the ongoing situation. Onceinawhile (talk) 16:54, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
Added to article as discussed here. Makeandtoss (talk) 10:35, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
The subjects are not synonymous as the 'Nakba' is the term used by the Palestinian narrative and its adherents, whereas the flight and expulsion article refers to the general scholarly discussion on the war and displacement and flight during it. PresidentCoriolanus (talk) 08:38, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
I will add these cites to the article later unless someone beats me to it, but I just finished running through my pile of sources, and this is the list of some 21st-century scholars who either say the Nakba was ethnic cleansing (in their own voice), or they say that other historians say the Nakba was ethnic cleansing: Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, pp. 30, 65, 71, 81, 182, 193-194; Abu-Laban and Bakan 2022, p. 511; Manna 2022; Pappe 2022, pp. 33, 120-122, 126-132, 137, 239; Shenhav 2019, pp. 48-61; Gutman and Tirosh 2021, p. 5; Hasian, Jr. 2020, pp. 77-109; Khalidi 2020, p. 12, 73, 76, and 231; Slater 2020, pp. 81-85; Bashir 2018, Introduction; Masalha 2018, pp. 44, 52-54, 64, 319, 324, 376, 383; Nashef 2018, pp. 5-6, 52, 76; Al-Hardan 2016, pp. 47-48; Natour 2016, p. 82; Rashed 2014, pp. 3-4, 8-18; Lentin 2013, ch. 2; Masalha 2012; Wolfe 2012, pp. 153-154, 160-161; Khoury 2012, p. 258, 263-265; Knopf-Newman 2011, pp. 4-5, 25-32, 109, 180-182; Milshtein 2009 p. 50; Ram 2009, p. 388; Shlaim 2009, pp. 55, 288; Sa'di 2007, pp. 28-29, 249-250, 291-293, 298, 308; Pappe 2006; Schulz 2003, pp. 24, 31-32. Levivich (talk) 21:34, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
 Done replaced the existing cites with the above cites, copyedited the sentence to match the sources, see edit summaries for details Levivich (talk) 05:55, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Ongoing Nakba

Ongoing Nakba quotes

Quotes from core sources about ongoing Nakba
  • Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, p. xiii "The Nakba continues. Some actors might be different, their practices altered, but the violence and its purpose persist."
    • Sabbagh-Khoury 2023, p. 264 "Thus, the Nakba is ongoing (al-nakba al-mustamirra); it has long been ongoing."
  • Abu-Laban 2022, p. 512 "For Palestinians, occupation, land usurpation, displacement and being forced to live as refugees have continued from 1948 until present times. The Nakba has in effect been an ongoing continuity of trauma."
  • Manna 2022, p. 25 "In the decades that followed the terms “fedayeen,” “intifada,” al-naksa (setback), and others were added to the international language, enriching it with new concepts connected to the continuation of the Nakba and attempts by Palestinians to regain their “lost paradise.”"
  • Sayigh 2022, p. 285 "The Nakba entailed a continuing state of rightlessness, with all the varieties of violence that rightlessness exposes people to."
  • Wermenbol 2021, p. 12 "For Palestinian-Israelis, the law not only constitutes an attempt to erase their past, but equally is, as Joint List leader and Hadash Chairman Ayman Odeh stated, “Point of proof that the Nakba – the erasure of Palestinians, along with our history, language and stories – is not a single historical event. It is a continuing phenomenon.”"
    • Wermenbol 2021, p. 305 "For the Palestinians living inside the 1948 borders, the Nakba as a present continuous is principally characterized by contemporary political marginalization and as an outcome of what Ilan Pappé succinctly termed a cultural memoricide.3 Consequently, the Nakba, as the watershed from which the vanquished minority spawned, has been conceived of as both an interpretative historical framework and, simultaneously, through its perceived continuity, a retrospective analogy. Public demonstrations aimed at exposing cultural and physical palimpsest practices deemed emblematic of the ongoing Nakba therefore not only seek a transmission of the past but also constitute a demand for social equality."
  • Khalidi 2020, p. 75 "None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.38 Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process."
  • Bashir 2018, Introduction "For the Palestinians, the Nakba is not merely about their defeat, their ethnic cleansing from Palestine,2 and the loss of their homeland, nor even about having become a people living predominantly as refugees outside their land and as a fragmented minority living under occupation in their own land. The Nakba also represents the destruction of hundreds of villages and urban neighborhoods, along with the cultural, economic, political, and social fabric of the Palestinian people. It is the violent and irreparable disruption of the modern development of Palestinian culture, society, and national consciousness.3 It is the ongoing colonization of Palestine that continues to the present through colonial practices and polices such as Jewish settlements, illegal land acquisition, imposing siege on Gaza, and the evacuation of villages.4"
    • Bashir 2018, Introduction "By contrast, most Palestinians live under largely miserable conditions of statelessness, occupation, fragmentation, rightlessness, and dispossession. Indicating the constitutive centrality of the Nakba in Palestinian politics, society, and collective memory, Ahmad H. Sa’di claims that the Nakba has become for the Palestinians what the French historian Pierre Nora called les lieux de memoire.32 The Nakba is an explicitly continuing present. Its consequences as well as the eliminatory colonial ideas and practices that informed it are still unfolding, being deployed, and affecting contemporary Palestinian life.33 Its aftermath of suffering and political weakness affects almost every Palestinian and Palestinian family, along with the Palestinian collective, on a near-daily basis.34"
  • Nashef 2018, pp. 1-2 "Since the events of 1948, the Nakba has progressed to denote the essence of what being a Palestinian entails. Even though the term refers to a singular historic event, the consequence of 1948 and the events that superseded that year have rendered the term elastic, as the Nakba is a lived past experience and a nagging reminder of a loss that still pervades the lives of generations of Palestinians. It is the beginning of a long line of catastrophes for the people of Palestine, and the “consequences of the Nakba, or the ongoing Israeli system of settler-colonial rule over historic Palestine, are therefore realities of the present and not merely the past” (al-Hardan 48). The Nakba “continues in the form of refugees, dispossession, exclusion from the homeland, occupation and military domination [and] continues as a point of origin rather than a beginning in as much as it continues to dominate what derives from it” (Makhoul and Hon 9)."
    • Nashef 2018, p. 5 "Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, suggests that the term Nakba or Catastrophe is elusive as it only refers to the disaster of 1948. The term not only ignores the perpetrators of the events that led to 1948 but also suggests that Palestinian loss is contained within that year. Unfortunately, the Nakba is unending."
    • Nashef 2018, p. 6 "Barghouti believes that the Catastrophe survives in people’s imagination because the state of Israel works against itself by continually igniting the wounds through its atrocities (Barghouti and Hamdi 663). The Nakba cannot be reduced to 1948 but extends to the years that follow."
  • Al-Hardan 2016, p. xi "The Nakba, however, is not only a historical event. It is today also a structure of Israeli settler-colonial rule in historic Palestine (Salamanca et al. 2012), one based on settlercolonialism’s logic of the elimination of the Indigenous population (Wolfe 2006). Examining memories that resulted from the Nakba is therefore not about taking part in a mourning of a second order (Chow 2008). It is about acknowledgment and accountability for the atrocities and enforced statelessness that accompanied the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This includes the decolonization of an ongoing violent system of settler-colonial domination (or total exclusion, in the case of the Palestinians expelled in 1948) that Israel has established over all Palestinian lives since 1948 (Salamanca et al. 2012; F. Sayegh 2012)."
    • Al-Hardan 2016, p. 3 "Within the context of Syria, this meaning of the Nakba reflects the drastic transformations that Palestinian communities in the country are undergoing after an uninterrupted four-generation socially and economically integrated presence. Before the war in Syria, the establishment of the state of Israel, when understood through its Palestinian patriotic and Arab nationalist significations,5 could be articulated as a catastrophic event whose impact on the new generations of Palestinian refugees was underscored by several factors. Most important of these are an ongoing statelessness, a political claim to historic Palestine, and diverse feelings of belonging. Today, these meanings of the Nakba have been transformed. The Nakba is no longer only about a distant event in the past that continues to manifest itself through an ongoing statelessness. It is also a catastrophe taking place in the present through the destruction of Palestinian communities yet again and the severance of their temporal, spatial, material, and personal ties in Syria."
  • Sela & Kadish 2016, p. 12 "In the following years, the nakba developed into a primary signifying symbol of Palestinian history and identity perceived as a continuous sequence of traumas, a perpetuation of victimhood manifested in repeated massacres, suffering, and misery."
  • Rashed 2014, p. 1 "The paper suggests that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, which was based on appropriation of the land of Palestine without its people, comprising massacres, physical destruction of villages, appropriation of land, property and culture, can be seen as an ongoing process and not merely a historical event."
    • Rashed 2014, p. 12 "The concept of an ‘ongoing’ Nakba is not a new one for Palestinians,6 yet despite the Nakba being central to Palestinian identity, history and memory, relatively few Palestinian scholars have examined its causes."
    • Rashed 2014, p. 18 "The fact that these Palestinians are Israeli citizens means that we could view these policies from a minority rights perspective, as the acts of a selectively ‘repressive’ government. This does not preclude individual victims experiencing this as genocidal. Indeed, if we take the view that the Nakba – including the ‘transfer’, denial, elimination and discrimination against Palestinians – is still taking place as part of a process of settler colonialism, the relevance to Genocide Studies cannot be ignored."
    • Rashed 2014, p. 18 "Yet it is apparent to Palestinians in different contexts experiencing discriminatory policies intended to drive them away from their land that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948 did not end in that era and is an ongoing process. Thus in this essay we have re-emphasised the possibility of viewing the Zionist project as a structural settler-colonial genocide against the Palestinian people, one that started with early Zionist colonisation and that continues until the present day."
  • Rekhess 2014, p. 98 "A central motif in the reconstruction of the Nakba memory was its relevance to present day reality in that it resembled a tragedy whose consequences continue to this day.69 As Honaida Ghanim explained, “To the Palestinians, the Nakba means the loss of one’s homeland, the collapse of society and the failure of one’s national project and dream.”"
  • Lentin 2013, ch. 1 "Importantly, in Palestinian history and memory the Nakba has become a demarcation line, after which the lives of Palestinians at the individual and the communal levels irreversibly changed."
    • Lentin 2013, ch. 2 "‘For Palestinians, still living their dispossession, still struggling for return, many under military occupation, many still immersed in matters of survival, the past is neither distant nor over.’ After sixty years ‘neither Palestinians nor Israelis have yet achieved a state of normality; the violence and uprooting of Palestinians continues’ (Abu-Lughod and Sa’di 2007: 10). In this sense, then, dealing with the Nakba is not only about memory or commemoration – the topic of this book – but rather about ongoing dispossession, which makes the memory of the Nakba unique."
  • Manna 2013, p. 87 "Contrary to what many think, particularly in Israel, the Nakba was not a one-time event connected to the war in Palestine and its immediate catastrophic repercussions on the Palestinians. Rather, and more correctly, it refers to the accumulated Palestinian experience since the 1948 war up to the present."
  • Sayigh 2013, p. 52 "The interview quoted above conveys the immensity of the Nakba and its continuation as an ongoing source of suffering for the Palestinian people. The Nakba is the historical circumstance which caused the displacement of the Palestinians, and continues today to disconnect them from their homeland, their communities, and their history. The loss of recognition of their rights to people- and state-hood created by the Nakba has led to an exceptional vulnerability to violence, as their desperate current situation in Syria shows."
    • Sayigh 2013, p. 56 "Moreover, suffering caused by the Nakba has to be understood in terms of a continuing state of rightlessness, with all the varieties of abuse and violence that rightlessness exposes people to. Unlike most of the disasters dealt with by the trauma genre, the Nakba is ever newly present. The Nakba is not merely a traumatic memory, but continually generates new disasters, voiding the present of any sense of security, and blacking out the future altogether. The Palestinian coinage “ongoing Nakba” (al-nakba al-mustamirrah) expresses this specific temporal feature."
  • Khoury 2012, p. 258-259 "Before tackling this issue, I want to point out that I am questioning the approach of dealing with the nakba as a historical event that happened in the past and once for all. My hypothesis is totally different: what happened hasn’t stopped happening for sixty-two years. It is still happening now, in this moment."
    • Khoury 2012, p. 262 "The specificity of the Palestinian nakba lies not only in the loss of the four major elements of Palestinian life that I tried to analyze briefly but in the fact that it is a continuous tragedy, a catastrophe without borders in space or limits in time. The nakba is taking place now in Palestine; it is not history to be remembered but a present threatened by interpretation, to use the words of Edward Said."
    • Khoury 2012, p. 263 "This schematic outline is full of stories of pain and loss; thus, the idea that when we speak about the nakba we are dealing with the events and atrocities that happened in 1948 is misleading. The nakba is not only a memory; it is a continuous reality that has not stopped since 1948. Dealing with it as a history of the past is a way to cover up the struggle between presence and interpretation that has not stopped since 1948. Memory can be a trap, and the nakba as only a memory is the biggest trap that can mislead rational analysis of the Palestinian present.
  • Masalha 2012, p. 12 "The Nakba as a continuing trauma occupies a central place in the Palestinian psyche. Memory accounts of the traumatic events of 1948 are central to the Palestinian society of today. The Nakba is the demarcation line between two contrasting periods, before and after 1948. It changed the lives of the Palestinians at both individual and national levels drastically and irreversibly; it continues to structure Palestinians’ lives and inform Palestinian culture... ."
    • Masalha 2012, p. 13 "Yet the traumatic rupture of the Nakba remains rooted in Palestinian collective consciousness; memory of pre-1948 life and the shock, devastation, humiliation and suffering wrought by the mass displacements of 1948 and 1967 continue to shape Palestinian politics and remain central to the Palestinian society of today. With millions still living under Israeli colonialism, occupation or in exile, the Nakba remains at the heart of both Palestinian national identity and political resistance (Nabulsi 2006: 16)."
    • Masalha 2012, p. 14 "But while the Holocaust is an event in the past, the Nakba and ethnic cleans ing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank are continuing."
    • Masalha 2012, p. 254 "While the Holocaust is an event in the past, the Nakba did not end in 1948. For Palestinians, mourning sixty-three years of al-Nakba is not just about remembering the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of 1948; it is also about marking the ongoing dispossession and dislocation. Today the trauma of the Nakba continues: the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians caused by Israeli colonisation of the West Bank, land confiscation, continued closures and invasions, de facto annexation facilitated by Israel’s 730-kilometre ‘apartheid wall’ in the occupied West Bank, and the ongoing horrific siege of Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are denied access to land, water and other basic resources. Today the Nakba continues through the ‘politics of denial’. There are millions of Palestinian refugees around the world, all of whom are denied their internationally recognised ‘right of return’ to their homes and land. The memory, history, rights and needs of Palestinian refugees have been excluded not only from recent Middle East peacemaking efforts but also from Palestinian top-down and elite approaches to the refugee issue (Boqai’ and Rempel 2003)."
  • Milshtein 2009 (in Litvak 2009), p. 4 "The Palestinians never portrayed the Nakba as a story of the distant past, but as a living, continuous event, integrated into the present and spanning several generations, different sectors of the population, and geographic origins."
  • Sa'di 2007, p. 10 "For Palestinians, still living their dispossession, still struggling or hoping for return, many under military occupation, many still immersed in matters of survival, the past is neither distant nor over. Unlike many historical experiences discussed in the literature on trauma, such as the Blitz, the merciless bombing of Hamburg and Dresden by the Allies at the closing stage of World War II, the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, or the World Trade Center attack, which lasted for a limited period of time (the longest being the Algerian war of independence, lasting eight years), the Nakba is not over yet; after almost sixty years neither the Palestinians nor Israelis have yet achieved a state of normality; the violence and uprooting of Palestinians continues."
  • Pappe 2006, p. 219 "Recent targets are the mosques of the so-called 'unrecognised villages' in Israel; this is the most recent aspect of the dispossession that first began during the Nakba."
  • Sa'di 2002, p. 175, "In line with that, Al-Nakbah is, in the final analysis, about the tragic fate of the men and women whose lives had been shattered, and about their descendants, who continue to suffer its consequences."

Discussion (Ongoing Nakba)

All of these quotes are from #Core sources (though I haven't looked through every source on that list, as I don't have them all). As I mentioned in #Discussion (Nakba definition), if anyone has core sources to add to the list, please do. So here is the question: Are these sources enough to support a statement in Wikivoice that the Nakba is ongoing? Can we say "the Nakba is" instead of "was"? I've posted a notice at Talk:Ongoing Nakba pointing to this discussion. Levivich (talk) 03:50, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I think there is a dualistic historiographical discourse: one that the Nakba pertains just to the events in and around 1948; the other that it is an ongoing trauma. There is a quite mercurial pattern of usage between these two meanings in scholarship, leaving it as something of an intrinsically fluid term. This is why it is hard to assert that Nakba = 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, and also why some scholars clearly felt the need to start circulating the notion of ongoing Nakba. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:29, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
What I've seen in the RS basically matches how it's currently described in the second sentence of the lead: The term is used to describe both the events of 1948, as well as the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and persecution and displacement of Palestinians throughout the region. Except I don't think that second clause fully covers all of ongoing Nakba, but I plan to come back to that later.
However, for the first sentence, I'm just not liking that Wikipedia says "the Nakba was" when most scholars I've read explicitly say the Nakba is a current, ongoing thing. Levivich (talk) 01:23, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
I like the "event and process" framework of Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2017, p. 393 footnote 2:

We use “Nakba” to refer to an event and a process. The event refers to the dismantlement of Palestine and Palestinian society in 1948 as a result of the establishment of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the part of Palestine on which Israel was established. The process refers to the continuation of what started in 1948 until today in the forms of dispossession, exile, colonization, and occupation.

Levivich (talk) 07:04, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
Agree that the use of the present (/+continuous) may be appropriate. Iskandar323 (talk) 07:53, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Change Introduction to Increase Neutrality

I am generally interested in improving neutrality on Wikipedia, but when it comes to contentious subjects, such as an ongoing political conflict, and where etymology section does an alright job at explaining the origins of the term, however, the introduction itself lends towards significant cognitive and emotional loadings by:

(a) characterizing the complex causes which are "a subject of fundamental disagreement among historians" as the ' the destruction of Palestinian society' as in the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight

(c) the term Nakba is not specified as a 'term used' but rather implied as a broadly accepted term free of political loadings to describe a series of undisputed events, when the reality is the opposite (it is rejected by many Israeli and other historians). Not specifying that this is a term used by the Palestinian narrative would be akin to, for instance, in the hypothetical scenario that Germans began to refer to the 1944–50 flight and expulsion of Germans as the 'Holotrophe,' not specifying it is a term used to describe the German narrative. Likewise, in the case of the 1948 war article, it is correctly stated that it is known as the War of Independence in Israel (not that it was the war of independence).

(d) the Nakba refers to more than the Palestinian exodus, it is an entire confluence of events, that under the Palestinian narrative constitute a catastrophe such as the return of the Jewish population, the establishment of the State of Israel, the victory of Israel over the Arab militias and armies, etc.


A more neutral and balanced representation would be:


The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. 'the "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'), also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, is a term used to describe the establishment of the State of Israel, and the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs. PresidentCoriolanus (talk) 11:20, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Best procedure if set on "improving neutrality" on IP articles would be to get 500 edits in less contentious areas and then set about doing it. Neutrality is achieved by fairly representing reliable sources of which I note there are none presented in your comments.
Kindly use the edit request format to request changes in the form change X to Y, then the change requested is from:
.....was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs
to
.....is a term used to describe the establishment of the State of Israel, and the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight of a majority of the Palestinian Arabs
I don't understand how Nakba is a term used to describe the establishment of the State of Israel, so I don't agree. Selfstudier (talk) 12:17, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
Then why is the 1948 war not called the War of Independence? Some of the sources for that are quite identical in that they are from Hebrew or Israeli historians that forward a particular representation of the conflict.
Likewise, I am making a critique of the sources provided, and arguing they are insufficient to not specify that this is a 'term used to describe [insert defined events]" because they forward the Palestinian narrative with cognitively loaded language such as "the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland" thereby already implying the consequences of the war were: (a) some sort of intentional objective of the conflict, (b) independent of the chronology of events by not specifying the acts of aggression, massacres by the discursively victimized (as in those represented as such in the article) as well as other wartime events ('move to innocence' sort of bias) and (c) ignoring that although the geopolitical identities that emerged in relationship to one another, that 'Palestine' was already the 'society' and 'homeland' of Arabs which erases the Yishuv as well as historical Jewish relationships (many Jews saw themselves as 'Palestinians').
That would be quite identical to stating that the 1948 war was about the "attempted destruction of Jewish society and homeland" (many scholars and Zionist thinkers have represented it as such, but to say that would be biased) and if your response is that the establishment of the State of Israel was required to produce this homeland, then that would likewise apply to Arabs as 'Palestine' was never an independent Arab state, although technically there was an independent Jewish state in 'Israel' or 'Palestine' at one point in history.
And the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight article provides significantly more reliable sources to show that the causes of the exodus are "a subject of fundamental disagreement among historians" whereas this article primarily sources supporters of the Palestinian narrative.
The 1944–50 flight and expulsion of Germans does not speak of the destruction, 'dispossession' and fragmentation of German society in Eastern Europe, either, though multiple sources already presented use some of those terms.
I'd be happy to provide sources on every substantive claim I made, but I believe I mentioned only well-known things, and I am more discussing the mechanism of bias here, rather than specifics, but if you would like them please request sources for which statements (e.g., Jews called themselves 'Palestinian' in the 20th century too). PresidentCoriolanus (talk) 02:16, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
Its very obvious POV pushing to describe it in such overdramatic terms, Palestinians and their society and culure still exist. Even The Holocaust article does not use such loaded words and that was a case of actual mass murder.★Trekker (talk) 16:24, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
@StarTrekker: You are welcome to try to find better words, but not to excise the point made by the sources altogether. The sources are consistently clear that the Nakba was/is more than just the displacement, and your edit contradicts that.
The Nakba was a complete change to what it meant to be a Palestinian - the entire society became stateless, a permanent victim. Not just those who were expelled; all of them. They all became either an oppressed refugee, or a minority in someone else's country.
After the Holocaust, a Jewish state was created in Israel, so the specific dynamics we are talking about here are different in too many ways for comparison to be relevant.
Onceinawhile (talk) 16:56, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Being a minority does not make make on a "permanent victim" that is entire your own POV, and they are not "stateless" either, many of them have citizenship from the State of Palestine or Israel and live in the areas their ancestors lived in. And it's not notwerthy, special or defining for them especially that their displacements result in change of culture/society/self-image, it happens every time a displacement takes place, it does not need to be mentioned separetly from the fact that it was a displacement, if the sources try to push that narative they are biased and are minimizing other cases of ethnic cleansing.★Trekker (talk) 17:05, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Your comment refers to no sources, just your own WP:IJUSTDONTLIKEIT viewpoint, and reads like an attempt to downplay the trauma of the Nakba. Our encyclopedia is not about what we as editors think, it is only about what the sources say. The sources are clear, and we follow them. Onceinawhile (talk) 20:17, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Before I begin, a quick disclaimer. First time here, and I am not familiar with how wiki works when it comes to having information pages listed. So admittedly, my question will be coming from a lack of understanding and knowledge. Having said that...
Question. What specific method/or principle is used to cite sources? Exactly how is neutrality/objectivity maintained? Hypothetically, there could be 50 sources referring to an either/or type of topic with the same degree of accessibility, with 25 sources referring to one POV, and 25 to the other. Could I not selectively cite those sources that substantiate my claim, while omitting those that don't? Wouldn't that be bias by omission?
Just to be clear, this is a question coming in good faith, and as mentioned at the beginning, one lacking full understanding of the process for editing, etc. 2600:4040:50F2:7A00:A1C8:E456:4579:7061 (talk) 00:02, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
The WP:Reliable sources guideline describes how to identify reliable sources in general, as does parts of the WP:NPOV policy. You're right that cherry picking sources can lead to NPOV problems; there's an essay about that called WP:CHERRYPICKING. Levivich (talk) 04:42, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
You cant argue based on feeling that the sources are wrong. That is essentially what you are doing, saying I feel like this isnt neutral but I cannot substantiate that view with any sources that argue against what is written in the article. If there is some perspective not given its due weight then bring sources to demonstrate that. If there are sources that are misrepresented quote from them to show how. But you are simply substituting your personal feelings for the views of the reliable sources cited. That is not acceptable in any topic area, much less one under CT restrictions. nableezy - 20:31, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Having just encountered this article for the first time, the lede is remarkably unbalanced. This is essentially a WP:POVFORK of 1948 Palestine war. Sennalen (talk) 02:31, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
It isnt an article on the war? nableezy - 02:53, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
It's about the consequences, and to some extent the causes of the war. Sennalen (talk) 03:47, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Historiography

Really? All that’s going to be said is that some Israeli-favoring critics say that the Nakba ignores Arab violence? That's all? No other side to the question of historiography surrounding the Nakba? Rather one-sided, hmmm, no matter where one falls on the side of the current conflict? Selahw (talk) 14:56, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Extended-protected edit request on 14 November 2023

In the lead, please change "The Palestinian national narrative views the Nakba as a collective trauma that defines their national identity and political aspirations, which the Israeli national narrative rejects and views it as a war of independence that established Jewish aspirations for statehood and sovereignty" to "The Palestinian national narrative views the Nakba as a collective trauma that defines their national identity and political aspirations, whereas the Israeli national narrative views it as a war of independence that established Jewish aspirations for statehood and sovereignty." According to the lengthy quote in the first ref, the Israeli view is a contrasting view, not an explicit rejection of the Palestinian view. 2001:BB6:47ED:FA58:8CD7:1AB7:9F03:2D13 (talk) 11:29, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Done, along with some other tweaks. Agreed it is not as simple as contradiction/rejection. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:05, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
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