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It was a coup for Abbas to get the Palestinian “nakba” myth (nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe) published in America’s “paper of record.” The article ran soon after Israel’s Independence Day celebrations and the Palestinians’ annual nakba commemoration, marked by violent confrontations on Israel’s borders as third-generation Palestinian refugees tried to exercise their “right of return” to their ancestral lands. The article appeared just days before Barack Obama’s much anticipated speech on the “Arab Spring,” in which the president also tried to jump-start peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. To reach agreement on a two-state solution, Obama declared, Israel must agree to return to the 1967 borders, modified only by mutually agreed “land swaps.” Dealing with the Palestinian claim of a “right of return” for the 1948 refugees and their descendants could be deferred to a later date, said the president.
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Abbas even contradicted previous accounts he had offered in which he conceded that his family left Safed voluntarily – in part because of fear that the Jews would seek revenge for a murderous rampage by local Arabs against the Jewish community in 1929. In an interview on Palestinian radio, Abbas said, “We left [Safed] on foot at night to the Jordan River.… Eventually, we settled in Damascus. My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a year, when the money ran out, we began to work.” There was no mention by Abbas in that earlier interview of living in a canvas tent.1
President Abbas’s historical distortions are at the very heart of the nakba myth (clearly not fact-checked by the Times) and are emblematic of the Palestinian leadership’s century-long refusal to accept a Jewish state in any part of the Arab Middle East. That obstinate rejection, not Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demurrals about Israel’s borders, remains the number one obstacle to peace in the Holy Land.
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