How the Nakba Has Eclipsed the Holocaust in U.S. Media Since October 7 - Opinion - Haaretz.com
By: Laurel Leff (Haaretz. com)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
How the Nakba Has Eclipsed the Holocaust in U.S. Media Since October 7
Dueling narratives of historical trauma are core features of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But since the Hamas attack, top U.S. newspapers have chosen a side
Dueling narratives of historical trauma have long marked (and marred) discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially those of Israel’s founding in 1948. For Jews, the six million murdered in the Holocaust and the 500,000 survivors without a home helped spur the state’s creation. For Palestinians, the hundreds of thousands displaced in the making of that state meant exile and misery.
But the narratives are dueling no more, at least not in the frenzied American media coverage since the October 7 Hamas attack. When Israel’s origins are evoked in contemporaneous press accounts of the Israel-Hamas War, and it happens often, the Holocaust is almost never mentioned.
Instead, the story of Palestinian displacement and suffering has come to dominate. But without mention of the then fresh Jewish trauma of the Holocaust, Jews’ reasons for wanting, perhaps needing, a state, are absent, leaving a blank that can be filled by motivations such as settler colonialism or white supremacy.
I examined more than 500 news articles and opinion pieces appearing in the U.S.’s top 50 newspapers in the six weeks after the attack that contained various combinations of terms related to the 1948 conflict.
In many of those accounts, the Jews, who are presented as being in British Mandate Palestine for no discernible reason, drive 700,000 Palestinians into exile, including into Gaza. This uncontested version of history which leaves out key details including why Jews, given their long history of persecution, might be seeking self-determination in their ancestral homeland and the Arab rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan, appears in stock paragraphs in news coverage of the Israeli incursion in Gaza; as part of chronologies and timelines providing background; in opinion columns and editorials; and in standalone background pieces.
Palo Shelah, purportedly pictured front right, after the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
Jewish children just after the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.Credit: Alexander Voroncov / USHMM/State Archives of the Russian Federation via Wikimedia Commons
The stock paragraphs began to appear a week after the Hamas attack as the Israelis directed Gazans to move south. An entire New York Times front-page story focused on the connections between the current directive and the events of 1948. “Some Gaza residents said they feared this could be the start of another permanent mass displacement like the one in 1948,” the story said.
Upon first reference the story was careful to explain that more than 700,000 Palestinians “were expelled or fled their homes”; by the next reference the caution had disappeared. “The majority of Gaza’s population … are among those who were forced to leave their homes in 1948, or are their descendants,” the story stated.
Entire stories on the history were rare, but almost every article included at least a few, strikingly similar sentences explaining the “the displacement” or “uprooting” of Palestinians in 1948. “More than half of the Palestinians in Gaza are the descendants of refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, when hundreds of thousands were forced out of what is now Israel,” the Los Angeles Times stated in a typical example. In that article, like many others, no further historical context was given.
“The mass displacement of Palestinians during the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 — an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or `catastrophe’ in Arabic — remains a profound source of intergenerational trauma,” The Washington Post wrote. This is true, but again, the origin story from an Israeli perspective, is absent.
After the U.S. Congress censured Representative Rashida Tlaib for her use of the phrase “from the river to the sea,” many news outlets published explainers on the term’s origins that also explained Palestinian displacement in 1948. “For many Palestinians, the phrase now has a dual meaning, representing their desire for a right of return to the towns and villages from which their families were expelled in 1948,” The New York Times said, “as well as their hope for an independent Palestinian state…”
Noting that Palestinians “either fled or were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces,” Boston.com presented Jews’ perspective that the term summoned “memories of genocide and displacement instilled in Jewish communities by Nazi Germany’s eradication of some six million Jews in the Holocaust.” It did not, however, connect that eradication to the founding of the Jewish state.
Timelines and other chronologies included the migration of Jews from Europe to British Mandate Palestine, such as in this Washington Post timeline, but in a perfunctory way and without mentioning the much larger number of Holocaust survivors who arrived after statehood. A subsequent Post interactive map explaining the region’s borders and the AP’s “history of the Gaza Strip” took the same approach.
Many standalone pieces described the history surrounding the founding of the state from the Palestinian perspective; none did from the Israeli perspective. A Washington Post history feature bore the headline: “Israeli operations uprooted Palestinians in 1948. Many fear a repeat,” and referred to “Jewish immigration” increasing “under decades of British authority.” It never mentioned where many of the Jews were coming from or why.
Back-to-back New York Times opinion pieces illustrate the different treatment of the trauma narratives. In dispelling myths “inflaming the debate” in the Middle East, regular columnist Nicholas Kristof nodded to Jewish history. “Israelis deserve their country, forged by refugees in the shadow of the Holocaust,” he wrote in a single sentence. By contrast, Dahlia Hatuqa, an independent journalist, devoted her entire column to “the 1948 Nakba — in which entire Palestinian villages were wiped off the map and the modern state of Israel was established.”
The American press has not ignored entirely the connection between the Holocaust and Israel in the wake of Oct. 7. Several stories mentioned Holocaust survivors who were killed or kidnapped. “The largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust” became the default way to describe the scale of the Oct. 7 attack, which also evoked comparisons to the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust.
An entire AP article chronicled similarities among the barbarities and noted that Israel was “a country that rose from the ashes of World War II and was created as a safe haven for Jews.” But this AP story, and another on a hotline for French Jews traumatized by the war, also recounted “Palestinians’ greatest national tragedy” – a “balance” the AP didn’t evince in stories about Palestinian displacement.
Only Victor Davis Hanson’s column, in the right-leaning New York Post, stated explicitly: “The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews.” That is an aside, however. The column’s main point was to warn of large Muslim nations’ threat to smaller nations in the region.
Several reasons account for the Nakba’s eclipsing the Holocaust in post-October 7 American media coverage. The press likely assumes the Holocaust’s role is so baked into public understanding that it doesn’t need to be spelled out. In addition, the 1948 displacement explains events in Gaza in a way Holocaust survivors settling in Israel proper does not. Palestinian activists also seem more determined to propel their 1948 narrative into public consciousness.
Whatever the reasons, the result is a void. A powerful state controlled by Jews emerges out of nowhere and immediately persecutes and displaces Arabs living in its midst. Who the Jews are, why they are there, what they hope to create is never explicated. Into the void flows more noxious accounts, of colonial settlers who migrated to the region only to pillage and exploit, of white supremacists whose sole interest is in subjugating an indigenous population.
These narratives are harder to sustain if “colonial settlers” are Auschwitz survivors, or the “white supremacists” include hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled or were forced out of Arab countries after 1948. (I found a single reference to this migration in the contemporaneous American media accounts.)
History reads differently without the Holocaust looming over it. Consider a final example. A New York Times story described “the young state’s triumph against its Arab neighbors in 1948,” which is a “a cherished national story.” What makes the triumph so poignant and the story so cherished, however, is not any joy in warfare, but the knowledge of what had befallen the world’s Jews in the preceding decade. This history is not conveyed.
Press accounts often refer to the Palestinians’ greatest trauma, which the 1948 exile was. But the Holocaust was the Jewish people’s greatest trauma that helped give birth to the Jewish state. Palestinian scholar Edward Said famously described the Palestinians as “victims of victims.” In the current media version, the original victims have dropped out.
Laurel Leff is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Associate Director of Jewish Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper and Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe.
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I think there is considerable truth to this article.
I know, and most people over 40 know, Israel was founded as a refuge state for the Jewish people, to prevent future Holocausts.
Since in recent years we have seen pictures of young people taking selfies at Auschwitz, etc. I think we can assume that large numbers of young people have no idea.
Their education focus on far more important topics.
When my eldest daughters were freshmen in high school, one of them got an SS ring from a boy and thought it was cool so she started to wear it. I grabbed their world history textbook and discovered that while WWII was spread over three pages the entire Holocaust was only two lines of text which didn't mention the numbers murdered.
That night I showed them Schindler's List after which we had a good talk. She gave up that ring that night, was very proud of her.
But the education system has IMO failed a great many of our children over the years and they are now in the position of working in our mainstream media. I believe it's a safe bet to assume that large numbers of young people really have no idea about this at all.
What is also quite interesting is how Palestine was chosen, at first there were four selections, It's called the Uganda Solution by the British they suggested British East Africa now Kenya and it was called ''white man's country'' how ironic. It was presented at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 by Theodor Herzl , the founder of the modern Zionist movement. He presented it as a temporary refuge for Jews to escape rising antisemitism in Europe . The proposal faced opposition from both the Zionist movement and the British Colony . [1] [2] Herzl proposed a plan to the Colonial Secretary for Jewish settlement in Cyprus , the Sinai peninsula , or El Arish .
Wikipedia.
But of course the Temple of David wasn't built in Kenya, nor was Jesus born in Cyprus.
I thought that it was good information that would be of interest to some members. Evidently not.
There is a news story that the US is giving Israel three more weeks , to the end of the year, to wrap this war up, or there will be repercussions.
I watched a video of the dogmatic right winger Ben Shapiro did about the history of Israel, and he goes all the way back to Moses. When the Jews fled Egypt they settled in what is now Israel. To one extent or another Jews have lived there ever since. They built the Jewish civilization there, including the great city of Jerusalem. The land has been conquered by other groups, mainly the Romans and then Muslims after Rome folded. To Shapiro, a great supporter of Israel, this history is enough to conclude the land belongs to Israel and Israel alone. But there is another side to the story, which is why some sort of compromise on territory by sincere opposing groups is the only way.
Now that’s colonialism!
biden taking responsibility for Hamas and for any future attacks is a bold strategy.
Did I say it wasn't? I was simply making the point that it was ridiculous to make the "Home for the Jews" elsewhere than their ancestral home, Israel (Palestine?), using the locations that were suggested in the article you posted.
alone. But there is another side to the story, which is why some sort of compromise on territory
you should look at a map. Not only do the Palestinians have Gaza and the west bank, they have Jordan too. They’ve ethnically cleansed Jews from all those areas, and want to ethnically cleanse Jews from any other area they control. You want to assist their plan to eradicate Jews from the Mid East by giving them more land of the little where Jews are actually allowed to live?
In his video Shapiro strongly implies that the Palestinians should simply pack up and go somewhere else, because Israel is surrounded by Arab countries. Does that sound realistic?
Is Branden going to threaten to withhold their financial and military aid?
Doubt Israel will be as easy to pushover as Ukraine.
But if he wants another inquiry and rebuke from Congress that is a sure fire way to get it.
When people make false statements they really make false statements.
First, Gaza has never been completely controlled by the Palestinians. They don't control their own borders, power, water, air space, and Israel has a blockade in place since 2006.
Second, how much of the West Bank do you think the Palestinians control? Look at a map of all of the illegal Israeli settlements. Israel controls 60% of the land in the West Bank- and has some 700,000 settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegally. The West Bank is hardly controlled by the Palestinians. Their people have to traverse countless IDF check points and barriers; they are subject to unwarranted IDF raids, arrests and killings; the PA can't/won't even protect them from attacks by settlers; and they don't control their own borders, water, power, and air space.
The biggest Israeli created myth in the world is that Jordan is Palestine.
The only thing worse than people pretending that Jews are going to be forced out of Israel- is Hezbollah and Hamas thinking what little Iran is giving them is ever going to bring that about.
In a perfect world the US would force Israel back to the 1948 borders. Palestinians would throw out Hezbollah, Hamas, and PA- and go under UN (or Saudi, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanese guidance until they can establish a working government). That means accepting financial obligations for building infrastructure, public services, education system, etc- OPEC would be the ideal source for that. Palestinians would agree to disarm- since there is no way in hell they will ever be allowed to develop any type of military by Israel. Any attempt and Israel would simply invade them- and the rest of the world would do it's normal and stand by and watch.
The US would agree to restrict it's aid to non military only. It would also agree to withdraw troops in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Let the Arab world settle things for themselves for a change.
Since no perfect world exists the Palestinians are fucked. Wash rinse and repeat until the next stupid Israeli/Palestinian cycle starts.
The West Bank isn't controlled by Palestinians, it's controlled by Israel and there are hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the WB with more moving in regularly with Bedouins and Palestinians being pushed out. Israel controlled Gaza for years and they left of their own volition they were not forced out by anyone, certainly not the Jews. They still control it through the use of blockade.
Jordan has a peace treaty with Israel, they are not involved in this.
On the evening news tonight was a story about Israel claiming they have nearly destroyed Hamas. Maybe the threat of "ramifications" from the US has crystalized the Israeli right wing governments thinking.
My guess is by mid to late January, major ground operations will have ended. You can only destroy so much in such a limited area.
If the EU and the UN donate lots of cash, reconstruction could improve unemployment in Gaza.
I REPEAT to you, Kavika...
Did I say it wasn't? I was simply making the point that it was ridiculous to make the "Home for the Jews" elsewhere than their ancestral home, Israel (Palestine?), using the locations that were suggested in the article that I mistakenly thought you posted, rather than JR, since you seemed sensitive about my comment.
Now, would that change be proclaimed without the warning from Washington? I think that is dubious.
Who know, Biden will take enough heat as this winds down. Israel also can’t keep all the reservists activated without a bigger hit on their economy.
There is no need to yell at me, Buzz. Happy that you pointed out that other than Palestine none of the other areas was the Jewish ancestral home. I'm aware of that but at the time in the early 1900 Herzl found it worthwhile investigating as it was brought to the Jewish World Congress.
As for ancestral land millions of people worldwide were killed and their ancestral land taken from them and they were never allowed to return.
I did post it to JR as information.
My apologies, Kavika. I think I misunderstood your comment.
OK
Ronin,
Aljazeera and Arabcenterdc are hardly unbiased in their reporting. In 1949 Jordan did take a huge swath of land as their own.
As for the Palestinians being " fucked", a lot of it is of their own doing. They were actually given Gaza and the Israeli settlers there were forcefully removed by Israel, and a two-state solution was offered many times: 1991, 1993, 2001, and 2013.
All the Palestinian leadership had to do was recognize the state of Israel, which they refused to do.
I literally never agree with you but there is a first time for everything. I think you are on the right track here.
I don't think that's necessarily true. The British Mandate of Palestine was to end-- the British forces to leave, and two countries were to be created from the inhabitants-- one a new (Jewish) country called Israel, the other a new (Arab) country to be called Palestine.
Because they were the two groups there. So British rule was to end, and two countries were to be formed.
I don't think that's necessarily true. The British Mandate of Palestine was to end-- the British forces to leave, and two countries were to be created from the inhabitants-- one a new (Jewish) country called Israel, the other a new (Arab) country to be called Palestine.
Because they were the two groups there. So British rule was to end, and two countries were to be formed.
There was a similar situation in British India. The two main groups there were Indian Hindus and Indian Muslins. So the British left, two new countries were to be created: the predominantly Hindu part became a new country (India) the predominantly Muslim part became Pakistan.
I think it's a combination of a lot of things, starting with our systematic failure to educate kids about history. Combine with that with the rise of social media, where the most popular youth forum is controlled by a malevolent state actor, China, who tacitly supports Hamas. Ignorance plus immersion in propaganda results in a shocking numbers of young adults who are either unsure the holocaust even happened or outright deny it.
History has this rather unremarkable habit of not stopping, past events get squeezed out to make room for newer ones.
But for much of what's happening now you won't get a full understanding of what's going on unless you know the history preceding the current situation.
I have to agree with Krishna on this. The problem is that our youth has no context for what is currently going on. It is on our schools and false information on the internet.
btw, I would just like to point out, that no one ever talks about the Jewish "Nakba". When the state of Israel started in 1948, every arab nation expelled their Jews (about 870,000), who had been living in those countries. Most were told to leave without their belongings and penniless.
Come on Perrie, you know that there are members here who would rather believe what Al Jazeera says about it, a news source that's been banned in countries all around the world and even in the Middle East. May as well believe what the Iranian Ayatollah says about it.