The Nakba ("disaster") is the heart of the Palestinians'
backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation
of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin. But the
Nakba narrative is a myth - a radical distortion of history.
During the 1948 war and for many years afterward, the Western
world expressed hardly any moral outrage about the Palestinian
refugees. The fighting in Palestine had broken out only two
years after the end of the costliest military conflict ever. 11
million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes and force-
marched to Germany by the Red Army, with the approval of
Roosevelt and Churchill. Historians estimate that 2 million died
on the way. Around the same time, the Indian subcontinent was
divided into India and Pakistan; millions of Hindus and Muslims
moved from one to the other, and hundreds of thousands died in
related violence. Against this background, the West was not
troubled by the exodus of a little more than half a million
Palestinians after a war launched by t