The Israeli War of Independence has no other name. This shouldn’t create much of a problem, even for anti-Zionists: they simply oppose the state that won its independence in that war.
But lately, the trend of discounting Israel’s existence has picked up steam in the media, which has latched onto the “nakba” narrative. Now, “nakba” is not a replacement for “Israeli War of Independence.” Nakba is a descriptive term coined by Arab intellectuals after the war for the combined Arab armies’ military defeat by Israel. (Later on, it was repurposed to refer to the flight of Arabs during the war.)
The fact that nakba isn’t a substitute for the war’s name poses a problem for the Western press: What does one call the war if one doesn’t want to accurately convey what one is talking about?
It would appear the current answer is: Call it “the war that created Israel.”
Now, it should be noted that this, too, is purely descriptive. So it is possible to use this phrase organically and not necessarily to signal one’s disapproval of the fact of Israel’s existence. But the context in which it is usually used makes clear that, most of the time, it is deployed in bad faith.
Sometimes the bad faith is overt and undisguised.
In the New York Times this week, Fatima AbdulKarim and Erika Solomon published a highly editorialized “report” about Israel’s current operation in and around Jenin, where Iran-backed separatists have dug in and threatened the security of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Israel’s attempt to suppress the terrorist hive required evacuation of certain neighborhoods. (There is a dispute as to whether 14,000 or 40,000 were temporarily displaced, and a few thousand have already returned to their homes.) Although Palestinians were already returning home after three weeks, AbdulKarim and Solomon claim the displacement “evoked painful memories of the Nakba, the Arabic word that has been used to refer to the mass flight and expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war that created Israel.”
You can see from the text how awkward it would be to call the war by its name: It would make clear that the nakba has always been about the failure to destroy the Jewish nation.
The clunky phrase “war that created Israel” isn’t new, but it has been cropping up all over print media recently. (It is rarely used even in the written stories of broadcast news agencies like CNN and Fox.) In October, the Financial Times ran an absurd piece making the case for UNRWA—the Hamas-adjacent agency whose employees were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023 slaughter—to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In it, UNRWA is described as having a “mandate to care for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that created Israel.” The Financial Times had used that exact same phrasing just months earlier in reporting on UNRWA’s Hamas-connected employees.
In the wake of the Gazan invasion of Israel and the subsequent war it sparked, the Washington Post described the nakba as “the mass expulsion of Palestinians during the months before and after the 1948 war that created Israel,” misleading readers with every part of the sentence. It used the phrase again weeks later in a story explaining why young people were more likely to support Palestinians over Israel than previous generations. (Perhaps those young people read the Washington Post.)
The Guardian uses this phrasing too, in a piece whitewashing early Hamas leaders: “Its founders, such as the late sheikh Ahmed Yassin, were children of the Nakba, the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’, when about 750,000 people were forced from their homes in 1948 during the war that created Israel.”
Time magazine, USA Today, and others have also taken to using the phrase.
The problem, obviously, is not just that it’s a clunky phrase, though it is. And the problem is not just that it usually tends to spring from bad faith, thought that’s certainly not a good thing. The primary objection to it is that the phrase is, quite simply, wrong. It’s not true.
Attempts to annihilate the Jews in their historic homeland obviously preceded partition. Throughout the 20th century, massacres of Jews in Palestine found some success in convincing the British to forbid Jewish immigration and further land ownership, even after the Holocaust. But it did not prevent partition.
The United Nations partition plan passed in November 1947 and made explicit what would take place the following year: The British mandate would end and the area would be divided between Jewish and Arab sovereignty. That is indeed what happened, although Palestinian Arabs rejected a separate sovereignty of their own and the land outside of Israel was claimed instead by Egypt and Jordan.
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence, in accordance with the agreement. In response, the surrounding Arab countries tried to murder the infant state—a theme that would come, sadly, to define the ensuing permanent Arab war on Israel.
The war on the State of Israel was launched after the State of Israel already existed and with the specific intent of defeating the State of Israel. “The war that created Israel” is a thing that doesn’t exist, and never has. I understand that it is painful for Western media types to acknowledge this, and I feel zero sympathy for them. The truth is the truth; speak it, or find a different industry.
