Hi Tomas. The history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly a vital topic right now, so I appreciate your attempt to understand what has happened. However, I don’t think you’ve really come to terms with what the founders of modern Israel did to the Arabic-speaking people of Mandatory Palestine.

You put a short paragraph about the Nakba in your section “The Formation of the New Israel”, which begins with events in May 1948. Yet violent expulsions of Palestinians actually began 6 months before that, in December 1947, with the massacres at Al-Khisas and Balad El-Shaikh. Zionist paramilitary groups, the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi, were taking control of land they wanted in a systematic and ruthless way, while British forces were abandoning the area.

When the Arab League began an offensive against Israel in May 1948, it was not simply a response to the concept of a Jewish nation state there. Nor was it simply a response to the injustice of one third of Mandatory Palestine’s population being offered state power over 56 percent of the land, it was also a response to six months of massive violence against Arabic-speaking communities.

Since late 1948, the UN has said repeatedly that Palestinians have the right to return to the lands they were expelled from. But the State of Israel has never let this happen.