Israel at 75. The Palestine War of 1948. Liberation or Catastrophe, or both?

On May 14, 1948  (on the American calendar) the Zionist forces in Palestine declared the arrival of the state of Israel.  2023 is the 75th anniversary of that event.  Israelis and Jewish nationalists in general consider this to be a day of liberation.  To Palestinians it is a day of catastrophe (Nakba) when they lost not only their farms and homes and quarries and orchards and professions  and bank accounts but their homeland.  The inflammatory rhetoric in our own country around these events gets very unpleasant.   Just this week a local school system in the Detroit suburbs lost its superintendent and a high school  principal because they allowed a Palestinian to speak to the sophomore class.  

As an educator, I always tried to present the matters surronding these events in a way that made them accessible and helpful to my students, whatever their background.  During the decades that I taught my class on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict I was very successful at that.  I had a couple of off-campus people or groups raise issues, but never once did I ever have a regular student raise a complaint.  (Although several came by after class to discuss their experiences and their perspectives.  I always appreciated those conversations, which I always told the class I wanted to hear). 

The last semester that I taught was during the pandemic and I had to record my classes and then forward them to students.  That was very difficult to do, to be completely detached from my students.  But it had the advantage of leaving me with a cache of recorded lectures.  Several of those on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict have been  previously posted.  Many of those involve the events of 1948.   This is one of them.   They are all there on the Stocktonafterclass site waiting for you.  This podcast is one.  You are welcome to listen to others as you wish. 

Glitch:  During the lecture, I got a number wrong.  It was the fabricated number of fatalities during the Deir Yassin massacre.  The number I mentioned was was 254, made up by Zionist spokesperson Mordechai Raanan on the spot.  I think I said 280.  The number of 248  reported by BBC and the New York Times, and used by trusting professors for decades until the true number of 110 emerged in the 1990s.