Today, 15 May, is the anniversary of what Palestinians call al Nakba, or the catastrophe – the 1948 creation of Israel and campaign to drive them from their homes and appropriate Palestinian land.
More than 520 Palestinian villages were abandoned in amid a brutal military campaign and many thousands of residents sent fleeing to other parts of the country and into refugee camps over the borders in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt.
I wrote at length about some of Israel’s ‘quirks’ when I was in the Holy Land last year. Like the doublespeak that exists regarding the very subject of the Nakba – something Israeli society won’t even discuss and which schools don’t cover. For Jewish residents this period of history is a glorious victory and even – for the more religious – a divine miracle. For the Palestinians it is a humilating disaster that still resonates today.
Then there are the various unfair laws which target the local Palestinian population – those who within what are now Israel’s borders (not even considering those in the occupied territories). There is for example the ‘present absentee’ law which means that any Arab property abandoned over a very short period that year became the property of the state – even if owners returned immediately after the fighting.
There are those are desperate to return to the sites of their old villages but who are prevented from doing so by the state.

I’m reading a great book at the moment, The Other Side of Israel by Susan Nathan, a British Jew who took up her ‘right of return’ to Israel but ended up living in an Arab town – a radical thing to do there, which sent shockwaves through Israeli society.
She quotes Eitan Bronstein, an activist I also met in Tel Aviv, who works to educate Jewish Israelis about the Nakba, as saying:

“I realised that there was a huge gap in terms of the understanding of the two sides about what had happened. One side, the Palestinians, was completely defeated, exiled and dispossessed – and that is how they see it. The other side, the Jews, won an incredible victory but they don’t therefore concede that the other side were the losers.
“Instead, they say things like, ‘It was the Palestinians’ fault that they chose to fight us,’ or ‘we didn’t start anything,’ or ‘we just wanted to be free and have a state’.
“When they do admit that their victory came at the expense of the Palestinians, such as in the case of terrible massacres like the one at Deir Yassin, a village where more than a hundred Palestinian citizens were butchered by Jewish militias, these are seen as exceptional incidents.
“‘That was carried out by a few bad apples’ or ‘That stuff happens in any war,’ they say.”