Shany Mor שני מור شني مور

Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed. Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us — one of home, tradition and memory over generations.

Asking Claude what would have happened had the Arab armies been successful in destroying Israel at its founding Prompt: Try project what would have happened in 1948 had the Arab military coalition been victorious in fighting Israel. Response: The counterfactual isn’t really speculative at the level of intent — the Arab leadership stated their war aims explicitly and behaved consistently with them where they did prevail. What was actually said and signalled. Arab League Secretary-General Azzam Pasha told Akhbar al-Yom in October 1947 that the coming war would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.” The political head of the Palestinian Arab cause, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, had spent the war in Berlin: he met Hitler in November 1941, helped raise the Handschar SS division, broadcast calls to “kill the Jews wherever you find them” on German radio, and — per Dieter Wisliceny’s Nuremberg testimony — discussed extending the Final Solution to Palestine with Eichmann. He was back in the region by 1946 and was the dominant Palestinian political figure in 1948. Qawuqji’s ALA insignia (a dagger through a Star of David) and his own Wehrmacht service were not idiosyncrasies; they were continuous with the Mufti’s program. What happened where Arab forces did win. Gush Etzion fell on 13 May 1948. At Kfar Etzion, 127 defenders were killed, many after surrendering — survivors describe villagers and irregulars shooting people who had laid down their arms. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City surrendered to the Arab Legion two weeks later; the Legion was relatively disciplined, but every one of the 58 synagogues was subsequently destroyed or desecrated, the Hurva blown up, and the Mount of Olives cemetery’s tombstones torn up for paving and latrines. No Jew was permitted to live in Jordanian-controlled territory for the next 19 years. The 1929 Hebron massacre — 67 Jews murdered in a single day, the ancient community ended — was the working template, and Husseini had been its political beneficiary. Projection for the 650,000 Jews of the Yishuv. With the Mediterranean behind them, British policy still hostile to Jewish immigration in early 1948, and the Arab states refusing exit corridors, there was no realistic escape route. The likely sequence: agricultural settlements overrun and their populations killed in Kfar Etzion–style massacres; mixed cities (Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed) subjected to urban pogroms once defensive lines collapsed; Holocaust survivors in the DP-camp transit population — perhaps a third of the Yishuv was European refugees from the previous five years — killed a second time. The Mufti would almost certainly have been installed as the political authority over whatever Palestinian Arab state emerged, with his Berlin-era network in senior positions. Behind that, the regional consequences were already in motion: the Farhud (Baghdad, 1941, ~180 killed), Aden (1947, 82 killed), Aleppo (1947, the ancient community effectively ended), the Cairo bombings of 1948. Roughly 850,000 Jews were expelled or forced out of Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the early 1970s despite Israel’s existence as a refuge. Without that refuge, those communities would still have been destroyed — they just would have had nowhere to go. The plausible end-state is the elimination of organised Jewish life between Morocco and Iran, and a diaspora reduced to the Anglosphere and a battered Europe, with no political vehicle to speak for it. The honest caveat: scale is the unknown. Whether the death toll among the Yishuv would have been in the tens of thousands or the hundreds depends on variables (Arab Legion discipline vs. irregular conduct, speed of collapse, whether any evacuation by sea was possible) that the documentary record can’t settle.

Breaking: IDF strikes in Gaza targeting Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, currently considered Hamas’s most senior figure in Gaza. Haddad was one of the architects of October 7 and was reportedly responsible for the captivity of some of the hostages. Results of the strike still unknown.

Just caught up with an old friend recovering from a car accident he had 50 days ago on a drunken joyride. What hurts him even more than the cast on his arm or the stitches on his head or his legal troubles or thoughts of the family he hit is...

Several hundred demonstrators outside the New York Times to protest Kristof column