You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.
For many Palestinians, one word haunts their historical imagination: “Nakba.” It means catastrophe in Arabic and summons the disasters that befell hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war when they were driven from their homes and native cities in the wake of Israel’s founding. “Their villages were destroyed, or resettled and renamed, their histories erased,” explained my colleague Louisa Loveluck. “It is a deep and enduring trauma that has touched nearly every Palestinian family — one many fear is repeating itself.”
