 So, let's talk about the Nakba. The Nakba is the catastrophe. It is the term the Palestinians use and the pro-Palestinians use to describe the refugee reality that occurred in 1947-48, primarily 1948, even into 1949, where depending on who you want to read, but probably 600,000, 600,000 Palestinians left or were kicked out or were evicted from their homes and left to neighboring countries. Although some historians today are claiming that it's close to a million people, but that is a, as Afan Kosh shows in his book, that is a complete fabrication. About 600,000, I think is a realistic number. Some say 700 possible, but 600,000, I've been convinced that that is probably the number. The Palestinians argue that they were evicted. They were thrown out. They were intimidated into leaving that the Jews basically went village by village, throwing them out, stealing their land, demanding that they leave. So, let's put this in historical context and then talk about whether this happened and to what extent it happened. Again, I'm not going to give you the whole context, but enough to say that Jews would be coming to Palestine from the late 19th century all the way to 1947, had been buying land, settling that land. Jews during this period built agriculture, the agriculture that succeeded enormously. They built factories. This is a really untold story of Israel's founding is the role of the industrialists, the businessmen, the traders, the people who really established Israel as a dynamic, prosperous economy. And this happened. We hear about the Kibbutzim and the agricultural phenomena, but that ultimately is not where the wealth came from. That ultimately is not where most people live. Most people lived in the cities in Haifa, but in the new city, created out of nothing in Tel Aviv. Those are the people who created a thriving industrial country. And, you know, they built hospitals. They dried swamps. Palestine was a malaria infested cesspool. It was truly horrible, horrible place to live, sparsely populated. And the Jews came and they civilized it. They modernized it. They bought, again, Western medicine, hospitals, dried swamps, technology, modern farming, and modern industry. Life expectancy among the Arabs skyrocketed. Infant mortality skyrocketed. Cases of malaria plummeted among the Arabs, benefited enormously. Before the Jews arrived in the area, people born in what was called Palestine, typically many of them left. There was a significant exodus of people out. Once the Jews settled in Palestine, economic activity was created. Everything, there were more jobs. There was more, you know, again, diseases and all of that declined. People stayed. And indeed, there was some in migration, population of the Arabs in Palestine skyrocketed. So, up until 1947, the Jews had come. They said, look, we'd like to form a Jewish state here. We're willing to give equal rights to the Arabs under this state. All we are asking for is open immigration for Jews to come in. Arabs have 22 other countries they can go to. We're asking that in this piece of land, Jews can come in because of everything I said about anti-Semitism and the need to protect ourselves. So, Arabs didn't like that. They don't want these Jews coming, in spite of all the benefits they received. Now, that's not exactly true. I shouldn't say that. I'd say the common person, the average Arab in an average village, actually liked having Jewish neighbors. And they respected each other and they were peaceful and they acknowledged the benefits they were getting. But the politicians and the intellectuals among the Palestinians and the Arab nationalists in the rest of the Arab world hated the idea of creating a state for the Jews in Palestine and fought it. And what that meant was fairly regular violent actions against Jews. And let me just say, I never said what I consider Jews. You know, Jews are either self-identified people who consider themselves Jews or people who the rest of the world consider as Jews. People who the anti-Semites consider Jews. For the purpose of Israel, that's what Jews are, at least from my perspective. Anybody who is discriminated against because he's Jewish, even if he doesn't consider himself Jewish, should be counted as a Jew and should be allowed free immigration into Israel. All right, so in 1947, the British had a mandate over Palestine. They wanted to leave. They'd had enough. Both the Jews and the Arabs were attacking the British. Both the Jews and the Arabs wanted them to leave. The Arabs wanted to establish an Arab state. The Jews wanted to establish a state for the Jews. The Jews were willing to share. That is to establish two states. The Arabs were not willing to share. They wanted just one state and they wanted to kick out all the Jews that had come there since World War I. They wanted to kick them up. So the British went to the UN and said, UN, you deal with this. The UN sent a commission. The commission reported back and they decided to partition the land into two, a Jewish state or a state for Jews and an Arab state. And the Jews celebrated. The Arabs said, no way, no way. The next day, they already attacks on buses between Jewish communities. People were killed. They continued to be in the weeks and months following. Ultimately, the Jews in Israel, for example, in a place like Haifa, tried to tell the Arab population in Haifa, which was quite large. Look, we want to live together. Please lay down your arms. You will be equal citizens in this new state. Don't worry about it. The Arabs said, you got to be kidding. They fought back. There was bloodshed on both sides. Ultimately, the Arabs realized they were going to lose and they left. They left. They got in their cars. They got on boats. They got on trains and they left. They went to Lebanon. They went to Syria. They went to Jordan. They went to Egypt. They went to Europe. They left. And they continued leaving. They started leaving right after the partition plan. By April, and the Jews had clearly won the battle for Haifa, most of the population left. Then only a small number of Arabs remained in Haifa. Interestingly, even though there was a large, these were not, these Arabs were not all Muslim. There was a very large contingency of Christian Arabs. Even they left. They did not want to be there. They did not want to live in a state for Jews, even though they were told over and over and over again that they were welcome and that they would be given equal rights. And indeed, the ones who stayed were granted equal rights. Same thing happened in Jaffa, the largest city, Arab city in Palestine at the time. Same thing happened in the villages, in the Galilee, and everywhere else. They initiated the violence. When they lost, they all went away. And then at some point, they just ran away. Now they ran away for a number of reasons. One, they were scared. Two, they didn't want to live with Jewish leadership. Even though they went Haifa, the mayor was already Jewish, because just over half the population was Jewish and there was a Jewish mayor, could have been an Arab mayor. It was very close in terms of the size of the population. So they left because they were afraid. They left because they didn't want to live under a Jewish rule. They left because they headed the Jews, many of them. And they left because the Arab nations said over and over and over again that they were going to launch a war soon as the British left Palestine, which was scheduled for May 1948. And as soon as they came in, they said, we want to clear out the civilians. You don't get hurt. And we're going to win pretty quickly. And once we win, you can come back. Now, I'll just note that not a single Arab country fought in that war in order to establish a Palestinian state. Every single one of them fought in that war in order to grab a piece of Palestine. Every single one. Now, there were announcements in Haifa. There were people walking, going around in cars with megaphones, Arabs, encouraging Arabs to leave, telling them they should leave, telling them that is what the leadership wanted, whether it was Palestinian leadership, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hussaini, who was a Nazi, went to Germany in World War II, hung out with Hitler, talked about the final solution, talked about exterminating the Jews in Palestine. He was a full-fledged on sympathizer to the Nazis, recruited Muslims to fight with the Nazis, I think in the Balkans. This was the leadership the Palestinians had. Once the Arab armies invaded, again, Palestinians ran away. Or were told to evacuate. Evacuate because the Arab armies wanted a clear field. They wanted just soldiers on the front. They didn't want Palestinian civilians getting in the way. Now, there are cases. In which Israel did evict civilians in population centers. In Ramele, which is near where the international airport is today, these are two Arab towns that had fought, that had, again, were part of the initiation of force against the Jews, rejected partition, rejected the idea of a state for Jews. When they tried to create, they tried to have a ceasefire, the ceasefire fell apart, violence erupted. And then at the end, the Jewish leadership decided, look, this is a strategic location on the path from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We do not want an enemy behind us. We do not want an enemy in our rear. And the populations there were evicted. They were sent away because they posed a threat, a security threat, to the Israeli army at that point and its ability to defend itself and fight the invading Arab armies. That happened in Ramele and in Lod. It also happened in several other villages. But it's about, of all the people who left Palestine, 600,000, let's say, it's maybe 10%, at most 15%. And always, for what you have to, what you would see as strategically necessary reasons in terms of, this is an enemy at my back. Can't afford to do that. All right. So was there a Nakaba, a catastrophe? Yes. But the catastrophe was of the Arabs making. And indeed, in 1949, after the war was over, the Palestinians' complaints were not about the Israelis. The Palestinians' complaints were about other Arabs, their own leadership, the Palestinian leadership, and the leadership of the Arab states who fought Israel, who told them to leave, and who didn't win, but lost. So here we have the Nakaba, the catastrophe, a catastrophe of leadership, Palestinian leadership that encouraged them to go fight, that encouraged them to initiate force against Israel, the Arab leadership that encouraged them to leave, that encouraged them, don't worry, we'll bring you back, we'll let you back in, everything's fine. It's a catastrophe, absolutely. But not one that can be blamed on Israel. If they had never initiated force, then they would have never had to leave. Once they initiated force, if they surrendered, handed over their weapons, and said, okay, we're willing to live here in a Jewish state, they would have become equal citizens, they would have maintained their property rights, nobody would have taken anything away from them. But they chose to run away, to leave. And, of course, this is a catastrophe of the Arab leaders who decided to invade Israel in May of 1948, and then went on to lose the war, and strand hundreds of thousands of people as refugees. Israel, after the war in 1949, made an offer to accept the whole of the Gaza Strip, God, and in it at the time were 100,000 refugees, and accept them into Israel, and accept the Arab population that was there into Israel as part of a peace deal with the Arab states. The Arab states said, no. Indeed, the catastrophe is the unwillingness of the Arab world to live in peace with Israel, to accept this state, this free, relatively liberal, relatively democratic, democratic in the positive sense of elections, state among them, because it was free, and they were not. There's no Arab state that is free in any sense, and because it was a state dominated by Jews. So the catastrophe is an Arab catastrophe. It's fault is the fault of the Arabs. And the Palestinians, if they have any complaints, it should be to their own leadership, and to the leadership of the Arab world, a leadership, by the way, that has rejected peace deal after peace deal after peace deal for a long, long time. Could have solved these problems a long time ago.