A predator attacks a porcupine expecting an easy meal. Instead, it gets a face full of quills.

Photograph the predator afterward and it may look like the victim. Its wounds are real. Its suffering is real. But the photograph is missing the most important fact: it attacked the porcupine.

That injured predator Nakba’d itself.

Consider Argentina in 1982. It invaded the Falkland Islands expecting Britain to accept the conquest. Britain sailed across the Atlantic, fought back and retook them. Hundreds of Argentine servicemen died, including 323 when a British submarine sank the General Belgrano.

Begin the story with the sinking and Britain looks like the aggressor. Begin it with Argentina’s invasion and you understand why British forces were there.
Chronology changes the story.

Which is core of the word Nakba.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed Jewish and Arab states for two people with long ties to the area of Palestine, one for Jews who had ruled for hundreds of years in the land, and one for local Arabs who aspired to their own country. Jewish leaders accepted partition while Arab leaders rejected it. After Israel declared independence in May 1948, armies of five neighboring Arab states entered the war against the reborn Jewish state.

The Arab calculation was breathtaking.

Only three years after the Holocaust, a tiny Jewish state was filled in part with survivors and refugees. Six million Jews had just been murdered. Its enemies looked at a shattered people surrounded by a much larger Arab world and saw weakness.

They mistook vulnerability for helplessness.

They attacked the porcupine. And they lost.

Israel survived. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled the battlefield as they waited for their Arab brothers to wipe out the Jews. And they lost the war they launched. In the end, Israel ended the fighting with more territory than the UN partition plan had allocated it.

Palestinian Arabs named their defeat “al-Nakba” — the Catastrophe. But over time, their catastrophe became a romanticized socialist-jihadi word stripped of its rejection of coexistence and fervor for extermination of Jews, even as the sentiments remained deeply embedded in Arab culture.

Still, the photojournalists showed the wounds as evidence of who must have been the victim.

So the Nakba lives on.

Hamas demonstrated that Israel was vulnerable, murdering 1,200 civilians and soldiers and abducting 250 hostages. When Israel fought back Gaza suffered terrible destruction. Once again, the world’s camera focused on the wounded predator rather than the beginning of the encounter.

The Gazans Nakba’d themselves again. They attacked, suffered, and then pointed to their injuries in a plee.

The animal kingdom does it. The quills can be devastating. But the story is clear.

Stop the hatred. Stop the attacks. Stop the complaining after losing the fight you sought and launched.