A ‘Nakba’ in Times reporting
September 16, 2025 by Bruce S. Ticker
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Reporting about Israel often inflames Jews, but they must not worry only about what the media covers. They need to worry about what they do not cover. Maybe more so.
Bruce Ticker
A stark example of a story that excludes relevant details appears in a Sept. 7 New York Times piece headlined “Forced to Leave Yet Again, With 1948 Displacement Feeling Fresher Than Ever.” It relates how the Abu Samra family was forced to move from sovereign Israel to Gaza more than three-quarters of a century ago, which excludes casting blame on their leaders.
We should be shedding tears almost immediately when the reporter, Raja Abdulrahim, writes, “The Abu Samra family and many other Gazans say they have always lived in the shadow of the Nakba…their worries of another Nakba rose.”
Abdallah Abu Samra, the 87-year-old patriarch of the family, recalls fleeing Israel in 1948 at the age of 10 to end up in nearby Gaza with the dream of returning. Now he fears another “Nakba” as Israel’s defence ministry promotes a plan to compel much of the population into an area near the Gaza-Egypt border.
“We are in a bigger Nakba now,” says Abu Samra.
A Nakba? That translates to a “catastrophe.” First, they left Israel for Gaza in 1948, and in the last two years, thousands of Gazans have perished in Israel’s military response to Hamas’ slaughter of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Abdulrahim, the Times reporter, proceeds to ignore key details as he writes, “Survivors of the 1948 war say that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were told at the time that they would be allowed to return to their villages in what is now Israel after a few days or weeks.”
What war? Who told them to leave and be promised a return? Who were Palestinians back then?
The war was launched by armies of five neighbouring countries who could not stand the idea of Jews or any other non-Muslims living among them. The United Nations approved a partition plan offering both sides their own territory. Jews accepted it, and the Arab armies swept into Israel.
Arabs were being told by their leaders to leave Israel so they would not get in the way of the Arab soldiers who intended to exterminate the Jews, and then Arabs could return to Israel afterwards.
It did not work out that way. “They were not allowed back,” Abdulrahim writes after Israel repelled the Arab forces, though Egypt held onto Gaza and Jordan retained the West Bank, comprising 22 per cent of the land.
Why should Israel allow them to return? They left voluntarily, expecting the territory to be free of Jews once they came back. That made them complicit with the invading armies. Israel is supposed to reward them by letting them return? How could Israel trust them?
Abdulrahim glosses over the nature of the 1948 war. “Israelis have long objected to the characterisation of the 1948 conflict as catastrophe. For them, it was a war of survival.”
He presents the nature of the war as a he said/she said-type of argument.
What that war was about was never a matter of conjecture. It is history. You bet “it was a war of survival.” Read the history books. Either Abulrahim received a warped education on the history of the very land from which he reported, or he deliberately distorted the background.
The reporter’s editors in Jerusalem and Manhattan could have readily reworked that passage to reflect a war based upon naked aggression. Don’t any of their editors know that? Or want to know that?
Who are these hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that Abulrahim references? Long after 1948, the term “Palestinian” somehow evolved. Those who lived there until 1967, when Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank, were still governed by Egypt and Jordan during the first 19 years of modern Israel’s existence.
“Palestinian” has not been a common phrase for long, at best, the last three decades. Arabs living within Israel’s borders were certainly not known as Palestinians in 1948.
It is often the omission of important information that I notice most when I read news stories about Israel, mainly in the Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Most glaring is the absence of Israel’s history of accepting compromise, especially its 2000 proposal for a two-state solution, which Arab leader Yasser Arafat rejected before resuming hostilities.
The Times and other media outlets have still done some excellent reporting on Israel, but that does not excuse deficient articles like this one.
Oh, yeah, Abdulrahim got it wrong when he writes that Arabs could return “in what is now Israel.” It was Israel as of May 14, 1948, when Israelis declared their independence and then defended the modern state of Israel until its leaders signed armistice agreements with their enemies in 1949.
Were his editors unaware of that, too?
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