The word Nakba means different things depending on where you stand to look at it. From the angle of colonialism you will see European Jews arrived in the land of Palestine and drove out 800,000 of its Arab inhabitants. Stand at the angle of territorial dispute and you will see two peoples went to war over a piece of ground, and the losing side, 800,000 of them, was displaced.
Both of these framings are available in the Western discourse on any given day, but stand at the angle of what the thing actually was and you will see the Nakba was a theological assault that failed. It was the attempt to extinguish a non-Muslim sovereignty newly declared on land that Islam regards as its own, an attempt prosecuted by five Arab armies that invaded the day after the state was born, lost the war they had started, and produced, in their losing, the refugees they have wept over ever since.
