On Friday this week will be the "Nakba Day," which the Palestinians mark each year to describe the "disaster" of Israel's establishment, and in particular the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, the result of the war initiated by Arab states against Israel on the eve of its declaration of independence. According to official figures from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), in the early 1950s, it was forced to meet the needs of some 750,000 Palestinians, although that number is also under debate. The UN broker in Palestine only numbered 427,000 during this period, including 360,000 in need of assistance. 

Do you know the number of Jewish refugees who were deported or fled from Arab countries for the same declaration of independence? Well: 850,000.

I am not conducting a victim contest here, but pointing to opposite narratives. Although in 1948 there was a UN agency responsible for dealing with every refugee (UNHCR), a new and exclusive refugee agency was established for the Palestinians. This is because of the tremendous pressure exerted by the Arab states on the UN in order to perpetuate the refugee problem as part of the struggle. in the state of Israel. This, despite the fact that in a report by the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut, revealed that most of the Arab refugees were not deported during the war, and about 68 percent of them left their homes without seeing an Israeli soldier.

The number of Palestinian refugees has not stopped growing over the years, and it currently stands at about 6.5 million people scattered between the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, according to UNRWA data. Unlike any other refugee, and unprecedentedly, the Palestinian refugee status is shifting Inherited from generation to generation and prevented any chance of a pragmatic arrangement for them.There is the key to understanding the narrative: The enemies of Israel never intended to help those unhappy refugees.To 

understand the size of the absurd, the parallel story of Jewish refugees from Arab countries must be known: A few years later, thousands remained, and the Declaration of Independence brought For the escape of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in the dead of night with the clothes on their backs, leaving behind a rich Jewish heritage and culture, since the end of the 1960s some of the Jewish communities that remained - were deported, and some had to leave over time due to strict rules and bullying by the authorities. Born in Morocco, he was one of them, and 

in the fall of 1963, after six years of underground activity in the Dror youth movement, my father learned that he had to leave Morocco immediately because the authorities were going to arrest him. Underground on behalf of the institution), and from there he came to Israel. My dad dropped the emissions behind. Like his friends, he devoted himself to taking his destiny into his own hands, within a refugee state - which was its founding ethos. He did not wait for him to be set up, and did not ask for him and his descendants to be looked after.

Without underestimating the suffering of the civilian population who had to be displaced after 1948, after seven decades the "Nakba" became a timeless refugee narrative, serving the struggle in Israel through a return claim, which in effect meant the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.

Attorney Shani Luski-Levi is a spokeswoman and director of StandWithUs Foreign Relations