-
Introduction: The Shock of the Nakba The defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 War against Israel was not merely a military failure; it was a seismic event that shattered the political and psychological foundations of the Arab world. The loss to a nascent, non-Arab state, perceived by many as an outpost of European colonialism, was so profound that it acquired its own name in Arabic: al-Nakba, the Catastrophe. For the Palestinians, it meant the loss of their homeland and the onset of a refugee crisis. For the broader Arab world, it represented a systemic collapse—a failure of the…