“It was only from the early 1950s onward, as the Palestinians and their Western supporters gradually rewrote their national narrative, that Israel, rather than the Arab states, became the Nakba’s main, if not sole, culprit.
The ex-Mufti led the way by casting his countrymen as the hapless victims of a Jewish grand design to dispossess them of their patrimony, as a steppingstone to regional domination, and this fantastic claim was quickly picked up by many of his contemporaries. Some ascribed these supposed designs to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a virulent anti- Semitic tract fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth century, from which the Jewish leadership allegedly drew inspiration and operational guidelines; others attributed them to religious and historical sentiments.
All viewed Zionism as omnipotent, with tentacles that reached the world’s most powerful spots. In the words of the prominent Islamist leader in mandatory Palestine, Muhammad Nimr Khatib:
“We are fighting an organized, educated, cunning, devious, and evil people that has concentrated the world’s wealth and power in its hands…. We are fighting the forces that have prevailed over the entire world, we are fighting the power that buried Hitler and defeated Japan, we are fighting World Zionism that has Truman in its pay, enslaves Churchill and Attlee, and colonizes London, New York, and Washington.”
Remembering the Farhud and the Jewish Nakba 