Nakba of 1948

The Nakba of 1948 is presented through personal memory and its political afterlife: in Kamal’s account, his grandparents were expelled from their village, and the resulting displacement altered his grandfather’s education, work, and life. That family history becomes part of Kamal’s explanation for his planned attack, showing how a remembered expulsion can be carried forward as grievance across generations without making the later violence an inevitable consequence of the past.

Family history and displacement

In an interview recorded by Hannah Loeb, Kamal traces his motive to a village called Sylia, three kilometers north of the Jewish city of Hod HaSharon. He says his grandparents lived there before Jews expelled them during the Nakba of 1948. The narration offers this as Kamal’s account of his family’s past, translated by Michal, rather than as an independently examined history of the village or expulsion.

Kamal connects displacement to the destruction of his grandfather’s prospects. His grandfather had been studying medicine at Cairo University, but, according to Kamal, lost his place when he became a refugee and could no longer attend. He later worked as a janitor at a Christian school in Ramallah and died young of a heart attack, which Kamal describes as a broken heart. In this family narrative, the Nakba is not only the loss of a home: it is also the interruption of an education, the narrowing of a life’s possibilities, and a death remembered through that deprivation.

An inherited grievance

Kamal presents revenge for his grandfather as the purpose of his planned suicide bombing at a Sbarros restaurant in Hod HaSharon. He says he intended to kill as many Jews as possible. The account links a specific family memory of expulsion to a later act of intended violence, but it does not establish that the Nakba alone explains Kamal’s decision. The book instead shows how he gives that history meaning within a much more immediate and radicalized present.

His departure is surrounded by secrecy and signs his parents understand but do not openly confront. He tells them he is going to visit his fiancée, Milah, in Jenin, while Kamal says they know the truth: they hear him reciting martyr verses, see his growing rage, and notice his bulky coat. Their knowledge of the planned journey makes the inherited story a family crisis as well as a political one. The account does not reduce the parents to simple accomplices or describe them as having stopped him; it records their awareness through the details Kamal supplies.

Memory within the book’s political history

The book places Kamal’s story alongside other disputes over Palestinian suffering and Israeli responsibility, but keeps their historical circumstances distinct. In his account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Yoav Lerner describes the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut and argues over how journalists represented Israeli conduct: whether Israeli forces carried out the killings, allowed them to happen, or failed to intervene. That later massacre is not the Nakba of 1948. Its presence nonetheless gives the book a wider setting in which Palestinian displacement and suffering are narrated, contested, and assigned political meaning.

The distinction matters to the book’s treatment of testimony. Kamal speaks about the Nakba as a family inheritance that helps explain his motive; Yoav’s account of Sabra and Shatila concerns a separate episode and the moral language used to describe responsibility. The narratives do not collapse these histories into a single event. Instead, they show how memories of Palestinian loss enter later arguments about violence, culpability, and the reliability of those who tell the story.

The unresolved question of return

The Nakba’s political afterlife also appears in the account of secret Israeli–Palestinian talks in London. The delegations exchanged maps over territory in the West Bank, while the Palestinians sought the return of refugees as one of the unresolved issues. The talks soon became mired in disputes over Jerusalem, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, connecting Gaza with the West Bank, and the role of Hamas; they collapsed a week after the meetings. The book does not specify a negotiated resolution to the refugees’ claim.

The contrast between the maps and the refugee question keeps territorial bargaining from appearing to settle the deeper history of displacement. Even as the delegations discussed land and borders, the right of return remained among the issues that divided them. The Nakba thus persists in the narrative not only as Kamal’s account of his grandparents’ loss, but as a historical memory with continuing consequences for family identity, political violence, and the possibility of peace.