Reckoning With Israel’s Past Is Hard. The Present Is Harder.

LOOT: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property, by Adam Raz

THE GATES OF GAZA: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, by Amir Tibon

Last autumn, in the weeks after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s crushing retaliation, it suddenly seemed as if everyone was talking about what Palestinians call the Nakba.

For good reason. Watching thousands fleeing Gaza City under Israeli orders — wheelchairs pushed along sandy roads, pickup trucks piled high with mattresses and children — evoked the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948. A Palestinian American friend told me that the news was triggering generational trauma. Israeli officials, too, were referencing the mid-20th century: Avi Dichter, a cabinet member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, boasted that the war would be “Nakba 2023.”

Nothing — not the Balfour Declaration, not the 1967 war, not the Oslo peace talks — is more critical in the troubled story of these neighbors than what happened at Israel’s creation.

For decades, there were few Jewish Israelis who would speak openly about how Zionist forces displaced and killed Palestinian civilians during what Israelis call their War of Independence. That changed in the 1980s with the arrival of a generation of scholars known as the New Historians. Though their scholarship remains taboo in Israel, their output continues. “Loot,” by Adam Raz, published in Hebrew in 2020 and recently translated into English, offers an important contribution to the tradition.

Raz, a historian and human rights researcher, narrows his lens further than previous authors, looking not at how the Zionist forces expelled Palestinians from their homes but instead at how they stole the things that filled them: farm equipment, livestock, cars, carpets, clothes, books, clocks, pianos. He estimates that the total value of plundered goods would be $820 million today.