It is Naksa Day, and we are still living with its consequences.
Even in Egypt, despite the 1973 War and the return of Sinai, we continue to live with — and suffer from — its regional repercussions.
We have also failed to learn, or perhaps have forgotten, many of the lessons that we, as Egyptians and Arabs, should have drawn from that defeat — politically before militarily.
The same underlying causes not only still exist in Cairo, but across capitals throughout the Arab world, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf.
This year, on the 59th anniversary of the Naksa, Haaretz published yet another bombshell for the Israeli public under the headline, "We Were Ordered to Kill": The 1967 Nakba That Israelis Don't Know About.
These testimonies expose a stark, unbridgeable gap between Israel’s carefully curated collective memory and the brutal reality of 1967.
In other words, they tear away the false narrative propagated by Israel’s military propaganda machine—a myth fed for decades to the Western world and the Israeli public to frame theirs as “the most moral army in the Middle East, if not the universe.”
The leftist-liberal Israeli newspaper revealed that newly uncovered documents indicate that 300,000 Arabs were expelled or forcibly displaced from the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights amid systemic violence, looting, and wholesale destruction.
Among the leaked files was a 1967 memorandum from Israel’s legal advisor famous judge Theodor Meron, explicitly warning senior Israeli officials that the forced expulsion of Palestinian civilians constituted "a serious violation of the Geneva Convention."
What the Israeli army perpetrated in the Sinai was mentioned only briefly in the Haaretz piece, primarily because those other captured territories remain under Israeli occupation today, unlike the Sinai, which Egypt successfully regained. (I will review the specific atrocities committed on the Egyptian front in a separate, upcoming post).
To be frank, nothing in Haaretz’s report about Israeli war crimes was new to me as an Egyptian, nor would it be new to most Arabs.
Egyptians and Palestinians have been shouting these truths to a deaf world—especially to the West—for nearly six decades.
Yet, despite a mountain of archival evidence and countless firsthand survivor and victim testimonies, much of the global community only began paying attention when an Israeli newspaper published the soldiers and victimizers’ letters.
A Note on Historical Context and Language
Before we dive into the archives, I must clarify an important linguistic choice in my translations. In translating the summer 1967 press reports detailing the tragic exodus from the West Bank, I have intentionally preserved the original text’s use of the terms "Arab refugees" and "Arab residents" rather than modernizing them to "Palestinians."
While a modern audience automatically views these events through a specific Palestinian national lens, the nationalized Egyptian press of 1967 was operating under a dual legacy. First was the linguistic residue of the British Mandate, which categorized the region strictly into "Arabs and Jews." Second was the ideological peak of Nasserite Pan-Arabism, which framed the defense of Palestine not as an isolated local conflict, but as a collective Arab responsibility.
Ironically, preserving this older vocabulary completely dismantles modern Zionist propaganda claiming that Egypt "invented" the Palestinian identity in the mid-1960s. The archival record demonstrates a deeply rooted population whose distinct connection to the land was so universally understood that reporters used the local and regional terms interchangeably.
I used both the AUC Rare Books and Collections Online library as well as the Torath Misr Official website, which is still in Beta phase
The Robin Dispatch from River Jordan
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