Israel’s 1948 war expanded its territory by a third and evicted 750,000 Arabs

Evidence

In Israel’s triumphant War of Independence (what Palestinians characterize as “Al-Naqba” or “the catastrophe,” a root meaning curiously more or less synonymous with “Shoah”), Israeli gains expanded the territory ceded it by the original UN Partition Resolution by almost one third. It widened its cartographic waistline, evicting 750,000 of the 850,000 or so Arabs living within enlarged Israel in order to ensure a Jewish majority. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 571

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that ‘catastrophe’ and ‘Shoah’ share a root meaning — worth verifying linguistically, since Naqba and Shoah come from different languages.