Jo

The Nakba never ended. The Israeli apartheid regime is still committing genocide in Gaza and violently erasing entire communities across Palestine and Lebanon. I'm leading a resolution to recognize the 78th anniversary of Nakba and reaffirm Palestinian refugees' right of return.

This real-time 1948 article from The Economist completely destroys the modern “Nakba” narrative that was invented decades later as political propaganda. Straight from British eyewitnesses in Haifa, October 2, 1948: “Jewish authorities urged all Arabs to remain in Haifa and guaranteed them protection and security ... However, of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa, not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. The most potent factor was the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive, urging the Arabs to quit ... those who remained and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.” They didn’t flee because of “Zionist ethnic cleansing.” They fled because Arab leaders ordered them to get out of the way so their armies could “drive the Jews into the sea.” Then they lost the war they started — and spent the next 77 years rewriting history to blame the Jews. The “Nakba” you were taught? Pure revisionist fiction.

The word “Nakba” (catastrophe) wasn’t invented by Palestinians to describe Jewish “ethnic cleansing.” It was coined in 1948 by a Syrian Arab historian, Constantin Zureiq, in his book The Meaning of the Disaster. He used it to describe the humiliating failure of the Arab world — their leaders’ arrogance, their lies to their own people, their military incompetence, and their refusal to accept a Jewish state. Zureiq wrote that the Arabs had “imaginary victories” and put their public “to sleep” with boasts — until the real disaster hit: they couldn’t wipe out the Jews. The original Nakba wasn’t about refugees. That a rebrand from several decades later. It was about the Arab leaders’ catastrophic decision to launch a war of extermination ... and lose. They’ve spent 77 years rebranding their own failure as Jewish guilt. That’s the only real "Nakba" they can’t forgive.

Historically, Arab states rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and invaded to prevent any Jewish state. Egypt took Gaza and Jordan annexed the West Bank after 1948—no independent Palestine was created or sought by them. Jordan's King Abdullah had long eyed the territory for himself. Had they won outright, the pattern in Arab countries (near-total expulsion of Jews post-1948) and their own rhetoric indicate surviving Jews would not have received equal rights or citizenship like Israel's 2 million Arab citizens do today.

We don’t talk about other, larger population displacements that took place around the same time of the Nakba (700K) with the same ferocity: • India/Pakistan (10-15 million) • Germans from East Europe (10-12 million) • Greece/Turkey (2 million) • Jews from Arab countries (800K) The main difference is that in none of those cases are activists pretending that they’re “ongoing” or treat descendants as perpetual refugees. The expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe is probably the closest analogue to the Palestinian displacement. Other than the fact that it was vastly larger, most historians agree that the Germans had it coming to them, having started WWII. Meanwhile, an industry of lies continues to make excuses for the Palestinians, painting them as perfect victims. The Nakba (“catastrophe”) is not a hoax because Palestinians weren’t displaced. They were, and it was tragic. The hoax is the mythology built around it, that the displacement was uniquely evil, uniquely permanent, and completely detached from violent Arab rejectionism. The real “catastrophe” in the Arab psyche was not merely displacement, but the humiliation of losing an ongoing war that many still today hope would end with the Jews driven out of the Middle East.