The Meaning of the Nakba
Anti-Zionist protesters have a lot to complain about. In the seven months since the October 7 massacre, over 35,000 Gazans have been killed, compared to less than 2,000 Israelis. Population centers in Gaza have been decimated, while Israel has been able to fend off most of the missiles fired into the Jewish state. Around two million Gazans have been displaced, compared to perhaps 250,000 Israelis.
These numbers are impossible to ignore, but they do not tell the whole story. For critics of Zionism, the current Israel-Gaza war is just the latest chapter in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the state of Israel. This struggle, which they call the Nakba ("the Catastrophe"), began in the late 19th century, when Zionists staked a claim to the land in Palestine as their national home, and crystallised during the first Arab-Israel war (1947-1949), when Israel ascended to statehood and over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees, mostly in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Cause of the Crisis
Israel's continued existence (and its expansion via settlements) is said to be an ongoing catastrophe--an ongoing nakba--and it can only end when Palestine is decolonized. This would require two things to happen. First, the originally displaced Palestinians and their offspring would have to be given proper reparations, including the ability to return to the land they lost almost eighty years ago. Second, the state of Israel would have to abandon its ethno-religious structure, which limits the socio-political position of non-Jews. Only then could there be justice for Palestinians.
That is one face of the meaning of the Nakba, and it is what we often see from anti-Zionist protesters on college campuses in the Western world. However, as with any political movement, the ideals often obscure or even misrepresent some of the facts. For example, the historian Benny Morris has shown that the vast majority of Palestinians left their homes willingly, and only about 20 percent of the refugees were forced to leave. True, many left in fear of violence, having heard stories of massacre. However, the violence had been started and was escalated by a domineering contingent of Muslims who were loyal to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. As Benny Morris has also shown, when Israel eventually decided to expel a significant portion of the Palestinian population, it was well after the Mufti and his supporters had begun to wage a ruthless war against the Yishuv (the Jews in Palestine), including the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.
The Yishuv had every reason to fear that their lives were not safe in the hands of the Mufti, who had collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust, and who had overseen massacres of Jews in Palestine, as well. They also had every reason to fear the neighbouring Arab states, which were gearing up to carve out portions of Palestine for themselves.
The dislocation and dispossession of Palestinians was not born out of the greed of a conquering alien nation. It was born out of the complex conflicts between Muslim and Jewish people under the enormous pressures of World War II, the Holocaust, widespread antisemitism, and profound political and economic instability in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which was also shaped by Britain and France’s own intentions for the region after the first World War. We cannot understand the Palestine refugee crisis without understanding the broader instability throughout the region, as well as the Arabs' stubborn resistance to Democratic norms.
A persuasive case can be made that the greatest threat to Palestinian Arabs was not the Zionists, but themselves. According to historian D. K. Fieldhouse, the most consequential moment for the fate of the region may have been in the early 1920s, when the Palestinian Muslims boycotted Britain’s efforts to establish a Muslim-majority legislature in Mandatory Palestine. That dashed any hope for a democratic solution to the violent conflicts between Muslim factions in Palestine.
Indeed, anti-Zionists don't often mention that the displaced Arabs never left Palestine as such; they relocated to parts of Palestine that were claimed by Jordan and Egypt during the war. For two decades afterwards, the refugees were in the care of Arab states, not under Israeli occupation. Yet, conflicts between the Arabs led to continued oppression and instability, and more and more resentment towards Israel.
Israel continues to be blamed for the Nakba, despite the fact that it happened because of a war which Israel did not start, and which Israel certainly did not want. When the UN first recognized a Palestinian right to return to their homes, Israel responded with a proposal acknowledging their "humanitarian duty" to do what they could to help the refugee crisis, but also insisted that the blame fell on the Arabs for starting the war. They offered to take in a limited number of refugees, but only with the participation of the Arab states, as part of a peace treaty. Unfortunately, there was no peace, and no resolution to the crisis. It seems the Arab nations were able to agree on little more than their common hatred of Jews.
This brings up another historical point which anti-Zionists tend to ignore: The number of Palestinian Arab refugees during the war was dwarfed by the number of Arab Jewish refugees in its aftermath. Arab Jews (now known as the Mizrahim) had never been treated as equals in their home countries, and had been subject to oppressive treatment during WWII.
After the Arab-Israel War, Arab nationalism only strengthened, fortified by hatred and fear of the Jewish State. Arabs did not recognize Jewishness as a legitimate nationality, but they did not recognizes Arab Jews as part of the Arab nation, either. All Jews were a blight against nature. As a result, Arab Jews were no longer welcome in their home countries and, in the 1950s, 900,000 Jewish Arabs were exiled throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. With nowhere else to go, the Mizrahim quickly became (and remain) the largest ethnic group in Israel.
The numbers are clear: The Arab-Israel conflict led to a greater displacement and dispossession of Arab Jews than of Arab Muslims. Yet, the cries of the Nakba do not shed a tear for the Mizrahim.
When anti-Zionists talk about the Mizrahim, they are most likely to do so as a way of criticizing Israel’s mistreatment of them—as if it were Israel’s fault that it could not better handle close to a million refugees—almost doubling the population of the entire country—at the same time it was recovering from both WWII and the Arab-Israel war while also trying to establish itself as a stable and secure state surrounded by hostile neighbors. This is not a defense of Israel's policies with respect to the Mizrahi refugees, but only to try to give the story some much needed perspective. When Israel--a nation of just over a million people--was suddenly tasked with accommodating close to a million refugees, while also worrying about defending its borders against its hostile neighbors, it quite understandably and justifiably was not willing or able to take on the Palestinian refugee crisis by itself. The fact that the crisis only worsened over time likewise cannot be blamed on Israel.
I sympathise with the anti-Zionist cause in so far as it yearns for a just world for Palestinians; however, I am infinitely disturbed by the movement's failure to recognize two basic facts. The first fact is that the ongoing Palestinian refugee crisis is not Israel's fault, but the fault of warring Arab tribes and states which have never been able to bring freedom and justice to the Arab cause, and whose despotic leaders have never supported democratic ideals. The second fact is that giving in to the anti-Zionist demands would mean the end of political and social stability for the entire population of Israel--and most likely a genocide of the Jews.
The Other Face of the Nakba
Apologists for Hamas' violence on October 7th talk as if a pure, noble desire for freedom was all that lay behind the premeditated slaughter and mutilation of civilians of all ages. They do not understand the deep-rooted psychological conditioning required for people to commit such heinous acts. And for that reason, they do not understand the nature and scope of the threat to Jewish lives. To understand this face of the Nakba--the ruthless, murderous face of the Nakba--we must look at how the story was first put into words.
The use of the phrase "al-nakba" to refer to the displacement of Palestinians can be traced back to a highly influential anti-Zionist book, Constantin Zurayk's Ma’na al-Nakba (first and second editions published in Beirut in 1948; English translation published in Beirut in 1956 as The Meaning of the Disaster). That book is to some extent about why Arabs lost the war against Israel, but it is more about the need for all Arabs to unite in fear and hatred of Zionism.
I've written a detailed summary and analysis of the book elsewhere, so I will only mention some key points here. In the book, Zurayk--known as the "father of Arab nationalism"--calls on all Arabs to unite in a life-or-death crusade against their mortal enemy--Zionism. This requires, he says, propaganda--to instill a profound and awful dread of Jewish power, so that Arabs will be willing to give up everything, including their own lives, for the cause. He also calls for the militarization of all civilians, so that the entire Arab people can rise to meet the challenge posed by the "evil" Zionists. On top of that, he denies the incontrovertible fact that Jewish people have an ethnic, religious and historical connection to the land of Israel, especially the city of Jerusalem. He denies that Jews are a nation at all.
Remember that this was all in the name of Arab nationalism, at a time when the pan-Arabic identity was still in its infancy. Ma’na al-Nakba is a powerful work of propaganda, and its influence on Arab national consciousness cannot be overstated. It established the story of the Nakba as an all-or-nothing battle between Good and Evil, an epic struggle of righteous Arabs all over the world against the monstrous Jews--not only in Israel, but as a global, shadowy presence with an especially dangerous power over the United States. In this way, the meaning of the Nakba is simultaneously the unification of the Arab people and the demonization of the Jews. The Nakba narrative projects all of the Arab's pain and fear and desperation onto hatred of Jews. It turns the Jew into an abomination, a crime against nature, an evil and unnatural Other who must be resisted and overcome at all costs.
When Gazans gleefully and proudly mutilated and massacred Israeli civilians of all ages on October 7th, they were not simply motivated by dreams of freedom. They were motivated by a deep-rooted hatred which they had been raised to project onto the dehumanised image of world Jewry. Only when we understand the vicious antisemitism fundamental to Arab consciousness can we understand why a full Palestinian return to Israel would not merely cause oppression of the Jewish population, but their cruel torture and annihilation. We witnessed the horrific massacres of Jews in Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s, and then in Europe during the Holocaust, and then again in Palestine in 1947 and 1948. If we are to blame the Yishuv for the Nakba, it is only because they had the courage and strength to say, "Never again!"
The Nakba has two faces. On the one hand, there is the lived experience of the Palestinian refugees, and the need for humanitarian aid. On the other hand, there is the narrative, the myth, of Jewish evil and Arab righteousness. The two faces fit well together, and no doubt have proved useful to despots in the region. The economic and social instability, not to mention the widespread poverty, throughout the Middle East could all be blamed on the Jews, and not on the rich Arab elites. Of course, in some cases the demonisation of Jews has worked against them. For example, in 1951, the king of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab because he sought friendly terms with Israel. For the most part, however, it is clear who has been best served by the Nakba narrative. Just look at who has the most money in Arab countries. Wealthy Arab elites continue to oppress the Arab people and profit from their misfortune.
The Dangers of Anti-Zionism
The bottom line is, the anti-Zionist movement is committing two grave injustices. First, they are blaming Jews for their own suffering, denying Jews the basic right to defend themselves. Second, they are doing an injustice to the Palestinians, and Arabs living in poverty throughout the Middle East, because they are spreading the lie that the Arab people would be free and happy if only Israel would disappear, or if it would at least stop being Jewish.
No, a Hamas victory would not mean freedom for Palestinians or anyone else. The only possible outcome where Palestinians are free is one in which they no longer blame Jews for their misfortune, and in which they no longer seek vengeance through bloodshed. This requires a shift in the Arab national consciousness--a shift away from the antisemitic violence and divisions instigated by the Mufti of Jerusalem in the first half of the last century, and which solidified through the mythology of the Nakba in the second half.
Palestinians have suffered a catastrophe--many catastrophes. So have Jews--both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews--also many catastrophes. If we want justice and peace, the meaning of the Nakba cannot be to seek justice for one group at the expense of the other. So long as it means anti-Zionism, the Nakba will not mean freedom.
Sources
Fieldhouse, David K. (2006). Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958. Oxford, Oxford University Press.Morris, Benny (2003). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
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