History or Histrionics? The Trouble with the Nakba Narrative

In an age awash with hashtags, slogans, and placard profundity, it has become unfashionable—if not positively subversive—to ask that history be treated with care. Today, history must emote. It must rally. It must rattle cages, preferably while rhyming in iambic chants. It must, above all, serve a cause. And so we come, inevitably, to the Nakba.

The Arabic word Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” has assumed a near-sacrosanct status in modern discourse on the Middle East. It has morphed from a term of mourning into a cudgel—used to delegitimise Israel’s very existence and recast the Jewish right to statehood as an act of original sin.

The Nakba narrative does not simply lament Palestinian displacement. It indicts the very fact of Israel’s creation. It is not remembrance—it is repudiation. It says not, “a tragedy occurred,” but “you should not exist.” This is not mourning. It is revanchism in ceremonial dress.

But what does the historical record actually tell us?

As we document in The Nakba: Narrative and the Historical Record—a new campaign booklet produced in partnership with Stop The Hate UK—what happened in 1948 was not a premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing, but the outcome of a war started by the Arab world against the newly declared Jewish state.

Let us state the facts plainly. In November 1947, the United Nations recommended partitioning British Mandate Palestine into two states: one Jewish, one Arab. The Jewish Agency accepted. The Arab League and Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it outright. And they didn’t just reject it—they declared war.

Within hours of Israel’s declaration of independence on 14 May 1948, five Arab armies invaded. They did not march to establish a Palestinian state; they marched to eradicate the Jewish one. Along the way, Arab leaders urged their own populations to evacuate. “Get out so we can get in,” they said, promising a swift victory and an even swifter return. The victory never came. The people never returned.

Of course, war is chaos. Civilian flight is tragic. And in the fog of battle, some Palestinian Arabs were indeed displaced by Israeli forces—particularly in strategic areas where armed resistance was active. But these were acts of war, not ideological cleansing. In cities like Haifa, Jewish authorities pleaded with Arab residents to stay. Some did. Over 160,000 Arabs remained in Israel and became citizens—today they are Israeli Muslims, Christians, Druze, and more.

And yet, none of this seems to penetrate the contemporary narrative. Instead, we are treated to theatre: marches through London in May draped in keffiyehs and slogans like “From the river to the sea,” which—despite polite reinterpretations—remains a call for the elimination of Israel from the map. The Nakba is not invoked as a plea for reconciliation. It is invoked as a rebuke of Israel’s right to exist at all.

This, I submit, is where rhetoric becomes dangerous.

The Nakba narrative today has less to do with history and everything to do with delegitimisation. It animates the rejectionist impulse that has derailed peace talks for decades. It has been weaponised not to achieve a two-state solution, but to reverse 1948 altogether. And in doing so, it has inspired chants, curriculum materials, and entire political movements rooted not in coexistence, but grievance without end.

None of this is to deny Palestinian suffering. Displacement is a tragedy. But not all tragedies are crimes. And not all suffering grants one a monopoly on moral clarity. We must be able to say, as our booklet does, that Israel’s creation was not a catastrophe—it was a miracle of national rebirth, anchored in international legitimacy, and born of necessity after the near-annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe.

If peace is ever to come, it must begin with truth. And truth is precisely what the modern Nakba narrative obscures. The facts are not ambiguous: it was not Israel that launched the war—it was the Arab world. The goal was not peace—it was obliteration. The consequences were grave—but they were not the result of Zionist imperialism. They were the bitter wages of rejection.

The booklet WBII and Stop the Hate UK’s offer is not a polemic. It is an historical reckoning—an appeal for grown-up engagement with the past. It does not ask readers to dismiss Palestinian pain. It asks only that we stop sanctifying historical fiction.

There is nothing noble in denial. Nor is there dignity in delusion. The Nakba, as it is framed today, demands that we view Jewish survival as criminal, and Arab aggression as righteous. That inversion is not merely dishonest—it is dangerous.

History should not be rewritten to serve political fashion. It should be reckoned with—truthfully, fearlessly, and with a commitment to moral clarity. Israel was not born in sin. It was born from the ashes of Auschwitz and the ruins of statelessness. To call that a “catastrophe” is to misjudge not only history, but humanity.

Let us, at long last, prefer accuracy to activism. And let us meet the future with eyes open, armed not with slogans—but with facts.