It’s Time to Abolish Nakba Day

Who in the Middle East has not been traumatized by the upheavals of the last century? We all treasure the places where our families have lived. Yet only the Palestinian leadership has weaponized the memory of displacement and transformed it into an ideology of genocide. Nakba Day, which falls on May 15 every year, was established in 1998 by Yasser Arafat to turn Israel’s Independence Day into a festival of grievance. The very fact of Israel’s existence was branded a “catastrophe,” but not the war that caused the displacement, and not the displacement that affected both sides.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish leadership accepted. The Arab Higher Committee rejected it. There was no counter-proposal, no negotiation, no attempt to secure the best possible deal for the Arab population. There was only refusal, followed by violence.

On May 15, 1948, the day after Israel declared independence, the armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq invaded the newborn country. The Arab League’s secretary-general, Azzam Pasha, reportedly described the coming conflict as “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” This was not a war of national liberation. It was a war of annihilation against a newly established state and its Jewish population. The Arab armies lost. That is the Nakba.

The Nakba narrative presents 1948 as something that happened only to Palestinians. It erases the fact that in the same war, the Jordanian Arab Legion expelled every Jew from the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank, destroyed 58 synagogues (some centuries old), and barred Jews from their holiest sites for nineteen years. It erases the more than 850,000 Jews subsequently forced from their homes across the Arab world, stripped of their citizenship and their property. Israel absorbed those refugees. They built lives, became citizens, and did not spend seven decades in camps waiting for the world to solve their problem. No one commemorates that Nakba.

I know what displacement looks like. I have lived it. I was born in the Old City of Jerusalem when it was under Jordanian control. In 1966, when I was eight years old, the Jordanian government relocated my family to the Shuafat refugee camp, where I spent the next 33 years of my life. It was not Israel that made me a refugee. It was Jordan. The conditions I grew up in,  the poverty, the claustrophobia, the sense of being a pawn in someone else’s game, were created by Arab leaders who used Palestinian suffering as a weapon while doing nothing to alleviate it. I watched my neighbors grow old waiting for a “return” that their own leaders had no intention of delivering, because the perpetuation of our misery served their interests. Every Palestinian in every camp across the Middle East knows this, even if they cannot say it aloud.

It is no coincidence that Arafat established Nakba Day just two years before he launched the Second Intifada. Israel had offered the Palestinians a state at Camp David in 2000. Arafat’s answer was not a counter-proposal but a campaign of suicide bombings that killed over a thousand Israelis and devastated Palestinian society. Even his own widow, Suha Arafat, later called the Intifada his “biggest mistake.” But the groundwork had been laid: by branding Israel’s existence a catastrophe, Nakba Day taught a generation of Palestinians that coexistence was treason and that war was the only honorable response.

The Palestinian Authority’s textbooks reflect this poisoned narrative. Israel is referred to as the “Zionist Occupation” rather than by its name. Maps of “Palestine” show no Israel at all. The two-state solution is never presented as a desirable outcome. This indoctrination has consequences. In Bethlehem, the Christian population has collapsed from 86 percent in 1950 to roughly 10 percent today under Palestinian Authority governance. When a society teaches its children that the existence of a neighboring state is a catastrophe, minorities are the first to suffer and the first to flee.

The man who now claims to lead Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, stood in Berlin in August 2022 and accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts.” This is from a leader whose doctoral thesis alleged a secret relationship between Nazis and Zionist leaders, and who is now serving the 21st year of a four-year term with no democratic mandate. When the president of the Palestinian Authority inflates Palestinian suffering to grotesque proportions while minimizing Jewish suffering, he is not advancing our cause. He is proving why Nakba Day must be abolished: it breeds exactly this kind of moral bankruptcy.

Compare this to what Israel has built. An Islamic Movement-affiliated party, Ra’am, has served in the Israeli government. Israel’s Supreme Court has appointed its first Arab Muslim justice, Khaled Kabub. The Abraham Accords have opened a pathway to regional normalization that benefits Palestinians as much as anyone. These are the seeds of the future, and planted in coexistence, not grievance.

If Palestinians genuinely want peace, and I believe the overwhelming majority do, we must begin by telling ourselves the truth. The 1948 war was not a natural disaster. It was a choice made by Arab leaders who preferred annihilation to compromise. The Palestinian refugees of 1948 were not victims of Israel’s existence; they were victims of a war that their own leadership started and lost. Every year that we mark Nakba Day as a day of mourning for Israel’s survival rather than a day of reckoning with our leaders’ catastrophic failures, we move further from peace, not closer to it. Nakba Day does the opposite of what Palestinians need. It should be abolished.

I dream of a Middle East where cities like Jericho, my native city in the Jordan Valley, become hubs of international cooperation and commerce. That future is within reach. But it requires Palestinian leaders to reverse course: end the incitement in our schools and media, teach our children the history and the humanity of Israelis with whom we share this land, and stop treating the existence of a Jewish state as an original sin.

If more Palestinians understood that nearly a million Jews across the Islamic world faced their own displacement after 1948, they would better understand their Israeli neighbors. To my fellow Palestinians: the catastrophe of 1948 was not that Israel was born. It was that our leaders chose war over statehood, and we have been paying for that choice ever since. Until we name that truth, we will remain prisoners of a narrative that does not serve our people.