It’s Time to End the ‘Nakba’ — Here’s How

From ethnic Germans expelled across Europe, to refugees displaced by the India-Pakistan partition—millions were uprooted by conflicts in the 1940s and successfully resettled. It’s time to end the Palestinian exception.

Every May 15, Palestinians mark Nakba Day — the “catastrophe.” For them, it symbolizes not just the 1948 war, but Israel’s existence. What began as the displacement of 700,000 refugees in a war launched by Palestinian militias and five invading Arab armies has been transformed into a permanent grievance and a political weapon called the “right of return.”

Like Israelis, Palestinians experienced deep trauma in 1948. But the same rejectionist ideology that launched the war to destroy Israel still fuels the conflict today — as we saw on October 7. Nakba Day is used to fuel this conflict by reviving maximalist demands like the claim of a “right of return” in a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” This glorifying of failure deepens the wound, keeping new generations trapped in grievance.

Seventy-seven years later some six million Palestinians still carry the label of “refugee” — not because they personally fled in 1948, but because the international system, led by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), has preserved that status across generations. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of dependency, extremism, and endless conflict.

Moreover, no honest conversation about 1948 can ignore the nearly one million Jews who fled or were ethnically cleansed from ten Arab states and Iran where they lived for centuries before Islam. Over 99% of Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa were emptied due to these regimes’ discrimination and violence. Most were absorbed into Israel without UN assistance. Today, their descendants make up over half of Israeli Jews. This too was a catastrophe, a Jewish Nakba, and their story and claims to justice must be part of any serious conversation about 1948.

When the world chose healing

The 1940s saw some of the largest and most traumatic population upheavals in history. Post-WWII Europe was flooded with some 40–50 million displaced persons. This included 14 million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere by Soviet forces — families who lived in Eastern Europe for centuries.

In South Asia, the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan triggered a population exchange of 13–15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, with up to one million killed.

Yet in Europe and South Asia, healing was chosen over grievance. In India and Pakistan, the population exchange became the basis for two national identities. Likewise, today’s 25 million descendants of the expelled ethnic Germans are fully integrated into Germany. Had they demanded a “right of return” to East Prussia or the Sudetenland, European stability would have collapsed, reigniting ethnic tensions and permanent conflict.

The Middle East took the opposite path. Through UNRWA the international community has kept millions of Palestinians in permanent refugee limbo and poverty. For anti-Israel voices, ‘ending the Nakba’ means erasing the Jewish state through a mass “right of return.”

Clearly, no Israeli government will ever accept that, just as Poland would never accept a mass ethnic German return to Silesia. And just as the world moved on from the massive India-Pakistan population exchange, Palestinians and their supporters must face the hard truth: peace requires compromise, not fantasies of turning back the clock 77 years.

The UNRWA Exception

And at the center of this dysfunction is the United Nations itself — not as a force for resolution, but as an enabler of perpetual grievance.

All refugees in the world today, except Palestinians, come under the jurisdiction of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) whose mission is to resettle and integrate refugees.

UNRWA uniquely passes refugee status to descendants, regardless of where they live or what citizenship they hold — even Palestinians born in Amman, Beirut, or New York. This inherited refugee status must end. Palestinians should be treated like all other refugees — with a focus on integration and citizenship in host countries.

Palestinians deserve being lifted from permanent refugee “camps” and marginalization into dignity and opportunity. Jordan, which has already granted most Palestinians citizenship, should fully normalize this population. Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq must follow.

A Just Solution Requires Moving Forward

The Palestinian narrative describes the Nakba as a wound inflicted solely by Israel, ignoring Arab rejectionism and their decision to launch a war to destroy Israel, but lost. Today this self-inflicted wound endures because of choices — by Palestinian leaders clinging to maximalist demands, by Arab states refusing integration, and by Palestinian rights activists – all preferring to keep Palestinians trapped in a status that denies them a future so while fueling the engine of endless conflict.

Europe, India, and Pakistan showed a better way. The massive refugee crises of the 1940s were resolved through resettlement, citizenship, and reconciliation. The uncompromising insistence on a ‘sacred’ demand for a ‘right of return’ is a demand for Israel’s erasure, cynically wrapped in the language of justice.

Yes, it is time to end the Nakba, not by undoing history, but by building a future where Palestinians can live in dignity, and Israel — including its millions of descendants of Jewish refugees from Arab lands — can also endure.

 The author is Senior Writer and Analyst for StandWithUs.