Our Nakhba Days – the Three Weeks and its Missing Analogy

Among the Palestinian diaspora, and in sympathetic forums such as university campuses around the world, every year Nakhba Day is solemnly commemorated.

Corresponding with the Gregorian calendar date of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, it recalls the mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs during the events of those times.

One wonders, by way of a thought experiment, how long would the Palestinian diaspora maintain their identity and demand their rights of return if a political solution to the conflict is not found? 50 years? 100 years? 1,000 years? Longer? 

This is the question that Jews faced at the time of the first exile at the hands of the Babylonians, and again at the time of the second exile at the hands of the Romans.

The Jewish answer is ‘forever’.

Our prophets and sages, with divine inspiration, and guided by Torah, determined that Jews would always maintain their identity, that Jews would never give up their rights of return to the Holy Land from which we were exiled.

And so the sages instituted four Jewish ‘Nakhba Days’ every year, and a Jewish ‘Nakhba three weeks’ between two of those days, which we have just commenced, culminating in an annual ‘Nakba nine days’, with progressively more intense practices of mourning, which reaches its peak with the fourth and most intense of the Jewish annual ‘Nakba Days’ in which the pain of our mourning is so intense we literally emulate, and in some ways exceed, the same mourning practices we would adopt upon the passing of our closest of relatives.

Today, there are some Jews who will observe the Palestinians’ Nakhba Day.

Yet, apart from religiously observant Jews, very few commemorate our own Nakhba Days – the 3rd of Tishrei, the 10th of Tevet, the 17th of Tammuz, the three weeks, the nine days, and the 9th of Av.

Today, there are some Jews who protest imperialism and colonialism in its modern guises.

Yet very few protest about the imperialism and colonialism that Jews have suffered and continue to suffer. Decolonisation must start at home.

Decolonising the Jewish mindset means collectively experiencing the pain of our exile, which still continues to date in the guise of growing efforts to delegitimise Jewish peoplehood and identity, delegitimise Jewish history, and delegitimise our G-d-given Jewish truths which have birthed both Christianity and Islam.

Living with this pain of exile, for me, is why I have at the same time strongly protested the Netanyahu Government’s reckless judicial reform adventure, which in its form and tone needlessly weakened Jewish unity and national institutions, opening up the way for October 7th, and putting at risk the relative sanctuary of our third Jewish commonwealth; and it is why I have also strongly protested the anti-Netanyahu protestors and their reckless disruptions to Israel’s security and economy, which bring the same consequences.

I pray that all Jews will decolonise their mindset during these three weeks, to fuse the pain that many Jews are feeling now at this difficult time with the pain that Jews have always experienced during our 2,000-year historical experience of exile, subjugation and genocide.

Only the experience of this pain will allow us to draw strength from the miracle of Jewish survival. Only the experience of this pain will allow us to put first things first, specifically Jewish unity, in this era when Hashem has blessed us again with self-determination in our Land.