Nakba narrative: What Arab leaders said about Palestine

Part Two of a Six-Part series

On May 15, as has been done for decades, Palestinian Arabs, their supporters and Israel detractors observed the “Nakba” or the catastrophe of Israel’s birth in 1948. In order to understand the veracity of that narrative and how it’s been conflated in modern dialogue and reporting, it’s important to understand what lies behind that.

A core element of the Nakba narrative is the notion that there was an independent entity known as “Palestine,” that was occupied, and a “Palestinian” people that were displaced with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Indeed there were Arabs who fled due to the war and due to Arab leaders calling upon them to leave. The Nakba narrative erases the truth by calling it an “expulsion” when the reality is that many fled voluntarily, not even in the midst of battle. But history proves that in no case was Israel’s 1948-1949 War of Independence – which would have been the Arabs’ War of Annhilation had they succeeded – designed to eliminate the Arabs in pre-state Mandatory Palestine, whether they were indigenous or not.

One of the key truths to debunking the Nakba narrative is the fact that there never was an independent Arab Palestine, nor a Palestinian people before 1948. Here are some of the facts, in the Arab leaders own words.

Admissions from the inside the Arab world

Among the most striking features of the “Palestinian” national narrative is how thoroughly it has been contradicted, at key moments and on the record, by prominent Arab and Palestinian Arab leaders themselves. These are not fringe voices or obscure footnotes. They are founding figures, senior officials, and historians speaking on the record.

In 1977, Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO figure and head of the as-Sa’iqa faction, gave an interview to the Dutch newspaper Trouw. He stated: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”

It’s southern Syria, not Palestine

Mohsen was not alone. Speaking to the British Peel Commission seeking to find a formula for establishing infrastructure for creating a Jewish state alongside the Arab population in 1937, Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul Hadi told the commission directly: “There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented. Palestine is alien to us. Our land was for hundreds of years a part of Syria.”

This reflected the widespread view, common under Ottoman rule and continuing into the British Mandate period, that the area was simply southern Syria. Ahmad Shukeiri, the first Chairman of the PLO from 1964 to 1967, stated the same thing years earlier, in 1956, as the Arab League representative at the United Nations representing Syria: “Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.” For decades, he and others emphasized pan-Arab ties over any unique Palestinian national identity. In 1964 it all changed, and the Nakba narrative became turbocharged.

Demographic candor

More recently, Hamas Minister of the Interior and National Security Fathi Hammad offered a revealing demographic admission in a much more recent, March 2012, speech on Al-Hekma TV in Egypt: “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians, and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. Personally, half of my family is Egyptian.”

In 2017, Arab historian Abd Al-Ghani stated on the Palestinian Authority’s own television network: “Before the Balfour Promise, when the Ottoman rule ended, Palestine’s political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today.”

These are representative of an inconvenient truth, not isolated incidents but moments of honesty that confound the Nakba narrative.

What about Yasser Arafat?

There’s a well-known quote widely attributed to Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat, “The Palestinian people have no national identity…I will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”

In the spirit of being fair and accurate, because the truth matters, while the quote is widely repeated as coming from Arafat, there has not been any documentation of Arafat actually saying these words. The truth is, it doesn’t matter whether he said it or not, because he did just that. He crafted a people with no common identity to one whose only common identity is enmity toward Israel with the goal to eliminate Israel. That’s bad for Israel and has been at the core of the conflict ever since.

However, by making up this identity and the common unifying factor in the so-called national identity, he turned the newly minted “Palestinian people” into victims from conception, with him as the leader of the victims even though he was not born in “Palestine.” More than anything else, the victim mentality – perpetuated by the Nakba narrative – is one that has plagued these people ever since, making the conflict intractable and making them unable to extricate themselves from it and move forward because they never had any other national identity.

What history confirms

These statements from Arab leaders align with the historical record. Under the Ottomans, the region was divided into administrative districts known as sanjaks, covering Jerusalem, Nablus, and Akko, with no unified “Palestine” province and no national identity separate from Arab or Syrian identity. A distinct Palestinian Arab consciousness began emerging in the early twentieth century, largely in opposition to Jewish immigration and British policies, with newspapers such as Filastin appearing in 1911. But a full national identity separate from pan-Arabism only developed decades later.

Many local Arab leaders in the 1920s through 1940s, including the Grand Mufti of Palestine under the British, Haj Amin al-Husseini, aligned primarily with pan-Arab and Islamist causes. Al-Husseini collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, sharing the goal of preventing Jewish statehood and massacring Jews. The 1948 defeat was a collective Arab failure, not the birth of a unique Palestinian nation.

The evidence, including testimony from the narrative’s own founders, consistently points to the same conclusion: Palestinian Arab national identity was a political construction, developed in opposition to Israel’s existence rather than from any prior independent national experience.