The Nakba: What the historical record actually shows

Part Three of a Six-Part series

A 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.

The Term and Its Meaning

The word “Nakba” is Arabic for “catastrophe.” For Palestinians and their supporters who have become conflated with and indistinguishable from Israel detractors, it marks the displacement of roughly 700,000 Arabs during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the evacuation and destruction of villages, and the broader loss of land following the Arab rejection of a two-state solution, and war that five Arab states launched against the fledgling Jewish state. It claims that Arabs were “expelled” where the historic truth shows that many fled of their own volition, urged by the Arab leaders at the time to do so. The “Nakba” has become the cornerstone of Palestinian national identity. Rather than being rooted in a Declaration of Independence, it gave birth to their declaration of resistance.

An historically grounded view identifies the Nakba narrative as a strategic construct that reframes a failed war of annihilation against the Jewish state as an original sin, with the “catastrophe” defined not by specific wartime events but by Israel’s very existence. That framing is evident in Nakba commemorations today, which feature maps without Israel, slogans denying Jewish history and legitimacy in Israel, and demands incompatible with a two-state resolution.

The war that caused the displacement

In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state under Resolution 181. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had already affirmed the goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in the territory. The Jewish leadership, in the wake of the Holocaust and centuries of persecution, accepted a further compromise with the partitioning of the remaining 22 percent of the land that had already been partitioned in the creation of Jordan, and prepared for statehood. Arab leaders including Jordan, which was only created two decades earlier, rejected the partition outright, demanding all of Mandatory Palestine, and launched increased violence against Jewish communities immediately after the November 1947 vote.

By May 1948, when Israel declared independence, five Arab armies invaded. The war resulted in Jewish victory against overwhelming odds, armistice lines, and a major refugee crisis on both sides. Approximately 700,000 Arabs fled or were displaced amid the fighting. Many left in response to Arab leaders’ calls to clear the way for invading armies, in the expectation that once Jewish communities were defeated, those who had fled would return and inherit their properties. Other Arabs were displaced by Israeli forces securing strategic territory. Arab radio broadcasts urging evacuation, which the Nakba narrative largely erases, are well documented.

The Jewish refugee crisis that is never acknowledged

During the same period, roughly 800,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries. Many resettled in Israel. The contrast in how the two refugee crises were handled is stark and revealing. Israel absorbed Jewish refugees, integrated them as citizens, and built a state. Arab states largely kept “Palestinians” in refugee camps as political pawns, denied them citizenship, and in many cases discriminated against them socially and economically. This was not an accident. It was a policy.

The United Nations, through its agency UNRWA, then conferred refugee status not only on those who had fled – regardless of the reason - but on every generation of their descendants, indefinitely. UNRWA is the only UN refugee agency in history dedicated to a single national or ethnic group, and the only one whose mandate is to perpetuate rather than resolve a refugee crisis. Refugee status is inherited regardless of where descendants live or what citizenship they hold, an arrangement that exists nowhere else and with no other ethnic group in the world.

Cause and effect

The Nakba narrative inverts cause and effect. The war began with Arab refusal to accept any compromise vis a vis the creation of a Jewish state, and the invasion of it by five armies. The displacement of Arabs was a consequence of that war, not its goal. Israel’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, explicitly called on Arab residents to remain and build the country together. That call is well documented yet absent from “Nakba” discourse.

The Arab population of Mandatory Palestine also included a substantial proportion of relatively recent migrants. Records document that the Arab population roughly doubled between 1920 and 1948, a rate of growth that far outpaced global averages and is statistically inexplicable without large-scale immigration. Estimates suggest that 30 to 50 percent of the Arab population in Palestine by 1948 were migrants from Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and elsewhere, drawn by the economic growth generated by Jewish immigration and development. Conferring refugee status and claiming indigenous roots on this mixed population, across five generations, contorts the concept of refugee beyond recognition.

True peace requires accepting Israel’s legitimacy as the nation-state of the Jewish people, with secure borders. Demands for the “right of return” of millions of descendants to properties their ancestors left nearly 80 years ago are not a path to coexistence alongside Israel. They are a mechanism for erasing it.