American Jewish leaders deny the Nakba. In Israel, they celebrate it.
JVL Introduction
For Nakba day Peter Beinart points to the enormous disjunct between what he calls “the sanitized arguments that are being made in the United States” to justify the Israeli state and what the Israeli government is saying.
The response of the Jewish establishment to Congress member Rashida Tlaib’s attempt to commemorate the Nakba was to deny it happened – whereas the Israeli government does not deny the Nakba at all.
Rather, they celebrate it. Yes, there was a mass expulsion in 1948. It was good. And, if you’re not careful, we might do something like that again.
And American Jews are increasingly hearing what the Israeli government is saying rather than what their own appointed leaders are claiming…
Thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost.
This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Mon 15 May 2023. Read the original here.
In America, Jewish leaders deny the Nakba. In Israel, they celebrate it
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A very disagreeable state of affairs and unfortunately the right wing in Israel it seems would expel or even exterminate the arab peoples within the country’s borders.
But two points of order. There has never been a country called Palestine so those expelled or who fled were arabs living in the region that had just become Israel, they were not Palestinians. Secondly, how many were expelled and how many fled having been told they would be annihilated by the new state, I think is not known – so we need perhaps to not exaggerate the numbers expelled.
Thanks for publishing this.
Personally Adrian, I don’t like the word Arabs, it’s like calling everyone in Europe Europeans and denying them their cultural heritage, or all first nations in North America, indigenous Indians instead of their respective tribes. Therefore why deny the original Philistines their cultural heritage and call them Palestinians..and by the way the numbers may and probably are an underestimate. Lets face it the powers that be at the time will hardly admit it.
Here’s a bit of a controversy…is denying the Nakba equivalent to denying the holocaust?
Zionists will use all sorts of spurious arguments to distract the arguments for human rights and perhaps sometimes to salve their own consciences. “There has never been a country called Palestine”. I suppose it depends what you define as a country, and whether you accept UN recognition and so on. But it’s irrelevant because even if I could demonstrate to everyone’s satisfaction that at some point before 1948 that there was a country called palestine, Zionists would not change one iota of their belief that it now belongs to them by dint of God’s generosity, their military prowess or any other reason they could find. (b) there never was a country called Israel before 1948 (c) nations are self-defined and highly fluid entities; human rights pertain irrespective of changing borders or labels (and Jews should be very aware of that) (d) individuals have human rights irrespective of their self-identification with any nation or country (e) the holocaust was a tragedy and huge abuse of human rights irrespective of whether its Jewish victims (there were others of course), called themselves Germans, Poles, Russians, French, Dutch, Yidden, Jews or any combination of these and other identities. The enormity of the Naqba is similarly not dependent on whether those expelled (or massacred, which happened to both ethnic groups) came from an independent country called Palestine, or a territory known as Palestine for millennia and administered under the British mandate from the League of Nations and previously the Ottomans.